Russian Journalist in Critical Condition After Attack: The Other Russia

[RememberCuba94]

http://www.theotherrussia.org/2010/1...-after-attack/

A Russian journalist from the newspaper Kommersant is being kept in an artificial coma after surviving a severe beating in central Moscow, Gazeta.ru reports.
Just past midnight on Saturday, Oleg Kashin was beaten by unknown assailants on a street close to his rented apartment. The attackers left the journalist with two broken shins, fractures on the upper and lower jaws, skull lesions, and broken fingers. However, they did not take Kashin’s money, tablet computer, or cell phone.
According to a janitor who witnessed the incident, Kashin was beaten by two people “not with their fists, but with some kind of object.”
The journalist is currently in an artificial coma and hooked up to an artificial lung in a Moscow hospital, where doctors fear that he may develop pneumonia. An operation on the victim’s skull revealed that his brain was undamaged. As of Saturday night, doctors said his condition was “extremely critical.”
Editors at Kommersant say the attack was most definitely connected to the journalist’s professional work.
“It is totally obvious that this was a planned action, naturally, connected with Oleg’s professional work,” said Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Mikhailin. “They broke his fingers, legs; they wanted to cripple him. This wasn’t some kind of hold-up.” Mikhailin said he plans to “put the maximum amount of pressure on the investigation in order for it to be solved.”
Kashin’s recent articles have focused on a number of controversial topics, including political youth movements, the Khimki Forest, and high-ranking government officials.
Moscow city police filed a criminal suit early on Saturday for attempted murder, after reviewing security camera footage and interviewing witnesses of the attack. Later that morning, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered that the investigation be transferred to the direct control of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.
“There has also been an order to take all measures to solve this crime,” reads a Kremlin press release.
A statement posted late Saturday on Kommersant’s website decried the fact that the murders of so many journalists in Russia often go unsolved:

The attack on Oleg Kashin is outrageous, but far from the only manifestation of the growing violence in the civil and political life of the country. Unfortunately, we only see the victims: the attackers go uncaught, and the ones who ordered it – unknown. The impunity stimulates further violence.
If the investigation of Oleg Kashin’s monstrous beating, despite the demands of Russian Federation President Dmitri Medvedev and the personal control of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, ends in nothing, as has already happened with murder and beating investigations of other journalists in past years, it will effectively legalize the use of force.

Activists working to prevent the destruction of the Khimki Forest say that the attack on Kashin could be connected with another beating that occurred just a day earlier, when unknown assailants attacked environmental activist Konstantin Fetisov with a baseball bat late on Thursday night.
“My personal opinion is that Kashin suffered because of his journalistic work,” Khimki Forest activist Yaroslav Nikitenko told Gazeta.ru. “In our country, attacks don’t just happen. If I’m not mistaken, Kashin was the first correspondent to write a large article about the Khimki Forest in the newspaper Kommersant.”
Russia is widely considered one of the most dangerous places for journalists to work in the world. The press watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranks Russia as 140th out of 178 countries on its 2010 Press Freedom Index, and has called Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin a “predator of press freedom.” The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Russia as the 4th deadliest country for journalists in the world, with 52 killings with confirmed motives since 1992.

[RememberCuba94]

http://www.theotherrussia.org/2010/1...o-be-murdered/

Nashi Tells Journalists to Stop Asking to be Murdered (updated)

November 10th, 2010 • Related • Filed Under
Related Post




Update 11/11/10: Fuller context added to Pleshcheyeva’s remarks.
Members of Russian law enforcement, mass media, government agencies, advocacy groups, and pro-Kremlin youth organizations spoke yesterday during a Public Chamber session dedicated to the ghastly beating of Kommersant journalist Oleg Kashin. While most presentations denounced the attack and focused on the need to step up efforts to prosecute assailants of Russian journalists, one speaker accused the journalists of bringing these attacks on themselves.
According to the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, passions ran high during the two-hour session, with journalists, lawyers, and activists decrying Russia’s chronic failure to solve cases of attacks on journalists. Editor-in-Chief Yevgeniya Albats of the New Times magazine spoke directly to representatives of law enforcement present in the auditorium, saying that the government has provided vast amounts of support to large organizations that have long been hounding Kashin and numerous other journalists.
The editor was referring to government-sponsored pro-Kremlin youth movements that routinely harass journalists whose views contradict their own, some of whose representatives were present at the session. Nashi Commissar Irina Pleshcheyeva turned out to be an actual member of the Public Chamber, and issued a sharp rebuke against those who she felt practice “political terrorism.” Noting that she did not consider Kashin to be a talented journalist, the commissar argued that the journalists themselves are responsible for such attacks:

When a journalist is attacked or murdered per order, when he’s dealing with some case, then journalists take it, come together, and continue the case. They don’t need to provide reasons to murder them. Not everyone is going to be killed. If a person – the people who commit crimes – they don’t think they’re going to be caught. None of the criminals think they’re going to be caught. But if their goal is to change the situation – so that a person doesn’t write, doesn’t investigate – he should know that, in the future, the journalists are going to take the case and continue it. The editorial staff will take it. All the journalists will take it. I don’t know. But that investigation will continue. Then there won’t be any necessity to explain to people that fists don’t solve anything.

Pleshcheyeva went on to say that she herself feared being attacked for what she wrote on blogs and other Internet media, and that this is a problem shared by Russian society on the whole. Moreover, she argued, lots of people get killed in Russia while fulfilling their professional duties – soldiers, businessmen, teachers, doctors – so journalists are no exception. While the commissar briefly touched upon the importance of investigating such attacks, she stressed that society has to focus on the fact that “they don’t let us speak,” and not “that somebody got crippled.”
The speech was disturbingly reminiscent of remarks by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in August that opposition protesters intentionally provoke the police into “bludgeoning them upside the head.”
Also present at the session was Andrei Tatarinov, a leading member of the pro-Kremlin youth group Young Guard and member of the Public Chamber. He supported Pleshcheyeva and added that while his organization has not always been on great terms with Kashin, its website has posted condolences and denounced the attack. He did not explain, however, why this page was accompanied by what Nezavisimaya Gazeta described as “staged photographs mocking people expressing sympathy.”
A presentation by Moscow’s chief investigator, Vadim Yakovenko, provided an abrupt summary of Kashin’s case: the work is ongoing; 30 witnesses have been questioned; there is a wealth of information.
Vladimir Vasiliev, head of the State Duma Committee on Safety, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the auditorium was clearly unsatisfied with Yakovenko’s laconic speech. Therefore, Vasiliev spoke about the lack of sufficient budgetary funds for the needs of Russia’s law enforcement system, which results in complex cases being doled out to “boys” to solve. According to the newspaper, Vasiliev’s remarks were taken as evidence that we shouldn’t count on seeing any results from the investigation in the foreseeable future.
After undergoing two operations on his skull and a partial amputation of one of his pinky fingers, Oleg Kashin awoke from a coma Wednesday morning in a Moscow hospital. Doctors say his condition is critical but stable, and that he should be able to talk in the coming days. Colleagues and supporters continued calling for his perpetrators to be found and brought to justice for the fifth day in a row.

[RememberCuba94]

http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2010/s3065545.htm

A whole new meaning to the word bravery

Elizabeth Jackson reported this story on Saturday, November 13, 2010 08:05:00
Listen to MP3 of this story ( minutes) Alternate WMA version | MP3 download

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Oleg Kashin is a Russian journalist lying in a hospital bed in a medically induced coma after he was bludgeoned by two unknown assailants.

The latest reports say he's slowly recovering but still breathing through a respirator. Oleg is one of many journalists who have paid dearly for their attempts to print the truth in Russia.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent nonprofit organisation promoting international press freedom, 24 reporters have been killed in Russia since 1999, the time period encompassing the administrations of Vladimir Putin and Medvedev. Investigations into these attacks rarely involve finding any real culprits.

Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. I asked him to tell us what happened to Oleg Kashin.

JOEL SIMON: Well, he was returning home from a night out. He was entering his Moscow apartment. Apparently a couple of men were waiting for him; one had, based on a video that was recorded by a security camera, had, was holding flowers, but inside the flowers were metal rods, and they proceeded to beat him viciously.

They seemed to be attacking his fingers; they broke his jaw; they left him in a horrible condition. He's lucky to be alive and we really don't know what the prognosis is at this point.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Now, he's a newspaper journalist, and I understand that his colleagues believe the assault of result of the work that he had been doing. What was he writing about?

JOEL SIMON: He's a correspondent for Kommersant, and he'd written about a number of very contentious issues, including the rise of nationalist organisations.

But one of the things he wrote about was this disputed highway project in a suburb of Moscow called Khimki, and there's a proposal to build a highway through that area and there's allegations that local officials are on the take.

He had covered this story and another reporter who'd covered this story was also brutally beaten in a somewhat similar manner about a year ago. So there's some thought that these two crimes are related.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: What was the official response to this recent attack on Oleg Kashin?

JOEL SIMON: You know, it was very interesting because previously when we tried to raise our concerns with the Government they dismissed them. They said that we were exaggerating, that our information was inaccurate, that we had some sort of political agenda, and in our most recent visit to Moscow, which was in September, all that changed.

We have a very productive and constructive meeting with Russia's top investigator, who reports directly to president Medvedev. Instead of rejecting our research, he embraced it. We had a very constructive discussion with prosecutors; we talked about specific cases; we presented out information. We considered it something of a breakthrough.

And the response of president Medvedev and Russian authorities and even the Russian state media to the attack on Oleg Kashin was very different. Instead of ignoring it and pretending it didn't happen or dismissing his work and saying he was insignificant, which are responses we've seen in the past, president Medvedev made a very strong statement. It was covered on national television; that's certainly a good sign.

I mean, we want to see convictions; we don't want to see expressions of sympathy and rhetoric. I mean all that's fine, but our only interest is seeing the perpetrators of these crimes brought to justice.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Are Russian politicians merely reflecting the attitudes of the wider Russian community? Do people in Russia really care about what happens to journalists?

JOEL SIMON: There's a couple of things, dynamics at play here. One is because the kind of critical journalists who are likely to run afoul and face attack are completely marginalised from the larger Russian public, they have no access to the larger Russian public because they're writing for newspapers with smaller circulations or they're limited to Moscow. So, when they're attacked the response of the government in the past has been to sort of marginalise and trivialise their work, and there's been no real outcry from the public.

But the case of Oleg Kashin is different. The response of the government is different. I think that prosecutors take their cue in Russia - it's a very hierarchical system - from the leadership, and if the leadership expresses indifference, then the Investigators will be indifferent.

If the leadership expresses concern, well, we're hopeful that will be a signal to them that they had the green light to investigate these cases.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: In the West, journalists might not be liked very much, but there does seem to be a broad acceptance that they play an important role in the democratic process. Is that what's missing in Russia?

JOEL SIMON: Well, it's interesting, I mean, in the West, as you say, journalists may not be beloved, and there was actually a lot of cynicism about the role that the media plays.

But in places where the Government controls information and people don't have access to critical perspectives; journalists are very valued by the segment of the population that has access to these views.

In a place like Russia, within the kind of elite groups in Moscow that have access to these kinds of critical perspectives, the work that these investigative journalists do is very valued. So, it's a kind of funny contradiction there, but that's certainly my sense in talking to journalists and how, in Russia, and how they feel they're perceived by their audience.

It's a strategy that you see not only in Russia, but in many parts of the world. If you can tolerate, you can tolerate these kinds of critical journalists as long as you can ensure that their audience is small, and that the people that they're able to reach do not have the ability to threaten you politically.

And this is a tried and true strategy, you know, in many places, even in like Milosevic's Yugoslavia there was a tiny press core in Belgrade that continued to do critical reporting throughout his period in power and he tolerated them. So, it's a strategy we've seen before.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: But surely that will change. I mean, surely ultimately digital technology will change that situation because people will get access to the internet and they will have access to this information?

JOEL SIMON: You know, I am not convinced. I think that fighting for freedom online is the same as fighting for it in real space. You need, you can't rely on technology; you need to actually fight for it.

And as soon as online speeds become a threat to governments they respond. And if you look at China, or if you look at Vietnam, or if you look at countries that feel threatened by kinds of dissident speech that's taking place in the blogosphere, they've been very effective in controlling that speech.

Using the same technological means that can also liberate people; they use it to track speech, to monitor dissent and to crack down on those whose critical voices challenge the authority of the government.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Is this problem confined to Russia, in that part of the world, or does it extend to other post-Soviet countries?

JOEL SIMON: The scale of violence against journalists is unique to Russia, but there are violent incidents and varying degrees of repression in many former Soviet states, ranging from Belarus, which is probably the most repressive country in Europe, to say the Baltic States which are open and relatively free.

But there are varying degrees of repression and what you see is that the perception of the role of the media is emulated throughout the former Soviet states, and what that means is that the view of those in power is that the role of the media is to support the government.

And those who fail to do that may be repressed by the government or they may be attacked by others and the government will simply fail to protect them, and that's an approach that's actually quite common in many former Soviet states.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: And that's a big cultural shift to try to bring about, isn't it?

JOEL SIMON: It is, and I think that it's very hard to envision a truly impendent press surviving in the absence of a competitive political environment, and that's what does not exist in Russia.

There are some critical voices, but there is no opposition, no effective opposition to the Putin/Medvedev Government.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: And so Joel, who is guilty? Is it the politicians, the oligarchs? Are they organised? Do they operate in gangs? How does it work? How do these people operate?

JOEL SIMON: Well, you know, precisely because journalists who try and answer those questions tend to get knocked off in Russia, we don't know the answer.

I mean, that's one of the consequences of the violent and repressive atmosphere. But if you look at the list of these 19 journalists who are killed, many of them to one degree or another were seeking to answer that specific question; what is the relationship between those in power in Russia, between the criminal organisations, between the powerful figures who control regional governments?

There are relationships there that are obviously essential to the ability of the government to maintain its hold on power, and journalists who seek to explore those relationships to make them public have an uncanny record of being attacked and even killed.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: So how do you begin to address this problem? And what do you say to journalists operating in Russia? It's a high price to pay, isn't it, to get at the truth?

JOEL SIMON: It is. I mean, there are things we say to the journalists and things we say to the government.

First of all, I believe that there is a, something innate to our humanity that makes us want to know and understand the environment in which we live, and that this is why governments work so hard to suppress journalists. It's not an easy thing to do because people have an innate desire to understand the world around them; to have information and to seek that information.

So the journalists who do this kind of work do it because they can't help it. They can't help it; it's something about their, and I've met many of them, there's something about their personality, it's so deeply ingrained that even though they know it's risky, they can't stop doing it.

And what we say to the government is something very different. I mean, first of all we make a large argument that this is an essential role. Russia, despite it's, you know, autocratic tendencies, sees itself as a democracy, and you cannot be a democracy if you don't tolerate a free and open press.

And the other argument we make, and I think this is irrefutable, is that this record of impunity, of murder and impunity has done tremendous damage to Russia's international reputation. It is one of the things that people who follow Russia even casually are aware of.

They know that it's a very, very dangerous and deadly place for journalists. And until the Government addresses the issue of impunity and brings the killer of journalists to justice, it will have to deal with this blight on its international reputation.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Does it care?

JOEL SIMON: It does. It cares intermittently and I think it cares more now than it did before. It depends on what Russia's leadership views as its relationship to the West and what kind of relationship it wants. During periods where it withdraws and takes shelter in sort of the nationalist impulses which always exist in Russia, it's much harder to get through to them.

But right now, it is a moment where there's a greater openness to the West; where Russian wants to project greater soft power, if you will, on the international stage. And its ability to do so is compromised by its terrible press freedom record and its failure to investigate and prosecute these killings.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Joel Simon, thank you very much for joining us on Correspondents Report.

JOEL SIMON: Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

[RememberCuba94]

I know. It makes me wonder why people in our government think we can be friends with them.

[American Patriot]

Because the people in our government are idiots. At least the ones who believe the Russians are our friends.

Russia is NOT OUR FRIEND.

[RememberCuba94]

Because the people in our government are idiots. At least the ones who believe the Russians are our friends.

Russia is NOT OUR FRIEND.

Idiot is an understatement in this case. Russia does crap like this, supplies terrorists with weapons, allies itself with our enemies, and continually cheats us in arms treaties. Even the biggest idiot on the planet would know something is up.

[RememberCuba94]

I found the video of the attack. Sorry for the quality. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w-YhStbTkc

[Ryan Ruck]

I caught that video on FNC the other day. Outrageous but not surprising, unfortunately.

Honest journalists are living with their lives on the line in Russia while trying to report the truth, while reporters here in the US are wallowing in their ignorance and spreading lies.

[RememberCuba94]

I caught that video on FNC the other day. Outrageous but not surprising, unfortunately.

Honest journalists are living with their lives on the line in Russia while trying to report the truth, while reporters here in the US are wallowing in their ignorance and spreading lies.

I know. In one of the articles, the point is made that journalists in Russia are treated very differently from journalists here. Journalists in Russia are few and valuable. The people need journalists like Oleg Kashin to get any bit of truth they can find.

[RememberCuba94]

Russia

Moscow protest demands action over journalist assaults

Topic: Attack on Kommersant journalist, Oleg Kashin

Russian journalist Oleg Kashin

17:28 14/11/2010
© RIA Novosti


Related News

• Russians oppose safety privileges for journalists - poll
• Russian opposition leaders arrested for unsanctioned rally in Moscow
• Russian activists call for independent probe into Khimki highway row
• Russian journalists call for government to investigate attack on Kommersant correspondent
• Russian opposition to hold unsanctioned rally in downtown Moscow
• Attack on Russian journalist result of business dispute - United Russia deputy

Multimedia

• Journalists and bloggers rally in support of Oleg Kashin
• Medvedev: "The criminals behind attack on journalist Oleg Kashin will punished"
• Moscow-St. Petersburg highway construction options

Hundreds of people gathered in downtown Moscow on Sunday to demand that police find those behind last week's brutal attack on Kremlin critic Oleg Kashin.
Kashin, a reporter with the respected Kommersant daily, was brutally beaten outside his home last Saturday. CCTV footage of the assault shows two men using an iron bar to smash his hands, legs and jaw.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered an investigation into the attack. Kashin's colleagues, however, have doubted the culprits will be found.
"The society should follow the course of the investigation and remind the police that the case... should not be hushed up," said Igor Yakovlev, the spokesman for the opposition Yabloko party that organized the protest.
It is widely assumed that Kashin was targeted in revenge for his writing on sensitive social issues, including plans to build a motorway from Moscow to St. Petersburg through a centuries-old Khimki forest. The project was put on hold by Medvedev in the summer.
Another campaigner against the motorway, Konstantin Fetisov, was attacked in Khimki days before Kashin's beating.
Two years ago, Mikhail Beketov, a local newspaper editor, was nearly killed outside his home in Khimki for speaking out against the motorway. The style of attack was much similar to that on Kashin.
There have been scores of unsolved killings of reporters in Russia in recent years, including most infamously, that of Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce Kremlin critic, who was shot dead in her apartment block on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's birthday four years ago.

[RememberCuba94]

http://www.theotherrussia.org/2010/0...-around-putin/

More Russians See a Cult of Personality Around Putin

July 10th, 2010




Update 07/10/10: Several misprinted figures have been corrected.
The number of Russian citizens who see signs of a cult of personality surrounding Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been growing consistently over the past several years. According to the results from a survey by the Levada Center research institute, 27% of Russians feel that “yes, all the signs of a cult of personality are there,” and another 28% say that “there still isn’t one, but there are more and more preconditions for one.” Researchers believe that the growth comes as a result of the fact that Russians no longer have a negative view of the idea of a cult of personality itself.
A full third of respondents, 33%, said that “no, there are no signs of such a cult,” while 12% were unsure.
Just four years ago, only 10% of Russians noted a cult of personality around Vladimir Putin at all. “The growth is definitely impressive,” said Boris Dubin, head of the socio-political department at the Levada Center, in remarks to the online news site Gazeta.ru.
According to survey results from the past several years, more and more people each year believe that Putin has a cult of personality. In March 2006, 10% believed that “all the sign of one are there;” in October 2007 – 22%; two years later – 23%, and now, less than a year after that, the figure has grown to 27%. During that same overall period of time, the number of Russians who don’t see a cult of personality fell from 57% to 33%.
“The fact of the matter is that the understanding of a cult of personality itself is no longer as negative as it was after the denouncement of Stalin. Now, most likely, it is viewed positively, the view of people who don’t see anything terrible about a cult of personality,” Dubin told Gazeta.ru.
“During the years of Putin’s rule, a majority of the Russian population has been formed that on the whole welcomes the currently established order and is sure that it is precisely Putin who guarantees this order and stability,” Dubin explained. This majority is made up mostly of relatively prosperous, middle-aged Russian citizens who remain politically active and reside in small to mid-size cities, he said. This is precisely the demographic that believes that the concentration of power in Putin’s hands and his cult of personality are helpful for Russia.
Indeed, more than half of Russian citizens believe that the concentration of all the power in the country in the hands of the prime minister “is for the good” of Russia. Only 22% think that Putin’s absolute power “does not promise anything good for Russia.”
More than half of respondents said that Russia needs a manager – “a strong hand.”
As for when this hand is needed, 27% of respondents said that Russia needs it “constantly,” while another 28% said that “such situations occur (for example, now) when total power needs to be concentrated in one set of hands.” At the same time, both of these figures are down from previous years – 40% and 31% respectively in October 2009. A full third, 33%, voted against the idea of giving total power to one single person in the current survey.
While Russia’s political opposition decries the existence of a cult of personality surrounding Vladimir Putin, only 11% of survey respondents felt that Russia “definitely” has an opposition at all. Another 38% believe that it “more likely” exists than not. 30% doubt that the opposition exists, and 8% feel that it definitely does not exist. The results are not surprising given that more than two-thirds of respondents – 68% – only learned about the existence of the opposition’s largest campaign,Strategy 31, during the course of the survey.
Only 3% of survey respondents said they were well acquainted with the essence of Strategy 31, knew that the series of rallies areconsistently banned by the authorities, and knew that the police violently disperse participants. Very few Russians strongly opposed the campaign – only 4% were totally against it, and 11% were likely against it. That said, more than two-thirds of survey respondents felt that Russia needs a political opposition – 23% “definitely yes,” and 44% – “most likely yes.”
A press release from the Levada Center with the survey results is available in Russian by clicking here.


Well, no duh.

[RememberCuba94]

Kashin Describes His Attacker

16 November 2010
The Moscow Times
Oleg Kashin, a Kommersant reporter brutally beaten Nov. 6, has told investigators from his hospital bed that the attacker who broke his jaw, fingers and leg looked like a football fan, Lifenews.ru reported Monday.
Last week, the All-Russia Union of Football Fans denied any involvement in the attack, which has angered bloggers and civil activists and moved President Dmitry Medvedev to promise that justice would be meted out, even if the mastermind was a senior official.
No arrests have been made in the beating, but speculation has swirled that it might have been organized by someone who Kashin targeted in his reports, including senior officials linked to pro-Kremlin youth groups.
National media have reported that football fan groups have cooperated with pro-Kremlin youth movements in the past when the youth needed muscle to deal with opposition groups. (Doesn't surprise me at all).-RC94
Kommersant reported Monday that the investigation into the attack has been passed to Investigative Committee official Sergei Golkin after exchanging hands several times last week. Golkin oversaw investigations into the murders of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in 2004 and reporter Anna Politkovskaya in 2006. Both cases went to court, but the suspects were freed for lack of evidence.




http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/a...er/423347.html

Looks like the list of suspects has been narrowed down to the usual.-RC94

[RememberCuba94]

http://www.theotherrussia.org/2010/1...tball-fanatic/

Kashin Says Attacker Resembled ‘Football Fanatic’

November 15th, 2010 • Related • Filed Under

Filed Under: Media
Tags: Oleg Kashin • Yevgeniya Milova


Beaten Russian journalist Oleg Kashin has given his first description of his attackers, Lifenews.ru reports.
Nine days after the brutal assault, doctors were able to take Kashin off of an artificial lung. Earlier, when he came out of an artificial coma late last week, the journalist had immediately requested pen and paper to ask when he would be able to breathe on his own.
Then, on Monday, Kashin said of his attackers: “The one that hit me in the jaw looked like a football fanatic.”
Wife Yevgeniya Milova told the media that her husband is able to speak with difficulty, but his right hand works and he is able to write normally.
According to RIA Novosti, doctors plan to keep Kashin in intensive care for the time being.
Investigators plan to question the journalist as soon as his condition permits.

Good, the guy can still write against these crooks.

[RememberCuba94]

http://www.theotherrussia.org/2010/1...aten-to-death/

Sochi Anti-Corruption Activist Nearly Beaten to Death

October 27th, 2010 Filed Under:Repression
Tags:Aleksei Dymovsky • bribery • corruption • Gavina Panaetova • Mikhail Vinyukov • Sochi • Sochi Olympics • Vladimir Shiroky


A prominent local human rights advocate who has worked to expose government corruption in the village of Lazarevskoe near the Black Sea city of Sochi has been nearly beaten to death by two unknown men, in the latest of a string of such attacks in the area.
On Monday night, the victim, Mikhail Vinyukov, explained the situation to a correspondent with the Kasparov.ru news portal. Vinyukov says he was walking to the store around 9 pm that night when an adult man came up and began whacking him with an metal bar for no ostensible reason. Vinyukov initially managed to fight back, but another man with a metal bar then approached him from behind and began hitting him over the head. The rights advocate eventually managed to escape and ran to a hotel and office complex, where an ambulance was called for him.
Vinyukov was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with “a concussion, a closed head injury, contusions and lacerations of the scalp,” as well as puncture wounds near his shoulder and bruises and lacerations on both legs, according to trauma nurse Mira Kheyshkho. The rights advocate was told he would have to remain hospitalized for an extended period of time.
Additionally, Vinyukov’s mother said that she was called after the attack by an unknown man who asked where her son was.
The activist said he believes that the attack was “organized by a criminal gang” that is working “against those who hinder corruption within government agencies” in the area.
Mikhail Vinyukov is the head of the local Public Service for the Defense of the Rights and Interests of Citizens. About two months ago, he was threatened with murder after releasing an audio recording of a conversation between the city’s resort service and tourism department head, Vladimir Shiroky, and the director of the Lazarevsky Otdykh tourism company, Gavina Panaetova. The recording resulted in Shiroky’s arrest on August 26 for taking bribes from Panaetova.
The recording itself was laterposted on the website of well-known whistleblower copAleksei Dymovsky. It was recorded by accident when a local resident, sitting in a park near the Lazarevsky Otdykh building, overheard the conversation while making a recording of nature sounds. Dymovsky said the attack on Vinyukov was no doubt “an ordered crime. People don’t just attack people with iron bars. The task was either to kill him or cripple him.”
A host of social activists expressed certainty that the attack on Vinyukov was connected with his efforts to fight corruption, which has risen as a result of preparations for the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Valery Suchkov, founder of the Public Assembly of Sochi, said that Vinyukov’s attack was extremely similar to other recent attacks on anti-corruption public figures. “The cases known to the whole public of reprisals against Communist Party Deputy Lyudmila Shestak, Mestnaya newspaper Editor-in-Chief Arkady Landerov, and now the case of human rights advocate Mikhail Vinyukov, speak to the fact that these attacks were ordered,” he said. “Moreover, all the crimes have the same signature. The public must demand that both the perpetrator and the person who ordered the attack be found, and the situation be put under public control.”

Brings back memories of Beijing, doesn't it?