Since recounting how he had been subjected to torture, Russian civic activist Ildar Dadin has been threatened with criminal proceedings, a ‘defamation’ suit and has been placed in solitary confinement for 6 months. The official ‘investigation’ supposedly found no confirmation of his allegations of torture, although numerous other former Karelia IK-7 prisoners and relatives of those serving sentences have reported similar treatment. There have been overt efforts to discredit Dadin in the Russian state-controlled media, and there are serious grounds for questioning the official version of the fight which Dadin supposedly had with a cellmate. There have been other cruel tactics as well, such as the rumour spread by Kremlin-funded trolls that Dadin had hanged herself. The young man’s mother needed to be hospitalized after reading that.
34-year-old Dadin is the first person to have been imprisoned under a draconian new law which allows criminal prosecution for totally peaceful protest, as guaranteed by Russia’s Constitution. Judging by the court proceedings, it is likely that he was targeted and received a 3-year sentence (later reduced to 2.5 years) because of his active support for Euromaidan and Ukraine in general.
