More Russians are criticizing each other in Ukraine, in an echo of the Soviet era

Written by Mark Trevelyan

LONDON (Reuters) – On the last day of January, a woman took her son to pediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova at Polyclinic No. 140 northwest of Moscow. The boy, aged seven, had a problem with one of his eyes.

The conversation that the boy's mother said took place when they met at the clinic for 18 minutes will change women's lives and put a 68-year-old doctor in prison.

The case hinged on criticism — part of a growing trend among Russians to inform their fellow citizens of their views on the war in Ukraine and other alleged political crimes. Critics say the wave of criticism is helping President Vladimir Putin's government to engage in a crackdown on the opposition.

In a video recorded from the clinic, the mother, Anastasia Akinshina, said she told the doctor that the boy was traumatized because his father was killed fighting for Russia in the war in Ukraine.

“You know what he told me? 'Well, my dear, what are you waiting for? Your husband was an official victim of Ukraine,' “said Akinshina, imitating the doctor's voice and voice.

Fighting back tears, Akinshina said she discussed the incident with the hospital management and suspects that they are planning to close it.

“The question is: where can I complain now about this person, so that he can be expelled from this crazy country or sent to Satan in prison?” he said in a video, which went viral on social media, putting him in a high-profile criminal case as a key witness for the prosecution.

At the hearing, Buyanova declined to comment. But despite the lack of other senior witnesses, the allegations were enough to destroy his 40-year medical career and his life.

The doctor, who has been in pre-trial detention since April, appeared before a Moscow court on Tuesday, his gray hair cropped close. He was found guilty under the wartime censorship law of “willfully disseminating false information” about the armed forces and sentenced to five and a half years in a penal colony.

Buyanova was born in Ukraine but is a citizen of Russia, where he has lived and worked for thirty years. His lawyer Oscar Cherdzhiyev told Reuters that the defense believes that Akinshina committed crimes because of the doctor's origins in Ukraine.

Akinshina did not respond to written questions for this story, or return his phone calls.

At the trial, he said: “We are Russians. Buyanova hates Russians. He feels that he hates me, that's what I think,” according to a document by Russian private company Mediazona.

Two hospital workers who saw Akinshina after consulting Buyanova described him as a witness as anxious.

The prosecutor's case was based almost entirely on Akinshina's account, as well as a transcript read at the trial of an interview with the child, conducted by an officer of the FSB security service. At first, Akinshina said the boy was not in the room when it was said, but later changed his story, telling the court that he initially spoke of a state of shock.

The judge rejected the prosecutors' request to cross-examine the child.

Russian rights group OVD-Info has recorded 21 criminal charges in politically motivated cases based on deportations since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Eva Levenberg, a lawyer for the group, told Reuters.

Levenberg, who lives in Germany, said that OVD-Info knew about 175 other people who were facing low charges of treating the Russian military with “disrespect” because of people they informed at the same time, and 79 of them were fined.

Reuters could not independently verify the numbers provided by Levenberg.

Russia's Justice Ministry did not respond to requests for comment about the data or the use of sentences to support prosecutions, including Buyanova's case. In response to a question posed by Reuters, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin does not say anything about the court's decisions.

'SCUM AND TRAITORS'

Putin said the country is at war with the West, and citizens need to help eliminate internal enemies. In March 2022, weeks after the attack, he declared that the Russian people “will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and traitors, and just spit them out like a fool that accidentally flew into their mouth.”

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to OVD-Info, authorities have arrested more than 20,000 people for various types of anti-war statements or demonstrations, and initiated criminal proceedings against 1,094 people.

In news reports, court cases and social media, there have been examples of neighbors reporting neighbors, churchgoers criticizing pastors and students reporting teachers.

For some, the current climate is reminiscent of the mistrust and suspicion under Soviet Communist rule.

Olga Podolskaya was a former deputy of the municipality of Tula region, south of Moscow, who by her own account earned a “bad” reputation as an independent local politician ready to stand up to the authorities. In the first hours after the invasion of Ukraine, he added his signature to an open letter describing it as an “unprecedented atrocity” and urging citizens to speak out against it.

Four months later, he became the subject of public criticism that called for an investigation into his finances after he collected public donations to pay a fine related to the 2020 protest. This decision was filed under the name “Olga Minenkova”, but Podolskaya said that no such person has ever been revealed, and she suspects her identity. Reuters has seen a copy of the indictment, but has not been able to identify who posted it.

Other civil cases followed, against her and her husband. Asked how she felt at the time, Podolskaya said it made her think of her great-grandfather, who was executed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1938 after someone told her about him.

“The time of abandonment and 'enemies of the people' had returned. I realized that they were suggesting that I should leave the country,” said Podolskaya.

He left, in April 2023. In September of that year he was placed on the Justice Department's public “foreign agent” list. To protect his safety, he asked Reuters not to reveal his current whereabouts.

“FROM A PAST PLACE”

Dr. Andrei Prokofiev was attacked in 2023 by a mobster named Anna Korobkova who wrote to her employer demanding that she be fired because of her anti-war comments she made in a foreign newspaper.

Korobkova did not respond to a request for comment.

In a letter she wrote last year to Alexandra Arkhipov, a sociologist who was the victim of some of her sentences, Korobkova said journalism was “in her blood” as her grandfather had worked with Stalin's NKVD secret police. Arkhipova sent a letter to Telegram.

Korobkova said she sent 764 sentences to government agencies in the first year of the war alone, focusing on Russians speaking to foreign media. He compared his work to “using submarines to destroy enemy ships”.

Reuters could not confirm the extent or impact of his work.

Prokofiev told Reuters that he was not affected, as he lives in Germany. But he is afraid to return to Russia: “I don't think I will leave the airport. They will start a criminal case immediately.”

Prokofiev took a special interest in Buyanova's story because, when he lived in Russia, his son was one of his patients. He describes him as a quiet, modest man – “an old man from a bygone era” who used a finger or two awkwardly on his computer.

There was a setback in his case. Prokofiev was among a total of 1,035 doctors who declared solidarity with Buyanova in an open letter, warning that the case would cause young people to stop entering medicine. Some doctors appeared in their respective places and spoke in a video collection posted on Facebook.

Alexander Polupan, a doctor who founded the Buyanova program and letters supporting dissidents including the late Alexei Navalny, said at least seven doctors were questioned by police after signing them. Reuters could not confirm the investigation, and Russia's interior ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Polupan himself left Russia last year, “when it became clear that I would be arrested at any moment”, he told Reuters.

Rachel Denber, Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asia Division of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said that prosecuting an elderly defendant in a prestigious job sent a signal that no one can defy Ukraine's official line.

Even if Buyanova had said that Russian soldiers on the battlefield were legitimate victims of Ukraine, that would have been true under international law, Denber said.

“That's the Geneva Conventions,” he added.

International law governing war allows the use of lethal force against clearly identifiable enemies in certain circumstances.

At the trial, prosecutors provided details of messages and photos on Buyanova's cell phone that were not related to the dispute with Akinshina but were used to present the image of a person with pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian views.

The defender said someone else used the device and the messages were not his.

In his final closing speech, the doctor was in tears. He asked the court to consider his age, frail health and decades of work.

Supporters wearing shirts printed with Buyanova's self-proclaimed image shouted “shame” on the sentence.

Before the decision was read, Buyanova expressed shock at what happened.

“I can't memorize it,” he told reporters. “Maybe I will later.”

(Additional reporting by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)