openDemocracy: Poland vs. Azamat Baiduyev: how an EU member state deported a Chechen refugee back to face the Kadyrov regime

That same day, Baiduyev was flown to Moscow. He then flew to Grozny, capital of Chechnya. Soon after, according to contacts of Akhmed Gisayev, head of the Human Rights Analysis Center, reported that “roughly a hundred people with weapons, portable radios and police vehicles” surrounded a house belonging to Baiduyev’s uncle.

According to witnesses, some of these men spoke Russian without a Chechen accent and had a Russian appearance, which indicates that the Russian FSB was involved in the operation alongside the Chechen Interior Ministry. Azamat was abducted by force. It is not known where he is currently located. [...]

This final question is important because, according to Jacek Białas, a lawyer from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, regardless of the fault of the individual, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights indicates that the decision to deport to a country where they are threatened with torture or death is a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as the Polish Law on Foreigners. [...]

If the Polish authorities did not ask Russia to guarantee the security of Azamat Baiduyev, this is a serious charge in light of international law. If they did, it shows the kind of importance Russia attaches to these guarantees.

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The Guardian: Vladimir Putin’s politics of eternity

Inevitability and eternity translate facts into narratives. Those swayed by inevitability see every fact as a blip that does not alter the overall story of progress; those who shift to eternity classify every new event as just one more instance of a timeless threat. Each masquerades as history; each does away with history. Inevitability politicians teach that the specifics of the past are irrelevant, since anything that happens is just grist for the mill of progress. Eternity politicians leap from one moment to another, over decades or centuries, to build a myth of innocence and danger. They imagine cycles of threat in the past, creating an imagined pattern that they realise in the present by producing artificial crises and daily drama. [...]

The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one.The cliche of the politics of inevitability is that “there are no alternatives.” To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a premarked grave in a prepurchased plot. [...]

The wealthy few around Yeltsin, christened the “oligarchs”, wished to manage democracy in his favour and theirs. The end of Soviet economic planning created a violent rush for profitable industries and resources and inspired arbitrage schemes, quickly creating a new class of wealthy men. Wild privatisation was not at all the same thing as a market economy, at least as conventionally understood. Markets require the rule of law, which was the most demanding aspect of the post-Soviet transformations. Americans, taking the rule of law for granted, could fantasise that markets would create the necessary institutions. This was an error. It mattered whether newly independent states established the rule of law and, above all, whether they managed a legal transition of power through free elections. [...]

In September 2013, a Russian diplomat repeated this argument at a conference on human rights in China. Gay rights were nothing more than the chosen weapon of a global neoliberal conspiracy, meant to prepare virtuous, traditional societies such as Russia and China for exploitation. President Putin took the next step at his personal global summit at Valdai a few days later, comparing same-sex partnerships to Satanism. He associated gay rights with a western model that “opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.” The Russian parliament had by then passed a law “for the purpose of protecting children from information advocating for a denial of traditional family values”

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The New York Review of Books: The Literary Intrigues of Putin’s Puppet Master

What really triggered the sensation, though, over Okolonolya, or Almost Zero (subtitled gangsta fiction, in English, in the Russian edition), was the identity of its author, an unknown named Natan Dubovitsky. Dubovitsky was soon suspected, courtesy of an anonymous tip from the novel’s publisher to the St. Petersburg newspaper Vedomosti, of being a pseudonym for Vladislav Surkov, who was then the Russian presidential deputy chief of staff. At the time, this Kremlin ideologue was, arguably, the second- or third-most powerful man in the country. It was Surkov, variously called a “political technologist,” the “gray cardinal,” or a “puppet master,” who had created and orchestrated Putin’s so-called sovereign democracy—the stage-managed, sham-democratic Russia, the ruthlessly stabilized, still-rotten Russia that Almost Zero was savaging. Almost Zero is now available to English readers in a limited edition from an adventurous small publisher in Brooklyn, Inpatient Press. Inpatient takes the leap and credits Surkov as the author. (And, in the spirit of Almost Zero itself, it is publishing the novel without authorization.)

Plenty of politicos write novels; but not many write eviscerating self-satires. It was as though Karl Rove had taken the knife to his and George W. Bush’s America in, say, 2005. Surkov, however, wasn’t, and isn’t, simply a Rove. The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis calls him “a hero of our time” (in praise and opprobrium) for turning Russia’s political reality into “a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.” For supplying an early model, if you will, for Donald Trump’s media-savvy tactics of chaos and confusion. And what a perversely fascinating, complex figure emerges from the details of Surkov’s biography: an arch-propagandist of power and an arty outsider, an authoritarian’s right hand and a bohemian aesthete whose education included studying theater at the Moscow Institute of Culture in the 1980s (he was expelled for fighting). As the USSR was collapsing, Surkov became the public-relations mastermind for oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s pioneering business, Menatep Bank, which was where Surkov met his wife, Natalya; soon, he was heading up Russia’s fledging association of ad men. Denied a partnership in business after Khodorkovsky’s ill-fated acquisition of the oil giant Yukos in the 1990s—Khodorkovsky ended up in prison during Putin’s taming of the oligarchs—Surkov left for a position with Alfa Bank (of Trump dossier notoriety, for alleged aid in Russian meddling in the 2016 election; the owners are suing for defamation). He then ran a major TV network, before devoting his image-making and lobbying talents, first, to then President Boris Yeltsin, and, subsequently, to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. [...]

So how is an English reader to approach Almost Zero? I asked some Russians for advice. The author and journalist Masha Gessen hadn’t read the book. “Should I?” she wondered. I told her I thought Surkov was fascinating, apparently very smart. “None of them are smart,” she said. Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina looked taken aback when I brought up Almost Zero during audience questions at her performance with the banned Belarus Free Theatre at New York’s La Mama. “I have no interest in reading it,” she replied. “I don’t think I will.” Understandably, perhaps, since Surkov was in charge of the government’s religious relations when Pussy Riot’s members were imprisoned for their punk song performance in Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral in 2012. I emailed the novelist Vladimir Sorokin, whose outrageous satires, like Pelevin’s, have been attacked by the nationalist youth groups supported by Surkov. “Yes,” he wrote back from Berlin, where he now lives, “people say that it’s Surkov’s book, maybe it’s true. I’ve read twenty pages and that was enough for me. It’s secondhand literature. There is no space there, no air. Only effort and the attempt to write a ‘contemporary postmodern novel.’ It’s boring.”

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Al Jazeera: The death of the Russian far right

Today, most of the leaders of the ultranationalist groups that used to organise the march are either in jail or in self-imposed exile. Their supporters consider them to be politically persecuted and complain about increasing state repression. [...]

"Controlled nationalism is about using nationalists in some [political] games. In some cases, [the authorities] would support nationalists in order to keep the regime alive, to fight the threat of a colour revolution," says Anton Shekhovstov, visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Austria. [...]

That same year, the Russian authorities decided to finally do away with the November 7 official holiday celebrating the October Revolution. They moved the allocated day off to November 4 - the day Moscow was liberated from the Poles in 1612, an official holiday in tsarist Russia until 1917. [...]

In August 2011, DPNI was banned by the Russian government (the SS had been banned a year earlier). Nevertheless, the government allowed the Russian march to take place. On November 4, more than 10,000 nationalists, joined by opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny, marched in Lyublino with banners reading "Stop feeding Caucasus". Over the years, the central government has been perceived as being quite generous in its budget allocation to the Chechen Republic in the North Caucasus and has been criticised by both nationalists and liberals for it. [...]

The result was a "schism" in the nationalist movement with one camp supporting the annexation of Crimea and the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the other opposing both and supporting the Ukrainian central government. [...]

Human rights groups have been divided over whether or not to consider the detention and imprisonment of ultranationalists to be political prosecution. Human rights organisation "Memorial" considers that in the case of Belov, there are "signs of political motivation".

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Al Jazeera: Keeping Boris Nemtsov's memory alive

He is part of a small group of concerned citizens who call themselves the Nemtsov Bridge and who have established a 24-hour watch over the makeshift memorial.

They decided to do so after there were attempts shortly after Nemtsov's death to remove the memorial.

Since then it has been attacked a number of times by right-wing activists and also regularly removed by the municipal cleaning service.

Moscow's local authorities have refused to allow the installation of a plaque in the memory of Nemtsov and have rejected suggestions to rename the bridge to bear his name. [...]

Nemtsov's murder has been the latest in a string of political assassinations in Russia since the early 2000s. [...]

In June this year, Nemtsov's daughter Zhanna, said in an interview that he had a plan to run in the 2018 presidential elections.

Unlike opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is likely to be disqualified because of a past criminal conviction, Nemtsov wouldn't have had legal problems to stop him running and challenging Vladimir Putin's presidency.

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The New Yorker: Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country

The problem was obvious. WikiLeaks, like many journalistic organizations, has long insisted on keeping its sources secret. However, Assange was not merely maintaining silence; he was actively pushing a narrative about his sourcing, in which Russia was not involved. He once told me, “WikiLeaks is providing a reference set to undeniably true information about the world.” But what if, in the interest of source protection, he was advancing a falsehood that was more significant than the reference set itself? Arguably, his election publications only underscored what was known about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton. His denials, meanwhile, potentially obfuscated an act of information warfare between two nuclear-armed powers. [...]

Conventional journalism is often an incremental, inefficient process, built on chains of personal trust: between sources and reporters, reporters and editors, editors and readers. Assange has difficulties with the messiness of trust, and in WikiLeaks he invented a system that made it largely unnecessary. By design, the WikiLeaks site prevents him from knowing where submissions come from, so there is no need to trust that he will keep a source’s identity a secret. (In practice, he readily accepts material in less than anonymous ways.) There is no need to trust his editorial judgment, either, because he has vowed to publish everything in full, in as pristine a form as possible. WikiLeaks, in Assange’s ideal, is a populist machine, delivering unmediated secret information directly to readers. [...]

But Assange’s argument made little sense. The Swedish extradition process requires the approval of the nation’s Supreme Court; thus, the scenario that Assange was proposing—a geopolitical plot to use his sex-crimes case as a pretext to deliver him to the United States—would require at least three high justices to act as conspirators. If this were not reason enough for skepticism, under the rules governing European arrest warrants Sweden could not extradite Assange to the U.S. without British approval; in other words, shipping him to Stockholm would only add a layer of bureaucratic obstacles for Washington. In any event, Swedish law prohibits extraditions for “political crimes,” which include espionage, and for cases eligible for the death penalty. [...]

For nearly half a decade, Assange had been cultivating a dislike of Clinton that was partly personal and partly philosophical. Clinton, he suspected, had wanted to assassinate him, and was instrumental in aggravating his conflict with Sweden. Moreover, he saw her as the main gear of a political machine that encompassed Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and overseas client nations, like Saudi Arabia. “She’s the smooth central representation of all that,” he once said. “And ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States.” [...]

At times, though, Assange has had questionable associations. In 2010, Israel Shamir, a controversial Russian with extremist views, visited him at Ellingham Hall. (Shamir, a convert from Judaism to Greek Orthodox Christianity, has written several anti-Semitic screeds.) Some WikiLeaks volunteers viewed him as an eccentric hanger-on; some suspected that he had ties to Russian intelligence. During one visit, Assange—who had become lax in his attitude toward the State Department trove—gave him more than ninety thousand unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables concerning Russia, former Soviet-bloc countries, and Israel. Shamir sold some of the material to a magazine friendly to the Kremlin, and delivered other parts of it to Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian leader, who used them to arrest opposition figures. (Shamir denies this, citing “a malicious invention by my detractors.”) One Belarusian activist later told the Web site Tablet, “I really hate WikiLeaks. How can they do this? The KGB is telling these people, ‘Your name is in the American cables and you are a traitor, an American agent, and you will be treated like an enemy.’ ” [...]

Assange told me that, as he negotiated the deal, he pushed for editorial freedom. He asked RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, if he could host Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader. “She said, ‘The Kremlin won’t like it, but it would be good for us, because it will show our independence,’ ” he recalled. He then asked about inviting a Chechen terrorist, and got an unambiguous no. Laughing at the memory, he said, “That’s the line: all the way up to a Chechen terrorist.” Assange did invite Navalny, who declined. Navalny’s spokesperson told me that he believed it was indecent to have any contact with RT, saying, “This channel is associated with the spread of lies and propaganda, including about many opposition activists.” [...]

This kind of judgment—deciding what is signal and what is noise—is precisely what Assange’s system was designed to eliminate. In his campaign publications, the results were clear. There were stories of genuine import: an episode in which Donna Brazile, a CNN commentator who became the head of the D.N.C., illicitly leaked debate questions to Clinton; others in which Clinton seemed uncomfortably close to selling political access in exchange for large donations to her family foundation. But there were also thousands of pages of trivia, some of which did harm. E-mail conversations about a pizza place in Washington were spun into a conspiracy theory about child pornography, which ended in an armed attack. The leaks revealed staffers’ personal e-mail addresses and cell-phone numbers and, in one case, a voice mail that captures a parent and a child together at the zoo. Above all, the steady drip from WikiLeaks, always promising some bigger revelation, distracted from an essential inquiry into whether the country’s national sovereignty had been breached. For more than a year, it has often seemed that there is nothing but noise. [...]

In a later conversation, I urged him to articulate a coherent view of Trump, but the prospect seemed to pain him. “It’s hard to sum up in the current climate of polarization,” he told me. It seemed his main concern was that by criticizing Trump he would somehow appear to validate the previous norms of American politics. “Governments are evil,” he told me. “The last government was evil. This government is evil. Does the Trump Administration appear to have a potential to be uniquely bad? Maybe. But in many other respects it’s the same problem that existed under Obama. The difference is that now everyone is talking about it. What is associated with this Administration is a certain aggressive rhetoric, which can make the problem worse if people accept it; on the other hand, it also makes everyone pay attention to problems that have been there for a long time.” He told me that, whatever Trump’s flaws, his Administration had the capacity to challenge entrenched power in Washington, and to disrupt the structure of American power overseas. “I will give you a list of counterintuitive structural positives,” he told me. Several days later, he presented a set of ideas that could be distilled into one: “A complaint from civil libertarians and constitutional scholars is that the power of the Presidency is too strong. O.K., it has been reduced now.”

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The New York Review of Books: Our Trouble with Sex: A Christian Story?

As shocking as the Chechen campaign appears, it is nothing humans have not seen, or done, before. Ethnic groups, religious or racial minorities, and individuals who are different in some way have far too often become the objects of hatred and murderous intent. What is happening in Chechnya most immediately brings to mind the depredations of the Third Reich, which sought to rid Europe of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and others considered to be undesirables. [...]

In his deeply researched new book, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century, Geoffrey R. Stone gives his answer to these and other questions about our country’s regulation of sex, with a special emphasis on same-sex activity. According to Stone, a scholar of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Christianity has exerted the biggest influence on how we have addressed the issue from colonial times to today. The “central theme” of Sex and the Constitution “is that American attitudes about sex have been shaped over the centuries by religious beliefs—more particularly, by early Christian beliefs—about sex, sin, and shame.”

This history, Stone argues, has created “a nettlesome question” for the practice of constitutional law. Over the years, courts have accepted Christian traditions on matters relating to sex despite our nation’s commitment to the separation of church and state. When confronted with cases regarding restrictions on sexual behavior, or activities related to sexual behavior like contraception, abortion, or consuming pornography, judges have had to dress up in secular garb what were essentially religious principles. They did this by distinguishing between the “moral views” they said they drew on and the “religious views” they claimed they did not. [...]

Curiously, Stone pays scant attention to perhaps the most consequential issue for many of the nineteenth-century moralists—their crusade against slavery, in which sex figured prominently. The widespread southern practice of concubinage was one of the principal targets of their brief against the institution. Stone’s decidedly northern emphasis leaves the sexual habits and preoccupations of the South largely out of the picture. Sex and the Constitution has almost nothing to say about the topic of interracial sex, although outlawing it was one of the earliest examples of the regulation of sexuality in North America. Those laws almost certainly affected more people than prohibitions of same-sex sodomy, and it was to them that courts and activists looked for analogy during debates about gay rights. [...]

Many of the regulations described in Sex and the Constitution could be found in places and among people who had never heard of—or certainly can’t be said to have been affected by—the early Christians, Augustine, or Aquinas. This suggests that we may have to look beyond the influence of any one religion to understand how and why we have set the rules of sex by which we have lived. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? These are questions humans have struggled to answer, probably from the beginning of human history. Religion is only one way we have attempted to establish answers to them. Engaging with other possible influences more fully—specifically efforts throughout history to control women and perpetuate negative attitudes about womanhood—would have made Stone’s very important book longer, but it would have brought a needed perspective to his analysis.

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The New York Review of Books: Why Autocrats Fear LGBT Rights

With few exceptions, countries that have grown less democratic in recent years have drawn a battle line on the issue of LGBT rights. Moscow has banned Pride parades and the “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” while Chechnya—technically a region of Russia—has undertaken a campaign to purge itself of queers. In Budapest, the Pride march has become an annual opposition parade: many, if not most, participants are straight people who use the day to come out against the Orbán government. In Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey, water cannons were used to disperse an Istanbul Pride parade. Narendra Modi’s India has re-criminalized homosexuality (though transgender rights have been preserved). In Egypt, where gays experienced new freedoms in the brief interlude of democracy after the 2011 revolution, they are now, under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s dictatorship, subjected to constant harassment and surveillance and hundreds have been arrested. [...]

One can laugh at the premise of the Russian ban on “homosexual propaganda”—as though the sight of queerdom openly displayed, or even the likeness of a rainbow (this claim has been made) can turn a straight person queer. At the same time, in Russia queer people make an ideal target for government propaganda because the very idea of them serves as a convenient stand-in for an entire era of liberalization that is now shunned. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, queerdom was unthinkable. Afterward, it became possible along with so many other things: the world became complicated, full of possibility and uncertainty. It also grew frightening—precisely because nothing was certain any longer. [...]

Looking at a person who embodies choice—the possibility of being or becoming different—can be like staring into the abyss of uncertainty. In this sense, seeing a Pride march or a trans person can make a straight person feel very queer: it demonstrates possibility, making the world frightening. It speaks to the modern predicament the social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote about in his book about the rise of Nazism, Escape from Freedom: the ability to invent oneself. One is no longer born a tradesman or a peasant, or the lifelong resident of a particular quarter, or a man or a woman. This freedom can feel like an unbearable burden. No wonder the most notorious piece of American anti-transgender legislation—the North Carolina bathroom bill—focused on the birth certificate as the most important document. In mandating that people use public bathrooms in accordance with the sex assigned at birth, the law created a situation where some people who looked, acted, smelled like—who identified and lived as—women were required to use the men’s bathroom, and vice versa—but it established that one’s position in the world was set from birth.

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openDemocracy: Charting Russia’s most dangerous cities for LGBT people

n Russia, the first LGBT pride march was held in 1991 on the square before Moscow’s Bolshoi theatre as part of the Soviet Union’s first LGBT festival. The more modern history of LGBT parades in Russia began in 2006 when LGBT activist Nikolay Alekseyev attempted to officially organise a pride march in Moscow. Years passed, and the city authorities still haven’t found the guts to permit a march for LGBT human rights through the capital’s streets and provide security for its participants. However, other banned marches have been successfully challenged in the European Court for Human Rights and Alekseyev has generated support in other regions of the country. He and his colleagues have applied for permission to hold pride marches in Blagoveshchensk, Cherkessk, Cherepovets, Kazan, and Nizhny Tagil among many other cities across Russia, though they have always been rejected and sued city governments in response. A notable exception came in 2013, when the governor of St Petersburg did not forbid the city’s LGBT pride parade, although it did encounter violently homophobic protesters who tried to obstruct the march.

In fact, these violent far-right groups keep close tabs on LGBT activists in Russia and the events they hold – or try to. While the government fights some homophobic campaigners and inciters of hatred, it supports others. After all, instigating violence against LGBT people is essentially the Russian state’s official policy towards sexuality. For example, the 2013 law banning “propaganda” of “non-traditional sexual orientations” sparked a wave of hatred against LGBT people across the country. As we discovered from court decisions last year, after the “propaganda” bill was signed into law, the number of hate crimes against lesbians and gay men doubled.  [...]

After facts came to light about the systematic torture of gay men at secret detention camps in Chechnya, the republic’s press secretary immediately retorted that “you cannot repress those who are not and cannot be here in the Chechen Republic.” Despite the justified focus on Chechnya, these claims are hardly specific to one culture or region within the Russian Federation – officials in other regions speak in much the same manner. For example, the mayor of Svetogorsk in Leningrad Region declared his city “free from gays.” He subsequently argued that LGBT issues and rights are irrelevant there, neither an LGBT community nor LGBT people exist in the small city. [...]

One of the effects of Russia’s “propaganda” law was not simply the rise in violence against LGBT people. It also led to more frequent ewspaper publications on LGBT topics, hence public discussion on a topic which still remains taboo for many people. This was not entirely what legislators intended. We benefitted from this situation by researching the details and contexts of violence against LGBT in Russia as they were reported in media. The Sexuality Lab studied almost 4,500 media publications about violence against LGBT people in Russia between 2011 and 2016. We categorised all newspaper articles in accordance with the sexuality of the victims reported and the locations of crimes committed. All cities were then classified by population, making it possible for us to calculate an index of safety for every urban settlement.

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The New Yorker: How a Russian Journalist Exposed the Anti-Gay Crackdown in Chechnya

Male homosexuality was always perceived very badly in Chechnya. Even gay men themselves considered themselves sick, damned, inferior. Very many of these men have families and children, and are trying to cope with the situation somehow. They understand that, deep down, their status is not acceptable in their society. If they were found out, families would choose to close their eyes to this fact—having a male relative who was known to be gay would be too great a shame for the family, or even the whole clan, which can run to hundreds of people. Chechen families are very sensitive to their image and how their extended clans are perceived.

Honor killings against women—that is, women who, in the opinion of their relatives, somehow disgraced the family or their clan—are, sadly, rather common. Before this current campaign, we did not have a record of such honor killings targeting men in Chechnya. If a man was found out to be gay, he was not killed, but very often Chechen security forces would use it as an excuse for blackmail. The taboo was a pretext for extortion. But there were never killings, let alone on a mass scale. This became possible only after the signal passed from above, from the Chechen authorities. [...]

We know of six cases in which families were told by the authorities to kill male relatives who were said to be gay. Of those, at least three, maybe four, such killings actually took place. And this is a big problem, because in this way the authorities make people complicit in their crimes. From the very beginning, when we realized this was a campaign against gays, we knew it would be very difficult, that no relatives would want to confirm anything to us. For many Chechen families, the accusation of homosexuality is much more terrible than the charge of supporting terrorism. That accusation—sympathy for terrorists, involvement in extremism, having ties to Wahhabi cells or even isis—is a familiar one. It is, in a way, routine. It is considered a kind of norm. But the charge of homosexuality is very serious. No relatives will want to confirm this, because, first, it is a shame for the family and, second, in many cases the authorities force them to kill their relatives who are suspected of being gay. And family members who have committed an honor killing will not want to talk about it. They don’t want to testify against themselves or implicate their family further. [...]

In the beginning, the Kremlin simply did not believe that such a thing could happen. They asked for confirmation. We at Novaya Gazeta were asked to provide information through the Russian human-rights ombudsman. We were guaranteed that the confidentiality of victims would be preserved, that their names would not end up anywhere. Officials in the Kremlin wanted to understand how serious the situation is, and whether or not we, in fact, have data on the dead and the number of detainees. When they demanded this information from us, I began to understand that, in general, the Kremlin does not quite understand what is happening in Chechnya and, again, in principle, they do not believe the facts of the anti-gay campaign. The first statements of officials in Moscow showed this: they said it was nonsense, it cannot be, it’s unbelievable.

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Vox: Ramzan Kadyrov: brutal tyrant, Instagram star

The New York Times: Angela Merkel Presses Vladimir Putin on Treatment of Gays and Jehovah’s Witnesses

Ms. Merkel said she had talked to Mr. Putin about her concerns on civil rights in Russia, including, among other issues, the persecution of gay men, a new ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses and the arrests of anti-Kremlin protesters. [...]

“I also spoke about the very negative report about what is happening to homosexuals in Chechnya and asked Mr. President to exert his influence to ensure that minorities’ rights are protected,” she added. He hosted her at his residence in Sochi, her first visit to Russia since May 2015. [...]

In Germany, the talks are important for the chancellor as she faces a difficult race for a fourth term in elections scheduled for Sept. 24. Gay rights protesters had engaged in a 48-hour vigil outside Ms. Merkel’s office, demanding that she bring up the issue of gay men in Chechnya. [...]

The official reason for the visit on Tuesday was the agenda of the Group of 20 summit meeting in July in Hamburg, Germany, where Ms. Merkel will be the host. It will probably be the first face-to-face encounter between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin.

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The New York Times: Chechen Authorities Arresting and Killing Gay Men, Russian Paper Says

On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men.

While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir V. Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale. [...]

By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings. [...]

“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.

“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.

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Deutsche Welle: Chechens waiting at Europe’s door

Brest is the most significant junction on the border between Belarus and Poland. The city once served as the western gateway to the Soviet Union. All manner of smuggled goods used to pass the checkpoint here, in both directions.

Now, it's refugees that attempt to cross this checkpoint on the EU's external border. According to Polish and Belarusian media, as many as 2,000 Chechens were gathered here waiting to enter the EU during the summer months. It's December now, and there are still many Chechen migrants milling about the train station. [...]

n the meantime, Poland's ombudsman for civil rights as well as Polish human rights groups have started looking more closely at the behavior of the Polish authorities. Their reports state that, as a rule, only two or three families are permitted to file an application for asylum, even if others also declare their desire to do the same. Around 90 percent of arrivals in Terespol are sent back.

By the end of October this year, some 6,573 Chechens had applied for asylum in Terespol. Several hundred other applications were registered in different towns in Poland. These numbers from the authorities are not much higher than the numbers in the past year. That's despite a much higher number of migrants who were denied entrance in Terespol, from around 19,000 in 2015 to more than 78,000 this year. Many of those sent back are Chechens.

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The New York Times: What Russia After Putin?

The map of post-Putin Russia might undergo other changes. The country inherited a complicated federal structure from the Soviet Union: It contains 83 republics, regions and administrative districts — or 85, according to Russian law, including annexed Crimea, which alone counts for two — all of them with different formal rights relative to the government in Moscow. Since Mr. Putin took power in 1999, members of the Russian Federation have lost most of their autonomy: They can no longer elect their governors, and they control only a tiny portion of the taxes collected on their territories. But even as Moscow has exerted ever-greater control, the centrifugal pull on the regions has increased.

Parts of the Far East have forged stronger economic ties with China and South Korea, and Moscow has had to expend both brutal force and extravagant investment to keep Chechnya and other republics of the North Caucasus in line. Participants in October’s Free Russia Forum generally took it as a given that in the event of regime change, Moscow’s relationship with the other 82 regions will have to be renegotiated — and that the chances of those negotiations being peaceful, and of Russia retaining its current borders, were slim. [...]

The transition will require a wide-ranging public discussion. But what will be the language of a post-Putin Russia? That is, where will the Russian words for a new country be found? Key concepts have been distorted by misuse and discredited by decades of Soviet and then Putin-era propaganda. “Democrat” has become an insult; “freedom of speech” is invoked to legitimize hate speech even while people are being jailed for expressing their political views. The corruption of language reflects a general lack of trust in democratic mechanisms and widespread dismissal of democratic values.

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Deutsche Welle: Why are some people attracted to Jihad?

It differs from country to country. It depends on the minority groups and the country's migration history. For example, if you see Austria's foreign fighters, these are people who came from Chechnya or from the former Yugoslav republic. When you look at Belgium and France, we see Moroccans and Algerians. In Holland, it's mostly Moroccan and when you look at the British situation, you would find a lot of Pakistanis and Afghans. [...]

Sometimes it also has to do with very practical things. We have had examples of people who stayed there for three months in a row and came back because otherwise their tourist visa to Turkey would become invalid. Sometimes people are hurt and need some major medical treatment. And we've also had people who came back because of disillusionment, because they didn't feel at home there. A lack of Western standards of comfort is also a factor for a lot of people. [...]

Some people go back to their normal lives. Some of them come back with post-traumatic disorders and live a marginalized life afterwards. And finally, we have people who come back and use the skills they learned in Syria for criminal purposes. For example, people who were good with weapons have a high tendency towards violence when they return.

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Deutsche Welle: Protests against the Kadyrov Bridge in St. Petersburg

The protests were triggered by plans to name a city bridge after the former president of the Russian Republic of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov. The responsible city commission gave its approval to the initiative in late May, and a city government representative said that the body sought to "extend the hand of friendship to the Chechen people." [...]

The prospect of the bridge being named after Kadyrov has been causing fights for weeks. Activists have been collecting petition signatures since the idea became public and hope to persuade regional Governor Georgy Poltavchenko to block the plan. In a matter of days, they had collected more than 70,000 signatures for the online petition. Director Alexander Sokurov, who won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, was among those who signed it. The liberal opposition party Yabloko, which has a large following in St. Petersburg, intends to push for a referendum on the issue. [...]

The activists' case against the "Kadyrov Bridge" is not necessarily a lost cause. About ten years ago, citizens won a major victory against an even mightier opponent: the energy giant Gazprom. The company wanted to build a skyscraper in the middle of St. Petersburg, yet after much protest, it was forced to find a new site - away from the historic city center. "When we took up the fight against the Gazprom Tower, everyone told us it was already a done deal," recalls the independent city council member Olga Galkina. Now she is collecting signatures against the Kadyrov Bridge. "We won then, and we will win again this time."

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