[LINK] "A Russian Housewife Caught in Putin's War"
Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky writes about a Russian housewife whose arrest reveals Russia's active involvement in the Ukrainian war.
Is Russia fighting a war against Ukraine? To hear President Vladimir Putin and his ministers, it's not -- it merely sympathizes with the separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. Yet the case of a Russian housewife with a two-month-old baby, accused of treason and jailed for making a call to the Ukrainian embassy, proves that Russia sees the neighboring country as an enemy and that it has troops there.
Svetlana Davydova, a 36-year-old housewife from Vyazma in western Russia, made the fateful call in April 2014. She told an embassy employee that a garrison near her home, which normally housed a crack GRU military intelligence unit, had suddenly emptied out. Davydova also said she had had overheard a phone conversation on a bus in which a man -- she thought he might have been a soldier from the unit -- said he and his fellow servicemen were being transferred to Moscow in small groups, wearing civilian clothes, in preparation for a certain posting. Davydova added that she thought the unit might be headed for Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
For months afterwards, nothing happened. Then, according to Davydova's husband, a local precinct cop knocked on their door at 8:15 a.m. on January 21. He said neighbors had complained of noise from the apartment, though the couple's seven children were still asleep. When the couple opened the door, a group of operatives from the FSB, Russia's domestic intelligence service, burst in, seized all of their computers, arrested Davydova and handed her husband a piece of paper stating she was suspected of treason and that he would be informed of her whereabouts later.
Davydova ended up at Lefortovo, the Moscow prison where people suspected of serious crimes against the state are usually kept. When human rights activists visited the former seamstress at the jail, she was unsure what to do or even how to deal with her court-appointed lawyer. She said she had admitted making the call.
For his part, the lawyer, Andrei Stebenev, revealed in an interview with a Moscow radio station that Davydova's case file contained a document from the Russian General Staff saying the information Davydova had passed on to Ukraine was genuine and "could be used against Russia's security, potentially threatening the efficiency of measures aimed at strengthening the state border with Ukraine." Davydova faces a prison term of 12 to 30 years.
Is Russia fighting a war against Ukraine? To hear President Vladimir Putin and his ministers, it's not -- it merely sympathizes with the separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. Yet the case of a Russian housewife with a two-month-old baby, accused of treason and jailed for making a call to the Ukrainian embassy, proves that Russia sees the neighboring country as an enemy and that it has troops there.
Svetlana Davydova, a 36-year-old housewife from Vyazma in western Russia, made the fateful call in April 2014. She told an embassy employee that a garrison near her home, which normally housed a crack GRU military intelligence unit, had suddenly emptied out. Davydova also said she had had overheard a phone conversation on a bus in which a man -- she thought he might have been a soldier from the unit -- said he and his fellow servicemen were being transferred to Moscow in small groups, wearing civilian clothes, in preparation for a certain posting. Davydova added that she thought the unit might be headed for Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
For months afterwards, nothing happened. Then, according to Davydova's husband, a local precinct cop knocked on their door at 8:15 a.m. on January 21. He said neighbors had complained of noise from the apartment, though the couple's seven children were still asleep. When the couple opened the door, a group of operatives from the FSB, Russia's domestic intelligence service, burst in, seized all of their computers, arrested Davydova and handed her husband a piece of paper stating she was suspected of treason and that he would be informed of her whereabouts later.
Davydova ended up at Lefortovo, the Moscow prison where people suspected of serious crimes against the state are usually kept. When human rights activists visited the former seamstress at the jail, she was unsure what to do or even how to deal with her court-appointed lawyer. She said she had admitted making the call.
For his part, the lawyer, Andrei Stebenev, revealed in an interview with a Moscow radio station that Davydova's case file contained a document from the Russian General Staff saying the information Davydova had passed on to Ukraine was genuine and "could be used against Russia's security, potentially threatening the efficiency of measures aimed at strengthening the state border with Ukraine." Davydova faces a prison term of 12 to 30 years.