Putin’s crackdown on ‘traitors’ spreads
Recent arrests by Kremlin include physicist, hockey player, university rector
The flurry of arrests across Russia in recent days has signaled that the Kremlin is intent on tightening the noose around Russian society even further.
Agents came for Dmitry Kolker, an ailing physicist; Ivan Fedotov, a hockey player; and Vladimir Mau, a state university rector.
It appears to be a manifestation of President Vladimir Putin’s declaration in the early weeks of his war in Ukraine that Russia needed to cleanse itself of pro-Western “scum and traitors.”
None of the targets of the recent crackdown was an outspoken Kremlin critic.
Kolker, the physicist, entered the hospital in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk last week for treatment for late-stage cancer. The next day, Federal Security Service agents arrived and, accusing him of treason, flew him to a Moscow jail. Over the weekend, he died in custody.
It was unclear why the agency targeted Kolker, 54, a specialist in quantum optics.
State media reported that he had been jailed on suspicion of passing secrets abroad. But critics of the Kremlin say it is part of a campaign by the Federal Security Service to crack down on freedom of thought in academia.
It came at the same time as the arrest on fraud charges of Mau, an economist who is the head of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
Mau, 62, joined more than 300 senior academic officials in signing a March open letter calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “necessary decision,” and he was reelected to the board of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, just last week. But he also had a reputation as someone who was working within Putin’s system to try to nudge it in a more open and pro-Western direction.
Putin, in a March speech in which he railed about the traitors in Russia’s midst, called out those who physically reside in Russia but live in the West “in their thoughts, in their slave-like consciousness.”
He is also increasingly asserting that truly patriotic Russians must be committed to living and working in Russia.
In that context, the news that Fedotov, the goalie of Russia’s silver-medal national hockey team at the Beijing Olympics in February, signed a contract in May with the Philadelphia Flyers was likely to have been seen as a challenge.
Fedotov, 25, was planning to leave for the United States this month, according to Russian media reports.
Instead, on Friday, as he was leaving a practice session in St. Petersburg, he was stopped by a group of men and taken away in a van, according to a television journalist who was filming a special report about him.
Fedotov’s alleged crime, according to Russian news agencies: evading military service. Russian men under 27 are required to serve for one year. On Monday, the RIA Novosti state news agency reported that Fedotov had been taken to an unnamed Russian navy training base.