by Mark Trevelyan

LONDON (Reuters) – On the last day of January, a woman took her son to see pediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova at polyclinic 140 in northwest Moscow. The seven-year-old boy had a problem with one of his eyes.

The conversation, which the child’s mother claimed took place during an 18-minute encounter at the clinic, would both change the lives of women and cause the 68-year-old doctor to go to prison.

The case was based on a tip that was part of a growing trend of Russians informing their citizens about their views on the war in Ukraine and other alleged political crimes. Critics say the wave of accusations is helping President Vladimir Putin’s government suppress dissent.

In a video recorded as she was walking away from the clinic, mother Anastasia Akinshina said she told the doctor that her child was traumatized because his father was killed while fighting for Russia in the war in Ukraine.

“Do you know what he said to me? ‘Well, dear, what are you waiting for? Your husband was a legitimate target of Ukraine,'” Akinshina said, imitating the doctor’s voice and intonation.

Akinshina, resisting tears, said that she conveyed the incident to the hospital management and suspected that they were planning to cover up the issue.

“So the question is: Where can I file a complaint against this bitch now so she can be kicked out of the damn country or sent to hell?” He said this in the video that went viral on social media and landed him in a high-profile criminal case as the prosecution’s key witness.

At the hearing, Buyanova denied making the comment. But even without more adult witnesses, the tip was enough to ruin his 40-year medical career and his life.

The doctor, who has been in pre-trial detention since April, appeared in a Moscow court on Tuesday, his gray hair cut short. He was found guilty of “deliberately disseminating false information to the public” about the armed forces under the wartime censorship act and was sentenced to five and a half years in a penal colony.

Buyanova was born in Ukraine but is a citizen of Russia, where she has lived and worked for thirty years. His lawyer, Oscar Cherdzhiyev, told Reuters that the defense believed Akinshina acted with malicious intent because the doctor was of Ukrainian origin.

Akinshina did not respond to written questions for this story or return her phone.

According to a transcript of the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona, he said at the hearing: “We are Russians. Buyanova hates Russians. She feels hostility towards me, and I think so too.”

Two hospital staff who saw Akinshina after meeting with Buyanova stated that she was distraught as evidence.

The prosecution’s case was based almost entirely on Akinshina’s testimony and a transcript read at the hearing of an interview with the boy by an officer from the FSB security service. Akinshina initially said the child was not in the room when the comments were made, but later changed her story and told the court she had initially spoken in a state of shock.

The judge denied the defense’s request to ask the boy his own questions.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, 21 criminal prosecutions have been recorded in politically motivated cases based on accusations, Eva Levenberg, a lawyer for Russian rights group OVD-Info, told Reuters.

Levenberg, who lives in Germany, said OVD-Info knew of another 175 people who faced lower-level administrative charges for “discrediting” the Russian army as a result of people giving information about themselves during the same period, and 79 of them faced these charges . He was fined.

Reuters could not independently verify the figures provided by Levenberg.

Russia’s Ministry of Justice did not respond to requests for comment on the data, including the Buyanova case, or the use of the accusations to support investigations. Responding to a question from Reuters, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Kremlin does not comment on court decisions.

‘BASTARDS AND TRAITORS’

Putin said the country was in a proxy war with the West and citizens should help root out internal enemies. In March 2022, weeks after the invasion, he declared that the Russian people “will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and spit them out like a mosquito that accidentally got into their mouth.”

According to OVD-Info, since the beginning of the Ukrainian war, authorities have detained more than 20,000 people and opened criminal cases against 1,094 people for various anti-war statements or protests.

Instances of neighbors reporting neighbors, churchgoers blaming priests, and students reporting teachers have come to light in the news, lawsuits, and social media.

For some, the current environment is reminiscent of the atmosphere of mutual distrust and suspicion under Soviet Communist rule.

Olga Podolskaya is a former municipal deputy for the Tula region south of Moscow and, by her own account, has an “annoying” reputation as an independent local politician ready to oppose the authorities. In the first hours after the invasion of Ukraine, he signed an open letter describing it as “unprecedented brutality” and urging citizens to speak out against it.

Four months later, after collecting public donations to pay a fine related to a 2020 protest, he was the subject of a public notice calling for an investigation into his finances. The tip was made under the name “Olga Minenkova”, but Podolskaya said no such person had been identified and she suspected the ID was fake. Reuters saw a copy of the notice but was unable to identify who made it.

Other public accusations followed against her and her husband. When asked how she felt at the time, Podolskaya said it reminded her of her great-grandfather, who was executed in 1938 under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin after someone tipped off against him.

“The time of denunciations and ‘enemies of the people’ was back. I realized that they were implying that I should leave the country,” Podolskaya said. he said.

He left in April 2023. In September of the same year, he was placed on the Ministry of Justice’s public “foreign agent” list. He asked Reuters not to reveal his current whereabouts to protect his safety.

“FROM A PAST ERA”

Doctor Andrei Prokofiev was targeted in 2023 by a prolific whistleblower named Anna Korobkova, who wrote a letter to his employer demanding he be fired for anti-war comments he made to a foreign news outlet.

Korobkova did not respond to a request for comment.

In a letter last year to sociologist Alexandra Arkhipova, the target of one of her denunciations, Korobkova said debriefing was “in her blood” because her grandfather worked in Stalin’s NKVD secret police. Arkhipova published the letter on Telegram.

Korobkova said that in the first year of the war alone, she made 764 denunciations to state institutions, focusing on Russians speaking to foreign media. He likened his work to “using submarines to destroy enemy ships.”

Reuters was unable to verify the scope or impact of his activity.

Prokofiev told Reuters that he did not face any negativity because he lived in Germany. But he is afraid to return to Russia: “I don’t think I can leave the airport. They will immediately start a criminal case.”

Prokofiev took a special interest in Buyanova’s case because her son was one of her patients when she lived in Russia. He describes him as a quiet, unassuming person – “an elderly figure from a bygone age” who clumsily taps his computer with only one or two fingers.

There was some backlash against his trial. Prokofiev was among a total of 1,035 doctors who declared solidarity with Buyanova in an open letter, warning that the case would deter young people from turning to medicine. Some of the doctors, wearing scrubs, spoke in a video compilation posted on Facebook.

Alexander Polupan, the doctor behind the Buyanova initiative and letters supporting dissidents including the late Alexei Navalny, said at least seven medics were questioned by police after signing them. Reuters was unable to confirm those inquiries, and Russia’s interior ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Polupan left Russia last year “when it became clear that I would be arrested at any moment”, he told Reuters.

Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia Division at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the trial of an elderly defendant from a respected profession signals that no one can afford to go against the official line on Ukraine.

Denber said that even if Buyanova said that Russian soldiers on the battlefield were legitimate targets for Ukraine, this claim would be correct under international law.

“This is the Geneva Conventions,” he added.

International law governing warfare permits the use of lethal force against clearly identified enemy combatants in certain circumstances.

At the hearing, prosecutors gave details of messages and images on Buyanova’s mobile phone that were not related to the dispute with Akinshina but were used to present a photo of someone with pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian views.

The defense said that someone else was using the device and the messages were not his.

In his final speech during the recapitulation, the doctor burst into tears. He asked the court to consider his age, fragile health and decades of service.

Fans wearing T-shirts with Buyanova’s humble photo shouted “shame” at the penalty.

Before the verdict was read, Buyanova expressed her surprise at what happened.

“I can’t get my head around it,” he told reporters. “Maybe I’ll do it later.”

(Additional reporting by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)