Russia‘s top cop has a new star role at the heart of the Putin regime. His mission? Shut down the opposition.
Alexander Bastrykin’s Investigative Committee has become President Vladimir Putin‘s de facto political police, accountable to him alone. The fearsome organization was given the new mandate after Putin returned for a third term as president last year, embittered and shaken by huge protests against his rule.
As new raids, arrests and charges hit the opposition seemingly every week, Bastrykin’s inquisitorial zeal and the degree to which charges often strain credulity show how the Kremlin is ratcheting up its longstanding practice of using the law as a tool to crush political enemies.
“Bastrykin is a man who follows any order — he’ll shut anyone down on any charge — and that’s what makes him so valuable to Putin,” Alexei Navalny, a leading anti-corruption activist embroiled in four separate legal battles with the Investigative Committee, told The Associated Press in an interview.
Russia‘s opposition, weakened and fractured after the protests petered out, is now forced to spend much of its time fighting often outlandish allegations from the Investigative Committee. Navalny is to go on trial in April on charges of leading an organized crime group that stole more than 10,000 cubic meters of timber worth 16 million rubles (about $500,000) while he worked for a provincial governor.
Several activists face charges based on a documentary-style TV show that said they were pawns of a minor Georgian lawmaker, Givi Targamadze, whom the show depicted as a murky figure working in league with rogue oligarchs to seize the Kremlin. When one of the defendants, Leonid Razvozzhayev, said he had been kidnapped in Ukraine and tortured into signing a confession, investigators deported him to Siberia on charges of stealing 500 fur hats in 1997, even though he had been cleared of the charges long ago.
“Those charges are obviously crazy and have no legal basis, but to some degree, that’s part of the point,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin political consultant, said. “It shows that all legal measures have been thrown out the window, and that scares people.”
With Putin’s backing, Bastrykin appears to have a free hand. Ostensibly, his agency is a Russian counterpart to the FBI, handling special crimes like murders, corruption cases and organized crime. In practice, however, the Investigative Committee recalls the FBI under its volatile founder J. Edgar Hoover, who abused the bureau’s considerable power to …read more
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