Russia has a deplorable rights record, starting with Kremlin flunkies or supporters bullying, attacking or even killing political opponents, ethnic and religious minorities, and gays.
Unfortunately for its neighbors, when Russia meddles in their affairs, it also exports its human-rights abuses to their territory.
An example is Armenian lawmakers’ introduction last August of legislation based on a Russian law that prohibits dissemination of information about “non-traditional sexual relations.” Armenia scrapped its so-called gay-propaganda bill in the face of domestic and international condemnation.
But the fact that our government introduced it at all is indisputable evidence of Russia’s ability to affect a neighbor’s human-rights situation. Armenia has been taking cues from Russia on both domestic and foreign policy — for example, it joined the Eurasian Economic rather than the European Union at the Kremlin’s insistence — because Moscow holds hammers over it. Russia supplies Armenia with most of its gas and continues to maintain a military base on our territory.
But Armenia is far from the most egregious example of Russia exporting its human-rights abuses.
That dubious distinction belongs to Ukraine, where Russia not only seized Crimea but also has backed eastern Ukrainian separatists with military equipment and troops.
Human Rights Watch issued one of the latest reports on rights abuses in eastern Ukraine in late January of this year.
“Rebel takeovers led to the complete collapse of law and order in several areas of the Luhansk and Donetsk region,” the report said.
The separatists “attacked, beat and threatened hundreds of people they suspected of supporting (the government in) Kyiv, including journalists, media outlets, local officials, and political and religious activists.
”The most basic right is the right to life, of course, and Human Rights Watch said that in several instances the separatists “also carried out summary executions.”
Those executed have included captured Ukrainian soldiers — a war crime — and rival separatist political leaders.
In addition, the rebels have “disrupted medical services, unlawfully detained people, ill-treated detainees and subjected them to forced labor, and kidnapped civilians for ransom and used them as hostages,” the report added.
The report said Ukrainian military forces have also committed human-rights abuses.But it’s important to note that Russia’s stepped-up support for the separatists beginning in the fall of 2014 prevented Ukrainian forces from defeating the rebels. Without Russian materiel and troops, the war would have ended, significantly reducing the number of rights abuses.
The death toll in Russia’s war against Ukraine is estimated at 6,200, with more civilian than military fatalities. That is a 50 percent increase over the toll of 4,000 estimated in the fall, when Russia began supplying the separatists with tons of military equipment and sending in regular forces.
Civilian suffering in the conflict extends far beyond deaths. Thousands of civilians have been wounded, including almost every member of some families. And the fighting has left an estimated 1 million people homeless or displaced.
Russia would love to shut up the human rights defenders and Western journalists who have exposed many of the rights abuses in Ukraine, but barring a Kremlin decision to take the entire country by force, that is unlikely to happen.
Thank God for those defenders and journalists!
Amnesty International reported one of the worst separatist abuses — summary executions of Ukrainian soldiers — just last week. Amnesty said it had incontrovertible evidence, including video, of the rebels’ murders of four Ukrainian soldiers captured in the battle for Debaltseve in mid-February.
Regular Russian forces played a key role in taking that strategic city.
“Summary killings are a war crime, plain and simple,” said Denis Krivosheev, deputy director of Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia Office. “The leaders of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine must send their members a clear message: Those who fight with them or on their behalf must respect the law of war.”
Although there has been no military conflict in Crimea that has spawned thousands of deaths and maimings of civilians, some opponents of Crimea’s new rulers have been murdered. And Russia and its henchmen on the peninsula are committing an array of other rights abuses there.
They include harassment, beatings, jailings and killings of political opponents, journalists and the Tatar minority, and confiscation of many Crimeans’ private property.
Politicians and others who opposed Russia’s seizure of Crimea in March 2014 found themselves stripped of their jobs and living in fear. The only course for many was to leave. Western news organizations have chronicled systematic beatings and harassment of Crimean journalists.
“A few plucky reporters remain on the peninsula trying to work,” Foreign Affairs magazine reported in the fall of 2014. “But when they are not in physical danger — several have been beaten and harassed — they suffer from digital attacks.”
No one dreaded the Russian takeover of Crimea more than the Tatars, who constitute 13 percent of the population. Josef Stalin ordered all 180,000 of the Tatars living in Crimea deported in 1941 because he feared they would side with the Nazis against the Red Army.
They began returning after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Like Stalin, today’s Kremlin sees the Tatars as potential troublemakers, people who might foment opposition to Russian rule in Crimea. So the Russian-backed leaders of the peninsula are going after them.
“Young Tatar men have been kidnapped off Crimean streets,” the Washington Post reported in November of 2014. “Tatar activists are sitting in jail. A few have been killed.”
One of the cruelest blows was Crimea sending Musapha Dzhemilev, the leader of the Tatar community, into exile for five years.
Dzhemilev is a true Tatar hero, having “spent years in Soviet prisons and camps for his activism,” Foreign Policy reported.
The most sweeping human-rights abuse in Crimea has not been mistreatment of oppositionists, journalists and minorities but confiscation of property, however.
Some of the government-directed confiscation has been aimed at muzzling dissent — the takeover of opposition television stations, for example.
But most has involved local officials enriching themselves by stealing successful businesses.There have been hundreds of confiscations, ranging from shipyards to banks to hotels to bakeries to dairies to farms to gas stations to even the Yalta Film Studios, the New York Times reported.
The newspaper estimated the value of the stolen property at more than $1 billion.
None of the human-rights abuses in Crimea could have happened without Russian military involvement. And there would have been far fewer abuses in eastern Ukraine if Russian troops had not intervened there. The array of abuses in the two areas has been mind-boggling — summary executions, repression of opposition figures, journalists and minorities, confiscation of property, and on and on.
Russia’s neighbors would agree that some Russian exports are worthwhile — vodka, for example. Those neighbors would be much better off without Moscow exporting its human-rights abuses, however.
Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia.
