By Mark Trevelyan
LONDON (Reuters) – On the last day of January, a woman took her son to pediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova at outpatient clinic No. 140 in northwest Moscow. The boy, seven years old, had a problem with one of his eyes.
The conversation, which the boy's mother said took place during an 18-minute meeting at the clinic, would change the lives of both women and land the 68-year-old doctor in prison.
The case revolved around an indictment – part of a rising trend of Russians informing their fellow citizens about their views on the war in Ukraine and other alleged political crimes. Critics say the wave of indictments is helping President Vladimir Putin's government crack down on dissent.
In a video recorded as she walked away from the clinic, the mother, Anastasia Akinshina, said she told the doctor that the boy was traumatized because his father was killed fighting for Russia in the war in Ukraine.
“You know what she told me? 'Well, my dear, what do you expect? Your husband was a legitimate target of Ukraine,'” Akinshina said, mimicking the doctor's voice and intonation.
Fighting back tears, Akinshina said she had discussed the incident with hospital management and suspected they planned to hush it up.
“So the question is, where can I complain about this bitch now so she gets kicked out of the damn country or sent to the devil in jail?” she said in the video, which went viral on social media and landed her as the prosecution's key witness in a high-profile criminal trial.
During the trial, Buyanova denied making this comment. But despite a lack of further adult witnesses, the indictment was enough to destroy her 40-year medical career and her life.
The doctor, who had been in pre-trial detention since April, appeared in court in Moscow on Tuesday, with short-cropped gray hair. She was found guilty under a wartime censorship law of “publicly spreading deliberately false information” about the armed forces and sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
Buyanova was born in Ukraine, but has Russian nationality, where she has lived and worked for thirty years. Her lawyer Oscar Cherdzhiyev told Reuters the defense was convinced Akinshina acted out of malice because of the doctor's Ukrainian heritage.
Akinshina did not respond to written questions for this story and did not answer her phone.
During the trial she stated: “We are Russian. Buyanova hates Russians. She feels hostility towards me, that's what I think,” according to a transcript from the independent Russian outlet Mediazona.
Two hospital workers who saw Akinshina after the consultation with Buyanova described her as distraught.
The prosecution's case was based almost entirely on Akinshina's story, along with a transcript read at the trial of an interview with the child conducted by an FSB security service officer. Initially, Akinshina said the boy was not in the room when the comments were made, but later changed her story and told the court she was initially in shock.
The judge rejected the defense's request to ask the child its own questions.
Russian rights group OVD-Info has registered 21 criminal charges in politically motivated cases based on indictments since the launch of Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Eva Levenberg, a lawyer with the group, told Reuters.
Levenberg, who lives in Germany, said OVD-Info was aware of another 175 people facing lesser administrative charges for “discrediting” the Russian military as a result of people targeting them during the same period informed. received a fine.
Reuters could not independently confirm the figures Levenberg provided.
The Russian Justice Ministry did not respond to requests for comment on the data or use of charges to support prosecutions, including in the Buyanova case. In response to a question from Reuters, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin does not comment on court rulings.
'Foam and traitors'
Putin has said the country is in a proxy war with the West, and citizens must help root out internal enemies. In March 2022, weeks after the invasion, he stated that the Russian people “will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and traitors, and will simply spit them out like a mosquito that accidentally flies into their mouth. “
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, authorities have detained more than 20,000 people for various forms of anti-war statements or protests, according to OVD-Info, and have initiated criminal cases against 1,094 individuals.
News reports, lawsuits and on social media have revealed examples of neighbors inquiring about neighbors, churchgoers denouncing priests and students reporting on teachers.
For some, the resulting current climate is reminiscent of the atmosphere of mutual distrust and suspicion under communist Soviet rule.
Olga Podolskaya is a former municipal secretary for the Tula region, south of Moscow, who says she has built a “nasty” reputation as an independent local politician willing to stand up to authorities. In the first hours after the invasion of Ukraine, she added her signature to an open letter describing it as “an unprecedented atrocity” and urging citizens to speak out against it.
Four months later, she was the subject of a public indictment calling for an investigation into her finances after she raised public donations to pay off a fine related to a 2020 protest. The indictment was filed under the name ” Olga Minenkova,” but Podolskaya said such a person has never been identified, and she suspects the identity was fake. Reuters has seen a copy of the complaint but was unable to determine who filed it.
Further public accusations against her and her husband followed. When asked how she felt at the time, Podolskaya said it reminded her of her great-grandfather, who was executed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1938 after someone informed against him.
“The time of denunciations and 'enemies of the people' had returned. I realized that they were suggesting that I leave the country,” Podolskaya said.
She left in April 2023. In September of that year, she was placed on the Justice Department's public list of “foreign agents.” To protect her safety, she has asked Reuters not to reveal her current location.
“FROM A SUCCESSFUL ERA”
Doctor Andrei Prokofiev was targeted in 2023 by a prolific informant named Anna Korobkova, who wrote to his employer demanding he be fired over anti-war comments he made to a foreign news channel.
Korobkova did not respond to a request for comment.
In a letter last year to Alexandra Arkhipova, a sociologist who was the target of one of her charges, Korobkova said that informing was “in her blood” as her grandfather had collaborated with Stalin's secret police. Arkhipova posted the letter on Telegram.
Korobkova said she sent 764 denunciations to government agencies in the first year of the war alone, targeting Russians speaking to foreign media. She compared her work to “using submarines to destroy enemy ships”.
Reuters could not confirm the size or impact of its activities.
Prokofiev told Reuters he faced no consequences as he lives in Germany. But he is afraid to go back to Russia: “I don't think I would leave the airport. They would immediately start a criminal case.”
Prokofiev took a special interest in Buyanova's case because his son was one of her patients when he lived in Russia. He describes her as a quiet, unassuming person – “an older figure from a bygone era” who tapped clumsily on her computer with just one or two fingers.
There has been some resistance to her trial. Prokofiev was one of a total of 1,035 doctors who expressed solidarity with Buyanova in an open letter, warning that the case would discourage young people from entering medicine. Some doctors showed up in their scrubs and spoke out in a video compilation posted to Facebook.
Alexander Polupan, the doctor behind the Buyanova initiative and letters in support of dissidents including the late Alexei Navalny, said at least seven medics were questioned by police after signing them. Reuters could not verify those interrogations and the Russian Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Polupan himself left Russia last year, “when it became clear that I would be arrested every day,” he told Reuters.
Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the prosecution of an elderly defendant from a respected profession sends a message that no one can afford to toe the official line against Ukraine to defy.
Even if Buyanova had said that Russian soldiers on the battlefield were legitimate targets for Ukraine, this claim would be correct under international law, Deber said.
“Those are the Geneva Conventions,” she added.
International law of war permits the use of lethal force against clearly identified enemy combatants in certain situations.
During the trial, prosecutors provided details about messages and images on Buyanova's cell phone that were not related to the dispute with Akinshina, but were used to display a photo of someone with pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian views.
The defense said someone else had used the device and the messages were not from her.
In her final speech at the summary, the doctor was in tears. She asked the court to take her age, fragile health and decades of employment into account.
Supporters in T-shirts printed with Buyanova's modest image shouted “shame” at the conviction.
Before the verdict was read, Buyanova was shocked at what happened.
“I can't ignore it,” she told reporters. “Maybe I'll do that later.”
(Additional reporting by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)
