Beware Contesting Mr. Putin
Prison sentences of up to four years were handed down in a Russian courtroom, involving seven anti-Putin protesters. It is an offence of unbridgeable proportions to publicly protest against the ongoing rule of a president who changed the constitution to enable himself to stand for re-election as long as he feels that the country should be headed fortuitously by the single individual who embodies all the characteristics of a classical Russian dictator. |
Evgeny Feldman
February 24, 2014 1:51 PM
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And Russians, by and large, appear to agree with him. Apart from the riff-raff that do not. And they, through their dissent, set themselves up for institutional punishment in a society that is not free to express themselves as they believe they are entitled to do. For the simple truth is, in President Putin's Russia, they are most definitely not entitled to disrupt the peaceful reality of accepting his authoritarian presence as just and needful.
Take the case of 22-year-old student, Yaroslav Belousov who believes he knows a lemon when he sees one. And he thinks that Russia has a huge lemon in Vladimir Putin. He would dearly love to exchange that lemon for a peach of a president who respects human rights and democratic freedoms. He was among 28 people rounded up during a 2012 protest when Vladimir Putin was re-elected for his third round at the presidency, and more to come.
Police had restricted access to Bolotnaya Square, not far from the Kremlin. Which is where the protesters, across the river from the Kremlin had received permission to gather. On Monday, protest supporters gathered outside the courtroom in condemnation of the trial, courting their own arrest in so doing. They are not too enthralled by the Kremlin's opposition bashing since Putin assumed supreme power in his third and most impressively entitled presidential reign.
Moscow police declared they had detained 420 of about 500 demonstrators. About 200 people were detailed by the police outside of the courthouse. Some had been released, then detained again later when they held an unsanctioned rally outside the Kremlin. Lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky decried the harsh sentence for his client, Yaroslav Belousov, of two and a half years, presumably for violent assault.
His crime was characterized as a violent assault against police in 2012, during the presidential protest. Two videos that were aired at the trial show Belousov picking up a small yellow object. He tossed it into the crowd. Prosecutors insisted it was a billiard ball. The policeman who claimed to have been hurt when it hit him was proven to have left the site just before it was tossed. Mr. Belousov insists that the "unidentified yellow object of spherical shape" thrown at riot police was just a lemon.
All of which proves that anyone who symbolically demonstrates contempt and disrespect for the Russian president and the police who support him would be better off playing billiards because lemons can be miraculously turned into virtual weapons, just like nations' saviours turn into tyrants.
Labels: Controversy, Crime, Justice, Propaganda, Russia
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, February 26, 2014
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