News of the Day: 10 November 2021

The Moscow Times: Russia on Wednesday confirmed 38,058 Covid-19 infections and a new pandemic record of 1,239 deaths.

RFE/RL: The Russian human rights group Gulagu.net has released new videos purportedly showing instances of torture and rape in a prison hospital in the city of Saratov. The group said the clips published on YouTube on November 9 had been recorded in the OTB-1 tuberculosis infirmary between July 2015 and September 2020. The nine videos appear to show instances of anal and oral rape allegedly recorded in the infirmary. Seven of them have dates on them.

The Moscow Times: A prominent NGO that tracks abuses in Russia’s prison system has released a new leaked video that shows inmates being sexually assaulted in a notorious prison hospital at the heart of a national torture scandal.

The Moscow Times: Russian prosecutors on Wednesday dismissed the criminal case against a former prison inmate who leaked videos of torture inside a Russian jail and is now seeking asylum in France. Last month, the Gulagu.net NGO published footage of abuse at a prison in the central city of Saratov. The videos were leaked by Sergei Savelyev — a Belarus national who had served time there for drug trafficking. 

RFE/RL: The former head of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s support group in Russia’s Bashkortostan region has been placed in pretrial detention on extremism charges. The Kirov district court in Bashkortostan’s capital, Ufa, ruled on November 10 that Lilia Chanysheva must remain in pretrial detention in Moscow until at least January 9.

Human Rights in Ukraine: Muslim Aliev is one of at least two Crimean Tatar political prisoners who are almost permanently held in the appalling conditions of a Russian punishment cell [SHIZO].  Aliev has been recognized by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience due to the lack of any grounds for the 19-year sentence passed by a Russian court, and it seems safe to assume that these extra ‘punishments’ are equally unwarranted.

RFE/RL: In a far northeastern corner of Yakutia, about 1,600 kilometers from Yakutsk, ecologist Sergei Zimov and his son Nikita have created what they call Pleistocene Park. They have turned a 145-square-kilometer plot of land into an experiment in reversing the effects of climate change. To halt the thawing of permafrost, they are repopulating the area with wild animals.

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