Friday, October 4, 2019

‘Not a day without treason’ is the present motto of Putin

10-4-19   As reported, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko said at the meeting with Ukrainian media representatives on September 26 that he was ready to settle the issue of pardoning Pavlo Sharoiko, who had been convicted in Belarus for alleged espionage, in the nearest future in exchange for similar steps regarding Belarusian citizen Yuriy Politika convicted in Ukraine.
  Belarus-based UA:Ukrainian Radio correspondent, Ukrainian citizen 
Pavlo Sharoiko was arrested in Minsk on October 25, 2017.  The State Security Committee of Belarus found him guilty of espionage and the creation of agent network.  He was sentenced to eight years in prison. https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/2793303-convicted-journalist-sharoiko-released-in-belarus-returns-to-ukraine.html
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  According to the KGB spokesman Dzmitry Pabyarzhyn, Sharoiko, an officer of Ukraine’s military intelligence, worked undercover as a radio correspondent and created a spy network of the citizens of Belarus.  Sharoiko’s work was coordinated by Igor Skvortsov, who ‘acted under the guise of the Ukrainian embassy counselor in Belarus’, Pabyarzhyn said.  Skvortsov was declared persona non grata and expelled from Belarus.  In November 2017, Sharoiko was accused of espionage.
  In 2018 Pavlo Sharoiko was sentenced to eight years in prison.  The trial of the Ukrainian citizen which began in February was held behind closed doors.  Ukrainian government agencies have repeatedly refuted the claim by the KGB of the alleged involvement of Pavlo Sharoiko in espionage and his being an intelligence officer.
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Belarusian journalist 
Vasil Syamashka of NTV might have been involved in the arrest of Ukrainian journalist Pavel Sharoiko, whom the Belarusian authorities charged with espionage.
  Earlier, Dmitry Tymchuk, a Ukrainian MP and coordinator of the Information Resistance group, said that the arrest was based on a forged document. Shortly before the arrest an employee of the state-run Russian TV station NTV asked Sharoiko to meet with him, he states with reference to his own sources.  The Russian journalist allegedly tried to give him ‘secret documents’ on Russia’s using the territory of Belarus for preparing an attack on Ukraine.  Knowing that it was a provocation, Sharoiko refused to take the documents.  On the way home he was arrested by the Belarusian KGB,” he said.
 https://belsat.eu/en/news/minsk-employee-of-russia-s-ntv-may-be-involved-in-kgb-arrest-of-ukraine-journo/
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  Ukrainian Pravda reported that the Security Service of Ukraine accuses 
Yuri Politika of transmitting classified data to a foreign state.  According to the investigation, he tried to take out in his smartphone aerial photography of the ATO zone in the Donbass. It was accompanied by a secret map of the “Storm” offensive operation, which the AFU planned in early July 2017 between Mariupol and Novoazovsk. Politika faced eight to 15 years in prison.  https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https://ryb.ru/2019/10/04/1454741&prev=search
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  K. Didenko:  “The occupying power is trying to forcefully destroy any manifestation of freedom of expression and freedom of expression in the Crimea, and 
Nariman Mammadinov's unlawful condemnation to imprisonment is a clear example of this.”
  Yesterday, October 2, 2019, the Southern Military District Court of the Russian Federation sentenced to 2 years and 6 months imprisonment of the Crimean Tatar blogger, public journalist of the Crimean Solidarity movement Nariman Mamedeminov, who actively covered human rights violations occurring on the peninsula.  As reported by IMI, on October 2, the Southern Military District Court of Russia's Rostov-on-Don sentenced journalist, blogger from Crimea Nariman Memedeminov to two and a half years , who was accused of public calls for terrorism.
  On October 1 Memedeminov made the final statement calling the justice and the law "pre-configured" in Russia, and called on journalists to continue to work on informing about the situation in the Crimea and lawsuits against the inhabitants of the peninsula.  On September 27 Russian prosecutor Aleksey Aydinov demanded a six-year prison sentence for Memedeminov.   https://imi.org.ua/en/news/crimean-prosecutor-s-office-
opened-proceeding-over-sentence-to-blogger-memedeminov-i29911
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  the kidnapping by the Russian security services of Ukrainian Internet activist Pavel Grib took place in Belarus in August 2017 and exposed the Belarusian side as a Russian accomplice, or as not being in control of its own territory, or both….There are several explanations as to why a breakthrough in bilateral relations has not been achieved. The first is the open, general mistrust in Ukraine toward Belarus caused by the latter’s close links with Moscow and vulnerability to Russian pressure….In the aftermath of the Grib kidnapping Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin warned that Ukrainians cannot feel safe in Belarus and should travel there with caution….In another sticking point, former president Victor Yanukovych’s defense minister and ambassador to Belarus, Mikhail Yezhel, reportedly received political asylum in Belarus in 2017….
  On the one hand Russia preserves not only its leverage on Belarus in general but also an ability to arrange specific provocations that put Minsk into embarrassing situations. The Grib case took place right after Lukashenko-Poroshenko summits in April and June 2017 and could have been intended to undermine further progress.  In April 2016, the deputy speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) and Ukraine’s representative at the Minsk talks, Iryna Gerashchenko, was suddenly denied entry to Belarus, which had huge negative media resonance in Ukraine, simply because, on the eve of the trip, Gerashchenko had been put on a no-entry list for traveling to Russia. This circumstance also made clear that Russia and Belarus coordinate their policies on such matters.     http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/partnership-not-making-ukrainian-belarusian-relations-after-euromaidan
  
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Pavel Grib in court on March 22, 2019
-Pavel Grib in court on March 22, 2019
Valery Matytsin / TASS / Scanpix / LETA

  Grib says plainclothes Russian Federal Security Service agents kidnapped him in Belarus.  After the meeting where Grib was arrested, Tatyana E. told journalists that she’d met the young man online, and after finishing school in 2017 she wanted to move in with him in Ukraine, where she would join a training camp for volunteer recruits.  After trying to obtain a passport, she says FSB agents came to her home (probably after gaining access to her Internet correspondence) and offered her a deal:  a passport in exchange for arranging a meeting with Grib, so the agency could confirm “if he’s a real person.” The authorities supposedly promised not to arrest anyone. 
  Tatyana told the newspaper Novaya Gazeta that she discussed the situation with Grib, who “decided that there should be a meeting,” otherwise they might “never see each other.”  On March 24, accompanied by her mother, Tatyana finally met Grib in Gomel.  The encounter didn’t last long.  (Grib would later claim in court that the real Tatyana never came to Belarus.)  Grib says several men grabbed him as he was preparing to return to Kyiv, throwing him in a van that took him to the Smolensk region. In court, he accused his captors of “suffocating him, beating him, and binding his arms so tight that they turned blue.”On March 22, the North Caucasian District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced 19-year-old Pavel Grib to six years in prison for abetting terrorist activity.   According to prosecutors, Grib tried to convince a young woman in Sochi named Tatyana E. to stage a terrorist attack at her high-school graduation ceremony.  Officials also accused him of supporting the “Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People's Self-Defense,” which is banned in Russia as an extremist organization.  Grib maintains his innocence, and his lawyer, Marina Dubrovina, arguedin court that others had access to his Skype account, which sent messages to Tatyana about bomb-making.  Dubrovina told Meduza that she plans to challenge the ruling, stating that prosecutors failed to produce evidence that her client is responsible for the correspondence at the center of the case.  https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/03/22/a-russian-court-has-sentenced-a-ukrainian-teen-to-six-years-in-prison-for-abetting-terrorism-the-suspect-says-fsb-agents-abducted-him-in-belarus
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 2-14-2015    This week the media discussed another case of “high treason.” Former FSB officer (and later an employee of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate) Yevgeny Petrin was accused of state treason after he returned from a trip to Ukraine.  Russian journalists devoured reports of this “young FSB major” who was “transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), from where he was assigned to Ukraine, then recalled this summer to Moscow and arrested on charges of betraying the Motherland.”   
   Anton Orekh (Echo of Moscow) asserts that cases of high treason are becoming the norm:  ‘Not a day without treason’ is the present motto.  Anyone can be a traitor: mothers of many children, physicists, wordsmiths and now a priest.  The enemy has many faces and goes under different guises.  What’s more, spy cases smack of devilry, all the more so in the case of Father Petrin, remarks Orekh.
  Orekh adds that today accusations of treason are easy to make but far harder than before for the accused to shake off, since treason can be linked to almost any contact with foreigners.  “It’s no longer necessary to convey state secrets or have access to highly sensitive information,” sums up Orekh.   https://russia-direct.org/russian-media/russian-media-divided-minsk-united-munich

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