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RIGA, Latvia — A prominent Russian investigative journalist and a human rights lawyer were brutally beaten as they headed to a court in Russia’s Chechnya republic to attend the high-profile trial of Zarema Musayeva, the mother of exiled opposition activists who challenged the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov.
Yelena Milashina, the journalist, has reported for years on Chechnya, the region in the Caucasus where Russia fought two wars, and that is now tightly controlled by Kadyrov, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s. Milashina investigated human rights abuses including the torture and killing of gay men, the persecution of dissenters and the killing of other reporters.
Milashina, along with Musayeva’s lawyer Alexander Nemov, were on the way to the court from the airport in Grozny, the Chechen capital, when another vehicle blocked their car early Tuesday. A group of masked men severely beat them, destroyed their equipment and threatened to shoot them, rights groups and Milashina’s employer, Novaya Gazeta, said.
“Milashina’s fingers have been broken, and she is sometimes losing consciousness. She has bruises all over her body,” the Memorial human rights center said. “When they were beaten, they were told: ‘You have been warned. Get out of here and don’t write anything.’”
In a photo posted by another activist, Sergei Babinets, Milashina was shown with most of her hair shaved off in uneven patches, her hands and one arm heavily bandaged, and her face and scalp covered in a green substance usually used as antiseptic but harmful when it comes in contact with eyes. A picture of Nemov’s injured leg showed bruising and what appeared to be a knife wound. Tass, the state news agency, reported that the pair were likely to be evacuated to Moscow on Tuesday evening because of the severity of their injuries.
“This was a classic kidnapping, the way it used to be,” Milashina told the Chechen human rights ombudsman Mansur Soltaev as she lay on a hospital gurney, according to a posted by Novaya Gazeta. “It just hasn’t happened in a long time. They threw the taxi driver out of his car, climbed in, bent our heads, tied my hands, put us on our knees, and put gun to the head. Somehow they did everything nervously; they didn’t even manage to tie [our] hands properly.”
Musayeva, whose trial Milashina was supposed to cover, is the mother of opposition activists Abubakar and Ibragim Yangulbaev. Musayeva also is the wife of former federal judge Saidi Yangulbaev. Chechen authorities accused the sons of conducting “extremist activity” over alleged links to the Telegram channel 1ADAT, which is highly critical of Kadyrov. Russian authorities banned 1ADAT after labeling it an extremist organization.
In early 2022, shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, Chechen police raided Musayeva’s apartment in Nizhny Novgorod, a city about 250 miles east of Moscow, and forcibly took her to Grozny, the Chechen capital, for interrogation. Her family called it an abduction.
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Threats against family members are a tactic commonly used by Chechen law enforcement to put pressure on Kadyrov’s critics and detractors. Musayeva’s detention made headlines, but Kadyrov doubled down on public threats to the family.
“A place either in prison or below the ground awaits this family,” Kadyrov wrote on his Telegram blog at the time. “And it doesn’t depend on me anymore. I know the mood in society. As long as at least one Chechen is alive, the members of this family will no longer be able to freely enjoy life; the honor of every representative of our people is so deeply hurt.” He added, “Always remember this, Yangulbaevs.”
Kadyrov’s close confidant Adam Delimkhanov went a step further, threatening to “rip off heads … over blood feud” in a live stream on Instagram.
The Yangulbaevs then fled the country. According to Kadyrov, Musayeva was taken to Grozny on Jan. 21, where she allegedly “attacked a police officer and almost took his eye,” and criminal charges were later brought against her. According to Babinets, a lawyer and activist associated with the Russian organization the Crew Against Torture, formerly the Committee Against Torture, Musayeva lost consciousness after she was detained.
At the time, Kadyrov also called Milashina “a terrorist who makes a buck on the Chechen topic, making up scenarios and whispering words and behaviors into the ears of their characters,” and he urged law enforcement to arrest her.
Musayeva spent nearly a year and a half in a detention center. Her defense team repeatedly pleaded for her to be moved to house arrest because of her poor health; she is in her late 50s, has diabetes and requires insulin injections.
In January, Abubakar Yangulbaev pleaded with Kadyrov to release his mother and take him in her place.
“My mother’s health is deteriorating, it’s hard for her to be in captivity, and she shouldn’t be there and shouldn’t bear responsibility for the actions of her sons,” he said in a address. “And if laws don’t work in Russia and Chechnya, there are only rules of war, so let’s exchange her for me.”
On Tuesday, Musayeva was sentenced to 5½ years in prison. Nemov, her lawyer, was not able to attend the hearing because of his injuries. The court refused to postpone the hearing, the Russian outlet Mediazona reported.
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The Kremlin said that Putin had been informed of the attack and that the episode was being checked by Russia’s commissioner for human rights, Tatyana Moskalkova.
“She has appealed to the Investigative Committee and the prosecutor’s offices of the republic,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “The law enforcement needs to evaluate this, but, of course, we are talking about a very serious attack that requires active measures.”
The Chechen ombudsman Soltaev described the attack in part as “a diversion.”
“It was a daring, subversive provocation against the republic. I think the internal affairs authorities will figure it out; we will monitor the situation,” Soltaev told the state news agency RIA Novosti.
“An attack on a journalist and a lawyer in Chechnya requires a tough response from law enforcement agencies,” said the senior Russian lawmaker Andrei Klishas.
Reacting Tuesday evening to the attack, Kadyrov said on Telegram that he “gave the order to relevant authorities to make every effort to identify the attackers.”
“We’ll figure this out,” he said.
This is at least the third known attack on Milashina. In 2006, she was attacked in Beslan, the capital of the Russian republic of North Ossetia-Alania, and in 2021, she was beaten in Balashikha, a city in the Moscow region. After Kadyrov’s threatening statements last year, she temporarily left Russia.
Six journalists with Novaya Gazeta, which cemented itself as the go-to publication of Russia’s liberal intelligentsia during the heyday of independent journalism in the 1990s, have been killed in three decades. They included Anna Politkovskaya, who covered the wars in Chechnya. In 2014, eight years after her death, a Russian court sent the hit men to prison, but it is still unclear who ordered or paid for the killing.
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Novaya suspended publication after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 because laws that Russia adopted late last year essentially outlawed critical coverage.
Novaya Gazeta’s editor, Dmitry Muratov, was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Philippine journalist Maria Ressa. Milashina received an International Women of Courage award that was presented by first lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry in 2013. Reporters Without Borders, an international advocacy group for journalists, said Tuesday that it was “horrified by the savage attack” in Grozny.
Memorial, the human rights organization, said the attack as well as previous public threats to reporters and activists in the region showed the “complete impunity of the authorities of the Chechen Republic.”
“There is no doubt that the attack on Milashina and Nemov was carried out by agents of the authorities to bar them from being present at the trial, and, more broadly, to intimidate the journalistic, lawyers and human rights communities,” Memorial said in a Telegram post.
The International Memorial Society, known as Memorial, and which is Russia’s most prominent human rights organization, was liquidated by the Russian Supreme Court in late 2021.
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