Journalist's suicide: Moscow also to blame?
Irina Slavina, editor-in-chief of the independent Russian news website Koza.Press, has died after setting herself on fire outside the police headquarters in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. The day before all the editorial equipment of the news outlet, which had already been sanctioned several times, had been confiscated. Slavina left a message saying that the Russian Federation was responsible for her death. Commentators say there is certainly some truth to this.
The people are letting the authorities do as they please
In a Facebook post republished by newsru.com, journalist Andrei Nikulin laments the apathy of the Russian people regarding the arbitrariness of their state organs:
“The hundred people who took to the streets to bid farewell to Irina are just a drop in the ocean in a city of millions. The people for whom she fought and wrote won't even find out what happened. They live in their own world. ... This year there has been a break with previous years: neither the attempted assassination of Navalny, nor the absurd voting campaign to change the constitution, nor the state's blunders in the fight against the virus have provoked a significant reaction. Society has sunk into apathy and is isolating itself - much to the delight of the Kremlin gang. It can do whatever it pleases - and is doing it.”
Raids by the state must not be the norm
The Russian state is abusing its monopoly on the use of force, economics professor Maxim Mironov complains in Echo of Moscow:
“Slavina was only a WITNESS in a trial, but at 6 a.m. they came to search the house, began to saw open the door and then carried all the technology and notepads away even though not a single object with any connection to the case was found. ... We've all grown used to these groundless dawn raids in which everything is confiscated. ... It happens constantly, daily even. ... With her action Slavina has shown that this normality to which we have become accustomed is not normal. The state has a right to use brute force, but it must not use it unjustly.”