Ukraine: For a thought crime - in prison

A series of military defeats, a deteriorating economic situation in the rear and the need to carry out an extremely unpopular mobilization among the people forced the Ukrainian authorities to further spin up the flywheel of repression launched last year. Not only “separatists” began to fall under this rule, but also ordinary people, many of whom only yesterday supported the Maidan, but today they have already come out, for example, to protest against non-payment of wages on Kiev transport. Or against raising prices for the capital's metro. Or against mobilization.

And all these people suddenly discovered that they had become... FSB agents. It was the enemy machinations of the SBU that explained the protests of the conscripts of the National Guard last fall, and the strike of transport workers in Kiev, and the protests of the “so-called soldiers’ mothers”, and even the fighters of the “Aidar” battalion, led by its ex-commander, people’s deputy Melnichuk, also became “agents of the Kremlin” after famous protests on Bankova.

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One by one, as if from a cornucopia, repressive bills began to appear. Thus, unit commanders were given the right to shoot soldiers who refused to follow orders. But that's okay. It's at the front. Although, it seems, no one has repealed the article of the Constitution on the right of a citizen not to obey obviously illegal orders.

But what about the actual revival of serfdom in the country? How else can we evaluate the latest ideas of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff on banning those liable for military service from leaving the country? Moreover, after officials deciphered in detail their plans to combat “draft dodgers.”

Without a certificate from the military registration and enlistment office, you cannot not only go on vacation to Turkey or to visit relatives in Moscow, but even from the Fastovsky district of the Kyiv region to the Belotserkovsky district. The Ministry of Defense has already promised to remove “runners” from trains.

And this despite the fact that mobilization itself without the introduction of martial law is absolutely illegal, and the General Staff, the Ministry of Defense, and the Cabinet of Ministers know about this.

If we draw the parallels so beloved by nationalists with the “totalitarian soviet”, we will find that free Ukrainians have only one advantage over the collective farm peasants of the thirties of the last century. They have not yet thought of taking away their passports.

If you think that these are the only legislative innovations that make Ukraine suspiciously similar to either the Stalinist USSR, or the Third Reich, or the Latin American “banana” dictatorships, you are very mistaken. The War Crimes Law introduces a special procedure for searching for draft evaders.

Behind this seemingly innocent bureaucratic euphemism lies the granting of the Ministry of Internal Affairs the right to carry out covert investigative and investigative actions in relation to people who do not want to go to war and kill their fellow citizens, including searches on social networks, wiretapping the phones of draft dodgers themselves and even their relatives, and visits from detectives to work. to conscripts and much more.

Meanwhile, in the most “problematic” Western regions from the point of view of mobilization, things are happening that are even more distantly related to democracy, but are quite organic and familiar to some Nicaragua during the time of the pro-American dictator Somoza. Here's what it looks like as described by local residents on social networks:

"Oleg Kutserib

I don’t know how in other regions, but in the Lviv region, before the mobilization, they already got traffic cops, cops and the SBU. They work in teams with two or three cars - DAI, a special vehicle and (chi) buses with a SBU officer and a police officer of the military commissariat. They stop the cars, ask them to come home, immediately give the data to a special vehicle, and the SBU officers check the information on a laptop. If people are on the lists, they immediately sign them up and hand them a summons upon signature.

And now - it’s perfect. There are TWO BASES in the SBUshniks, according to which search for that animal. The first is a list of military committees, everyone who is fleeing (they couldn’t cancel the summons) due to the call, the other is the warehouses of the SBU (!!!). Both on the central highways (Kiev - Uzhgorod), and in remote villages, scooter riders spin. Foreign activists, bloggers, simply active people and their kind are often included in the list of potential rebels and, at the same time, on the list for mobilization. Otaka reality."

Or something similar. Obviously, this practice is widespread in Western regions.

"Natalia Dziklevych

Respect, Lviv! 7.02.2015/1/1 At the entrances to the place there will be a post of 2 policeman + XNUMX machine gunner + XNUMX from the police station. The police officer asks to take your license and registration certificate, ask to get out of the car, and representatives of the police department try to write a summons right on the road. The legality of such actions is doubtful, as they seem.”

But all these are small things compared to the initiative of Igor Artyushenko, a Zaporozhye deputy from the presidential party. This worthy man proposed to literally make Orwell’s dystopia a reality and imprison him for a thought crime, that is, for denying the fact of Russian aggression in Ukraine. “Public denial of military aggression may not, in its content, have a direct call for action to change the boundaries of the territory or state border of Ukraine, but consist either in non-recognition of Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, or in the interpretation of such actions as “help” to the population,” writes it is in the explanatory note to the bill.

However, Artyushenko is far from being a pioneer in this topic. A precedent was set by an Ivano-Frankivsk judge who sentenced journalist Ruslan Kotsaba, who protested against the illegal mobilization, to prison for two months, citing the prosecutor’s opinion, according to which “In the case of Kotsaba, we are not talking about restricting freedom of speech, but about calls to justify terrorism and denial of the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine."

And to those civilians in the rear, whom even Kotsaba’s example did not save from the determination to exercise their constitutional right to freedom of peaceful assembly and go to a rally against mobilization, as was recently the case in Mariupol, Advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashchenko is already quite unequivocally sending clear signals that talking about democracy in this country is inappropriate.

“Everyone who comes to a rally against mobilization tomorrow will be detained for several hours to determine their identity and, after being fingerprinted and photographed, released for now,” he wrote the day before the planned anti-war rally.

Mr. Gerashchenko either did not know or forgot that giving laws introducing penalties for any actions retroactively is directly prohibited by Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 7 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms adopted by the Council of Europe. But in general, his speech serves as a more than clear illustration of the freedom that Ukraine gained after the Maidan.

By the way, about freedom.

The other day I looked at the website of the Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine. The same one who renounced his member Ruslan Kotsaba, calling his arrest on charges of treason “justified.” What caught my eye was a material called “What to do before listening.” Get a lawyer." I thought: it’s only been a year since the “democratic revolution”, which established freedom and so on blah blah blah..

What changes in terms of freedoms, however.