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Details about a grisly murder committed a year ago in Kemerovo have found an audience on social media in the past week, following activist Alena Popova’s Facebook posts about the killing of 23-year-old Vera Pekhteleva at the hands of a jealous ex-boyfriend. Her death is particularly disturbing and shocking because neighbors pleaded with the local police for assistance for hours while listening to the woman scream in agony. By the time the neighbors finally kicked in the apartment door, Pekhteleva was dead. The public’s attention now turns to the trials against the killer and the officers whose negligence likely cost a woman her life.

Russians know the story of Vera Pekhteleva, a 23-year-old student at Kuzbass State Technical University who was murdered in January 2020, thanks to Alena Popova, the co-founder of “You Are Not Alone,” an organization for victims of domestic violence. On February 20, Popova shared the following message on Facebook:

Popova, who obtained the case file from Pechteleva’s sister, said Vera had decided to break up with Kanyus. On the day of the murder, she went to his apartment to collect her things, but he wouldn’t let her leave. She tried to break free, but he pulled her away from the door and continued to beat her. Neighbors heard her screaming and called the police at least seven times, but no one responded. By the time the neighbors ultimately broke down Kanyus’s apartment door themselves, Pekhteleva was already dead.

Kanyus has been charged with murder and faces six to 15 years in prison. Popova noted that he is charged simply with murder, not aggravated homicide, which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Pekhteleva’s relatives had petitioned for the more serious charge, but prosecutors ignored these requests. The indictment does not state that Kanyus “tortured her to death” over a period of hours, Popova said, which could allow him to get a relatively short sentence with the chance of parole.

The Russian authorities have moved Alexey Navalny from the remand prison in the capital where he’s been jailed since returning to Moscow last month. The opposition politician’s lawyer told the news agency Interfax that he arrived at Matrosskaya Tishina for a meeting with Navalny on Thursday, only to be told that his client is no longer being held there. “He’s probably been transferred to a penitentiary, but it’s also possible they took him somewhere else,” said Vadim Kobzev.

Navalny’s 2.5-year prison sentence entered force on February 20, after an appellate court upheld his conviction for supposedly violating parole requirements in a previous felony sentence that international groups have condemned as an unfair, politicized trial.

Armenia’s prime minister and military leadership are squaring off in what the former is calling an attempted coup, following the Armed Forces General Staff’s calls for the immediate resignation of Nikol Pashinyan and his government cabinet, reports News.am. 

The General Staff released its demands in a letter signed by 40 senior military officers. The letter says Pashinyan’s decision to remove Lieutenant General Tiran Khachatryan as first deputy chief of the General Staff was made for “short-sighted and unfounded reasons.”

Armenia’s prime minister responded to the demands in a Facebook post, saying he considers the General Staff’s announcement to be “an attempted military coup.” “I invite all our supporters now to Republic Square [in Yerevan]. Very soon, I’ll be making a public address in a live broadcast,” wrote Pashinyan, who later announced that he’s removed Colonel-General Onik Gasparyan as chief of Armenia’s General Staff. Gasparyan then also signed the military’s letter to Pashinyan and his cabinet. 

According to the Russian news agency Interfax, some of Pashinyan’s opponents soon assembled near the Defense Ministry’s building, chanting slogans like “Pashinyan is a traitor!” and “Nikol, go away!” Neil Hauer, a Canadian journalist who lives in Yerevan, noted on Twitter that there is no evidence yet of a military coup in action. “No military vehicles on the street, no sign police are disloyal, [and] no statement of intent by [the] military to take power,” he wrote.

At the time of this writing, Armenia’s Defense Ministry had not commented on the General Staff’s demands.

Some new details emerged on Wednesday about the human rights organization Amnesty International’s decision to rescind Alexey Navalny’s “prisoner of conscience” status. As reported yesterday, the group has determined that Navalny’s past advocacy of anti-migrant positions constitutes hate speech. Today, more of the organization’s staff in Russia confirmed Navalny’s new designation. Also, several new encounters online fueled additional anger and ridicule. 

Amnesty’s policies state that a prisoner of conscience cannot be someone who has “used or advocated violence.” The sudden concern about Navalny’s ethnic nationalism apparently revolves around statements and videos he released in the mid-2000s when he compared Muslim extremists to cockroaches and endorsed mass deportations of undocumented laborers. Navalny has never renounced these positions.

Wednesday also brought further confirmation that Amnesty International based its decision to rescind Navalny’s prisoner-of-conscience status at least in part on a Twitter thread by a Russia Today freelance columnist. Natalia Zvyagina, the head of Amnesty International's Moscow office, told the news outlet Znak.com that multiple complaints to the organization cited a series of tweets written by Katya Kazbek (real name: Ekaterina Dubovitskaya), a self-described Communist activist who calls Navalny “an avowed nationalist and racist.”

On Twitter, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan mocked the journalists and activists who have criticized Amnesty International’s decision, and she defended the work of “RT’s columnist,” only to provoke Kazbek into responding: “You’re as racist as Navalny is, so go fuck yourself.” Asked why she would write for a Russian state propaganda outlet, Kazbek said on Twitter (before locking her account to subscribers): “I will take any platform I can control to further my Communist agenda.”

Oleg Kozlovsky, an opposition activist and a researcher at Amnesty International in Russia, told the independent television network Dozhd that Navalny’s loss of status is only a “technicality” and said the organization’s London office made the final decision after deliberations with the Moscow bureau. Both Kozlovsky and Zvyagina said their organization continues to believe that Navalny is being imprisoned for challenging Vladimir Putin politically. The group still demands Navalny’s immediate release. 

A coalition of opposition activists and politicians is calling on supporters of Boris Nemtsov to mark the sixth anniversary of his assassination by leaving flowers at the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow, where the former deputy prime minister was shot and killed on February 27, 2015.

According to Moscow municipal deputy Ilya Yashin, Saturday’s gathering will be a “memorial event, but not a rally or march,” which are currently prohibited in Moscow due to public safety measures against the coronavirus. Organizers are asking participants not to bring posters or any signs. “Don’t give the police any excuse to make arrests,” Yashin wrote on Facebook, urging everyone to observe social distancing and wear masks and gloves.

Days after Boris Nemtsov’s murder and every year since, the late politician’s supporters have marched to commemorate his life and condemn his killing. Yashin told journalists at Open Media that Moscow city officials don’t object to this year’s memorial event, so long as participants observe the capital’s pandemic safety requirements.

In November 2020, the investigative news outlet Proekt reported that a woman named Svetlana Krivonogikh owns a minority share in Rossiya Bank, which she apparently owes to an intimate relationship with Vladimir Putin. Journalists also discovered that Krivonogikh’s daughter, Luiza Rozova, bears a striking resemblance to Russia’s president, leading to speculation that Rozova is Putin’s illegitimate child, though the Kremlin has dismissed these rumors as “tabloid” speculation. 

After publicly engaging one of the journalists last week who outed her supposed lineage, Rozova granted an interview to GQ Russia that appeared on February 24, and posed for several photos but hid her face. The only question GQ’s Vadim Smyslov asked Rozova about Russia’s president was if she thinks she looks like him. Her response? “There are a lot of people who look like Mr. Putin.” Rozova also complained about “embittered people” trolling her online after Proekt’s report, but she insists that she’s adapted to the pressure and no longer cares.

Reporters from iStories and Meduza examined Moscow court documents and found more than 140 “professional witnesses” — people who regularly testify in court cases related to drug charges. The practice is blatantly illegal, but judges send people to prison for years based on these witnesses’ testimonies.

In May 2018, thirty-five-year-old Natalya Goloborodko reached out to Moscow police in an effort to “expose a dealer of illicit substances.” The officers decided to conduct a “test purchase” — Goloborodko would buy drugs from the dealer under officer supervision. The police found two witnesses, and together they all went to the home of Nikolai Grigoryev, the alleged drug dealer. As soon as the deal was made, the officers arrested Grigoryev. Back at the station, they confiscated the money Grigoryev had allegedly gotten from Goloborodko for the drugs, and — in the presence of witnesses — they found MDMA, amphetamines, and hash in his apartment. The authorities charged Grigoryev with two counts of selling drugs and one count of attempting to sell (they discovered information about future drug deals on his phone). He confessed to everything upon interrogation.

In court, however, Grigoryev maintained his innocence, saying that the police forced his confession and that Natalya Goloborodko framed him. He admitted to knowing Goloborodka, but insisted that he never sold her amphetamines. The police planted the money on him, he said. Nikolai’s mother and sister said in court that they had “never suspected him of dealing drugs.” The crime’s only witnesses were the police officers, Goloborodko, and the two official witnesses.

Grigoryev happened to meet one of them in a police car before his sentencing hearing. Thirty-eight-year-old Mikhail Rakhmankin, whose responsibility as an official witness was to act as an independent observer during the search, had already been tried twice for dealing drugs himself. He was in the police car with Grigoryev because he was simultaneously under investigation, and the two men were being kept in the same pretrial detention facility.

Nonetheless, the judge ruled that “the defense’s opinion that the search involved witnesses who were dependent on police officers is unsubstantiated.” On August 1, 2019, the Kuntsevsky District Court convicted Nikolai Grigoryev and sentenced him to 11 years in prison.

Protesting in Russia just got a bit riskier. On Wednesday, President Putin signed legislation that raises the penalties for disobeying police officers, including at public assemblies, and for violating new rules on financing mass demonstrations. 

The new law hikes the maximum fine for insubordination to 4,000 rubles ($55) and introduces up to 120 hours of community service. Perpetrators also face up to 15 days in jail, while repeat offenders can be locked up for 30 days and fined as much as 20,000 rubles ($275) or sentenced to 100-200 hours of community service.

With the president’s signature, it’s now illegal to donate money anonymously to support the organization of mass demonstrations, and any funds submitted this way must be surrendered to the state. Failure to comply with these new requirements can result in fines as high as 20,000 rubles or 40 hours of community service. Legal entities that violate the new law face fines 10 times as high. Individuals who “lack the right” to donate money for the organization of public assemblies but do so anyway face fines as high as 15,000 rubles ($200). A legal entity that does the same could be fined up to 100,000 rubles ($1,360).

The human rights organization Amnesty International has rescinded its decision to grant “prisoner of conscience” status to Alexey Navalny, arguing that the jailed Russian opposition politician’s past statements about migrants from Central Asia and the North Caucasus constitute hate speech. Alexander Artemyev, the group’s Russia and Eurasia media manager, confirmed the determination to Mediazona on Tuesday, after American journalist Aaron Maté first reported the news from Amnesty’s UK division. 

“Yes, we will no longer use the phrase ‘prisoner of conscience’ when referring to [Navalny], insofar as our legal and political department studied Navalny’s statements from the mid-2000s and determined that they qualify as hate speech,” Artemyev told Mediazona. “Nevertheless, our calls for his immediate release remain in force, as he is being persecuted for purely political reasons.”

Artemyev also noted that human rights activists “got the impression that the requests to review Navalny’s statements were part of a coordinated campaign abroad to discredit him,” adding that Amnesty International is still collecting signatures for a petition demanding Navalny’s freedom.

Requesting anonymity, another source at Amnesty International told Mediazona that “people in different countries at Russia Today” might have been involved in the campaign to revoke Navalny’s “prisoner of conscience” status, saying the authors of at least two complaints addressed to the organization cited a widely-shared Twitter thread by RT freelance columnist Katya Kazbek (real name: Ekaterina Dubovitskaya), where she called Navalny an “avowed nationalist and racist.”

On January 17, Amnesty International recognized Navalny as a prisoner of conscience, immediately after police officers arrested him at a Moscow airport. “Alexey Navalny has been deprived of his liberty for his peaceful political activism and exercising free speech. Amnesty International considers him a prisoner of conscience and calls for his immediate and unconditional release,” the organization said in a press release.

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (which Russia’s Justice Ministry has designated as a “foreign agent”), is trying to put a positive spin on the European Union’s decision not to sanction prominent businessmen Navalny’s associates say are partly responsible for the opposition politician’s imprisonment. Though his team advocates these sanctions, Zhdanov told the radio station Ekho Moskvy that targeting Russian oligarchs is largely impractical because their immense personal resources and access to elite lawyers enable them to challenge and reverse such measures.

“So things here are getting harder, of course, but I don’t see this as some major failure because the main thing is that those who violate the rights of Russian citizens — whatever judges, prosecutors, [Investigative Committee head Alexander] Bastrykin, and [Attorney General Igor] Krasnov are certainly included on this list. Also, this is just the first step,” said Zhdanov, referring to reports on February 22 that European Union foreign ministers agreed to impose sanctions on four senior Russian officials (Bastrykin, Krasnov, Federal Penitentiary Service Director Alexander Kalashnikov, and National Guard Director Viktor Zolotov) in response to Navalny’s imprisonment.

Also on Monday, EU Foreign Affairs Minister Josep Borrell confirmed that Europe is not prepared to levy sanctions against Russian oligarchs (who happen to be a frequent target of Navalny’s anti-corruption investigations). “Maybe we don't like the oligarchs [...] but if there isn't a link we can prove in a court of law, we cannot use [sanctions],” Borrell told reporters.

After Russian police arrested Alexey Navalny in Moscow in mid-January 2021, the opposition politician’s longtime associate Vladimir Ashurkov named eight individuals Navalny himself wants to see sanctioned in the West. The list included the billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Roman Abramovich, as well as the bankers Igor Shuvalov and Andrey Kostin. 

In early February, in response to Ashurkov’s proposed sanctions list, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin urged his colleagues to adopt amendments that would make it a felony to advocate foreign sanctions against Russian citizens. Lawmakers passed the first reading of this legislation in May 2018, but the draft law has since languished in consultations with Russia’s business community.