San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mass arrests overwhelm Moscow jails
MOSCOW — The video, shot by a man detained in a Moscow protest, shows a group of people jammed into a police minibus. One of them says on the recording that they had already been held there for nine hours, with some forced to stand because of overcrowding and no access to food, water or bathrooms.
Another video taken in a dingy holding cell intended for eight inmates shows 28 men crammed inside awaiting transfer, with no mattresses on the cots and a filthy pit toilet.
Detainees are recounting their miserable experiences as Moscow jails were overwhelmed following mass arrests from protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny last week. They described long waits to be processed through the legal system and crowded conditions with few coronavirus precautions.
“We were detained on Jan. 31 during a peaceful protest, and we ask for help and public attention to the inhumane conditions we’re forced to be in,” pleads the man in the police minibus video. The video was first posted Tuesday on the messaging app Telegram by Sasha Fishman, who received it from her friend Dmitry Yepishin, one of the detainees in the vehicle.
More than 11,000 protesters were reported detained across Russia in the proNavalny rallies on two straight weekends last month and in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Tuesday, after he was ordered by court to serve nearly three years in prison.
Some of the protesters were beaten on the streets by riot police or subjected to other abuse. Human rights advocates said many police precincts refused to let lawyers in to help detainees.
“Many violations (of detainees’ rights) we’ve seen before. But probably the scale we see now is much scarier than before,” said Alexandra Bayeva, coordinator with the OVDInfo rights group that monitors political arrests.
The capital’s jails quickly filled up as scores of people were sentenced by the courts. The news outlet Meduza cited court data saying 972 people have been handed jail terms in Moscow on misdemeanor charges in connection with the protests, and the number is likely to grow. Moscow courts have so far adjudicated less than half of 4,908 protestrelated misdemeanor cases filed between Jan. 23 and Feb. 2.
Many misdemeanor charges resulted in jail terms of five to 15 days.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged there were more detainees than detention centers in Moscow could swiftly process, but he blamed the problem on the protesters themselves.
“This situation wasn’t provoked by law enforcement; it was provoked by participants of unauthorized rallies,” Peskov said.
Marina Litvinovich, member of the Public Monitoring Commission that observes the treatment of prisoners and detainees, said Moscow simply could not handle such an influx.
“The first crisis occurred when police vans and buses (with detainees) were driving around Moscow anxiously and jails didn’t let them in. They didn’t know where to put people,” Litvinovich said. “Some people were brought back to police precincts. Some were standing the whole day inside police vans near the jails. Some got lucky and they were given food and taken to toilets. Some didn’t have luck and they had to pee in a bottle.”
Filipp Kuznetsov was arrested Jan. 23 and sentenced to 10 days in jail but didn’t get into his jail cell until Jan. 27. Kuznetsov said he spent the first night in a holding cell, and the second night in a police bus waiting for the detention center to accommodate him and about a dozen others.
“It was a very unpleasant situation,” Kuznetsov said.
As jails in Moscow filled, authorities moved people to at least five detention centers outside the capital.