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Novaya Gazeta Europe
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Novaya Gazeta Europe
Hanging on the telephone. A Russian reservist has begun an 18-year prison sentence for treason after trying to visit his mother in Ukraine — Novaya Gazeta Europe
One October morning in 2023, Olga Leonova's phone rang in the central Russian city of Dzerzhinsk. It was her mother-in-law calling from Ukraine to ask why her son, who normally called her every morning, hadn't been in touch and wasn't answering his phone. Olga said she'd check, and assured her that he probably either had no reception or his battery was dead. What she didn't know was that at that very moment, her husband, 57-year-old Gennady Artemenko, was being beaten up nearby in the back of a van by agents of Russia's notorious Federal Security Service (FSB), and that he wouldn't be calling his mother any time soon. Almost two years have passed since then, during which Olga has repeatedly assured her mother-in-law that her son is fine, but chose to leave Russia and has been stuck in a European refugee camp where his processing has been achingly slow due to him holding the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Russian military. She came up with the story so that her 84-year-old mother-in-law, Lydia Vasilyevna, could cling to the hope that she'd see her son again one day. But Olga is in fact now living in exile herself, and her husband, who was convicted of treason and justifying terrorism last month, has now begun an 18-year sentence in a high-security prison. Gennady Artemenko was born, grew up and went to school in the Dnipropetrovsk region of central Ukraine, then part of the USSR, where his childhood was indelibly marked by the death of his sister from leukaemia at the age of 12. Though his family had no military tradition, Gennady honoured his father's wish for him to become an officer in the Red Army, moving to study at an artillery school outside Moscow in 1985. After graduating with top marks, Gennady was given a plum first posting in East Germany, where he served until 1993, by which time the Soviet Union had collapsed. Gennady and Olga in Kyiv. Photo from family archive Returning to an independent Ukraine, Gennady initially attempted to find work with the Ukrainian military, but after being told that there were too many artillerymen and too little demand, he decided to try his luck in Russia. There, he was able to find work in his field of expertise, and was posted to the Russian Far East, and later to Tajikistan, where his service earned him early retirement. At the age of just 34, having attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, Artemenko left the army and moved to Dzerzhinsk where he became a reservist. 'All our friends and all the neighbours we'd known for at least 10 years dropped us when Gena was arrested.' 'We would go to visit Gena's mother in Ukraine every year,' Olga says. 'My mother-in-law had already buried her husband and daughter and lived for her son.' But in 2014, the war in Donbas began. Artemenko, a Russian citizen, nevertheless had an overseas Ukrainian certificate intended for those of Ukrainian origin who are citizens of other countries. According to a Ukrainian law signed in 2004, certificate holders enjoy almost all the same rights in Ukraine as citizens. On one of their annual visits to Ukraine, Olga even managed to track down relatives she had in the country's northern Chernihiv region. 'My cousin and her family know about my situation and are very supportive. The only family I have in Russia are my parents. All our friends and all the neighbours we'd known for at least 10 years dropped us when Gena was arrested,' Olga says. Gennady Artemenko. Photo from family archive The Gang of Three Olga woke up on the morning of 24 February 2022 to find her husband sitting with his head in his hands. When she asked him what had happened, he replied: 'They're bombing Kyiv.' He tried to call his mother, but was unable to get through. Having spoken to his mother once a week before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gennady 'started calling twice a day, in the morning and the evening, on the way to work, and on the way home from work,' Olga recalls, adding, 'They always spoke Ukrainian. … Maybe someone reported him?' Later that year, the pair travelled to Kyrgyzstan to apply for a visa at the Ukrainian Embassy in Bishkek. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Gennady had applied to the Ukrainian Migration Service for a residence permit. He worried that closed borders combined with the lockdown might prevent him from helping his seriously ill mother whenever necessary. But Gennady and Olga could never have imagined that it would be war and prison, not quarantine and the pandemic, that would keep them apart. Gennady Artemenko. Photo from family archive The Artemenkos' visa application was turned down. According to Olga, the Ukrainian consul was sympathetic to their situation and tried to help, but told them that during wartime it was the Security Service of Ukraine that granted visas, not consuls. Gennady wrote to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Migration Service and Presidential Administration. On each occasion, he received the same pro-forma answer: 'We understand, but there is a war going on. We will consider your case after the war.' However, Artemenko persevered, planning another trip to Kyrgyzstan in 2023, which he was ultimately unable to take, as the Russian intelligence services had come for him by then. On the day of his detention, FSB officers lay in wait for him outside his house, and after beating him up in a van parked around the corner, they searched his home. They brought him back inside and said they had found 60g of explosives in the kitchen radiator. 'They locked Gena out on the balcony and supposedly searched the apartment. Then they brought him back inside and said they had found 60g of explosives in the kitchen radiator,' Olga recalls. Olga understood immediately that the charge against Gennady for the 'illegal possession of firearms or ammunition by a group of people' had been prepared in advance, and that the explosives had been planted. 'The group of people must have been me, my husband and the cat,' Olga says wryly. Circumstantial evidence The charges for a group of people possessing weapons were eventually dropped, only to be replaced by charges of treason and justifying terrorism. Olga and Gennady. Photo from family archive 'Planting explosives is a standard FSB move,' according to Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with Russian human rights NGO First Department, who knows the Artemenko case. 'They needed to place Gennady in detention to have time to open a criminal case on other charges.' The charges against Artemenko for treason and justifying terrorism were based principally on his membership of Telegram channel Civil Force, which is run by the Crimean Tatar Atesh movement, an underground guerilla group that aims to free Crimea from Russian occupation. The terror charge was added to his rap sheet when the Atesh movement was recognised as a terrorist organisation by the Russian government late last year. When leaflets similar to a banner frequently used by Atesh began appearing around Dzerzhinsk saying 'Let's stop the war together!' alongside the Atesh logo, Artemenko was accused of posting them due to his subscription to the channel. As far as the court was concerned, Artemenko was subscribed to the Atesh channel, and that was all the proof it needed. Investigators looking into the incident claimed to have seen surveillance footage implicating Artemenko, though they also conceded that it hadn't been sufficiently clear to identify the perpetrator with any certainty. During Artemenko's trial, his lawyer asked to see the footage, but the court turned down the request, as it did nearly all other requests made by the defence. As far as the court was concerned, Artemenko was subscribed to the Atesh channel, and that was all the proof it needed. The prosecution also presented the leaflet itself as evidence, though the sample they submitted for expert analysis was oddly pristine, as if it had just been downloaded and printed off, and had never been stuck up anywhere in the city at all. The prosecutors said that a psychological and linguistic analysis had revealed 'a desire to stop the war' in conjunction with Atesh. As if being charged with wanting to stop the war was not absurd enough, Artemenko was also charged with communicating with Atesh members, though no evidence of this was provided, and no correspondence was presented in court. Atesh leaflet in Dzerzhinsk, Russia. Photo: Civil Force / Telegram Running out of time The trial lasted for four days, after which the court convicted Artemenko on both counts and handed him a sentence of 18 years in a maximum-security penal colony and a fine of 360,000 rubles (€3,900). 'There have already been over 1,000 treason and espionage cases since the start of the war,' Smirnov told Novaya Gazeta Europe. 'The defendants are mostly not public figures, but completely ordinary people who for various reasons at some point or other have found themselves in the FSB's crosshairs.' 'I believe Gennady Artemenko came under surveillance when he attempted to seek permission to enter Ukraine. … That's a trigger for the FSB. They might have thought he was planning to commit treason by changing sides,' Smirnov continued. Gennady and Olga in Kyiv, holding a Ukrainian flag. Photo from personal archive, used as case material Evidence of Artemenko's anti-Russian position was provided in the form of a 2018 photograph of Gennady and Olga in Kyiv holding a Ukrainian flag. They had taken the trip to celebrate his 50th birthday, and Olga had bought tickets to a concert by Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy. 'We were tired, but loved the concert. It was our favourite band, it was his birthday in Kyiv, and we had so many happy years ahead of us still to look forward to.' Seven years later and reserve lieutenant colonel Gennady Artemenko is in detention, waiting to be transferred to a maximum-security penal colony. Now 57, he has a long list of serious health issues, including hypertension, hernias and pancreatitis. Factoring in time served, he will be 73 when he is finally released, if he serves his full term. Olga now lives outside Russia where she works as a nanny and cleaner, but she hopes she'll soon be allowed to travel to Ukraine to see and reassure her mother-in-law. To this day, Lydia Vasilyevna knows nothing about the fate of her son, and Olga puts on a brave face every day when she calls her to say: 'Gena is fine, Lydia Vasilyevna! He just can't contact you right now as he's in a refugee camp. But he will soon. Trust me.'
Spectator
06-07-2025
- Spectator
The terrifying crimes of the Latvian KGB
For a gateway into hell, the innocuous brown wooden front door of 61 Freedom Street in downtown Riga is surprisingly narrow – just two feet across. Known as the Corner House, the two-foot-wide door into the old KGB Latvian HQ would be easy to miss amidst the wide boulevards and the ornate, art nouveau, balconied apartments and shops of the Latvian capital. But beyond that narrow threshold there is no mistaking that you've entered a world of terror. The tiny, barred reception area beyond the entrance door is no more than a human cage, where desperate relatives once came to enquire about the fate of their loved ones. A bleak antechamber whose further internal door serves only to hide the labyrinth of interrogation rooms, bars, spy holes, locks, and execution chamber, in the realm beyond. A portal into the vast hidden KGB terror machine to break the bones and bodies of those suspected of defying the Soviet regime. Like Latvia itself, the 1912 building has changed hands many times. It was a music school, a pharmacy, luxury apartments, before falling into the inventory of the KGB in 1940 during the Soviet occupation of Latvia, then the Nazis from 1941-44, before falling back into the thrall of its more permanent KGB landlord with the return of the Red Army until the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. Inside, the Corner House building is falling apart, plaster and paint hang from the ceilings and walls – torturers don't bother with internal décor – and every floor, door frame, bar and lock is chipped and battered, uncared for. Only the elaborate chandeliers, hanging forlorn from the high ceilings, hark back to the building's former glory. The narrow doors, the narrow corridors, even the narrow elevator, where it is almost impossible to physically turn around, are all deliberate – a means of preventing escape or rebellion amongst the KGB's captives. A primitive touch pad alarm system lines each corridor once enabling a KGB guard to warn his fellow henchmen within moments of a prisoner revolt. The very architecture of terror. There are spyholes in the doors and in walls of the cells so the guards could easily check on the inmates. A primitive kitchen. And toilets without any cubicles or privacy where prisoners, stripped of all their possessions and dignity, had to relieve themselves under the eye of their Russian and co-opted Latvian communist captors. The Corner House was a waystation, an interrogation centre, rather than a permanent prison. The corridors lead to a maze of subterranean cells that held up to 30 to 40 prisoners in each cell in stifling heat, lights on 24/7, shitting in a communal bucket, for weeks on end as KGB interrogators tortured and broke them down to obtain confessions. Before Stalinist courts then rubber-stamped their victims to long penal sentences or transportation to Siberian prison camps. Compared to East Germany, where Putin first cut his KGB baby teeth in the 1980s, Riga and Latvia, long subjugated, must have been a relative backwater for an ambitious young KGB officer in the post war era – like being assigned to Leeds. But the Corner House remained the Latvian KGB HQ for over 50 years. For a regime dedicated to the perfection of New Soviet Man, the KGB still expended a huge effort to cover up its own crimes; arresting its victims at night, disappearing them into its vast gulag of prisons after secret trials and even building backyard walls around its Latvian HQ so curious neighbours in the adjoining apartments would never catch a glimpse of its captives in the tiny exercise yard. Now a museum, the Corner House remains an evocative charnel house of despair and an indictment of the bureaucracy of the KGB state terror machine. Even as they awaited their fate, the Latvian prisoners would have heard the sounds of the city all around them. But must have also known that no one was coming to their rescue. Hope itself was impossible. For those even less lucky, at the height of the Stalinist terror, the KGB built a special execution chamber with thrice padded walls inside the Corner House, just off the building's internal courtyard, where 186 Latvian nationalists or those deemed to be Nazi collaborators, were led in at night, shot in the forehead and then their bodies hurled into the waiting truck, its engine running to cover the noise, before their bodies were dumped in hidden forest burial grounds surrounding the city. Later on, as perestroika neared in the 1980s, the KGB, ever adaptive, converted their execution chamber into a special KGB shop, wallpapering over their bloodied bullet slugs in the walls, so the Communist Party nomenklatura elite could then buy western cigarettes and forbidden luxuries. Today the Corner House is part of Latvia's national Museum of Occupation dedicated to documenting the crimes of the Soviet occupation. For 15 euros you can cheekily fill up your Instagram with selfies taken from inside the KGB's cells. Though there is something about the sheer misery of the place that cannot be so easily digitally washed away. Thousands died in this place over decades in the grip of a tyranny whose successor regime menacingly lives on just a four-hour drive away along the common Latvian Russian border. Judging by the Ukrainian flags adorning every second flagpole in Riga, the fate of Ukraine and a future Latvia are conjoined. Allegedly the old KGB, the Committee for State Security, was dissolved in 1991 and replaced with the FSB, the Federal Security Service – though you might be forgiven for failing to notice the difference. Less easy to forgive though are Putin's western apologists, who so easily talk about ceding the Donbass and eastern Ukraine to the Russian state, whilst glossing over the Putin regime's present tyranny, and the fact that new Corner Houses have already opened in every captured Ukrainian town.
Washington Post
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Don't believe the conventional wisdom. Ukraine can still lose.
PARIS — Soviet losses in World War II exceeded those of all other Allied forces combined and were roughly double those of Nazi Germany, whose capital, Berlin, ultimately fell to Red Army troops. Keep that in mind when you hear that Moscow can't possibly sustain the colossal military and economic costs it is suffering from the Ukrainian bloodbath Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated three years ago in pursuit of his neo-imperial fever dream. It can.
Sydney Morning Herald
04-07-2025
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
Why do I lie awake at night? Because it kept my ancestors alive
Gloom begets gloom. Darkness is the perfect environment for anxiety. As I'm taking nightly refuge in bed, whatever anxieties I currently have enliven into a rude health they couldn't hope to attain while I'm in daylight and din. A gutter that has rusted through is dripping outside my window, sounding like a bass drum keeping slow time for a funeral march. It is a noise that, during daytime, would be so unremarkable as to need someone to point it out to me. 'Listen. Do you hear that? I think your gutter's buggered.' But at night, when the anxieties emerge gaudied from their dressing rooms and begin to dance across the stage of my mind, the dripping gutter keeps time for the worries that need immediate attention. The gutter itself must be replaced. Reminding me (drip) every five seconds (drip) of the accelerating deterioration of the house, the floorboards need polishing, the walls painting, and then, of course … the deterioration of everything, of the friendships, of the faculties, and the organs, the memory, the prospects, the dwindling likelihood of ever understanding crypto … life's abstract imperfections blossom into a banal apocalypse given silence and darkness. I'm a better friend to myself during the day than at night. I think we all are. Maybe the night brings honesty, a more accurate reckoning of who we are. Maybe I'm cutting myself too much slack as I skip through my days. During daytime, I get on well with the ghosts of my past – but at night they seem a degraded crew who never got off their arses to have a go. The 'what ifs' and 'I shouldn't haves' mingle and mate in the mind until cause and effect give birth to a roughshod, idiot tribe of Ansons who have galloped headlong at disgrace. It's impossible to sleep with this going on. And sleep is a type of healing, so if you don't get enough you rise sick in the morning. At one stage I was getting about two hours a night. You'd be amazed at what an abstract, removed world this becomes when you're sleep-deprived, groggily walking around in a near dream. I was colourblind on two hours' sleep a night. I'm a much better sleeper than that now and the world is, again, ablaze with colour. Proust wrote in a cork-lined room so he had no distractions and his thoughts could be better heard. The stillness of night performs the same function as that cork room, allowing your worries to amplify until they're like those Red Army propagandists bawling through speakers in the icy Stalingrad night across the frozen Volga at the frostbitten soldiers of the German 6th Army: 'Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad. Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad.' A lot of people lie in bed listening to versions of that. Loading The dark is where evil traditionally lives – the night was always a time of tension. In past nights carnivores loped across plains with their noses to the breeze for your ancestors' scent – those who slept soundly woke in bears' bellies and have no descendants. Witches ride brooms and every haint and devil is at their pomp in blackness; ghosts that are knock-kneed and pot-bellied in sunlight are warlords by midnight; muggers and hatchet men lean into suburban hedges waiting for passers-by. A subconscious vigilance in the small hours kept our ancestors alive and it buzzes in us still. The brain is looking for threat and primed for negative thinking and, without the distraction of kids, PlayStation, and business meetings, becomes trapped in a negative loop. I used to try to get to sleep by thinking mild and pleasant thoughts. But my brain is as likely to be led into slumber by mental elevator music as a rhino is into a horse float. Now I reach for my e-book. The room remains in darkness and Sarah undisturbed. The e-book is a portal into the waking world from the swamp of my nocturnal thoughts. A way out of the night, an escape hatch, a path to Shangri-La … to all those Neverlands authors offer. 'I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works), and its bitter little embryos spying upon the love life of their parents.'
The Age
04-07-2025
- General
- The Age
Why do I lie awake at night? Because it kept my ancestors alive
Gloom begets gloom. Darkness is the perfect environment for anxiety. As I'm taking nightly refuge in bed, whatever anxieties I currently have enliven into a rude health they couldn't hope to attain while I'm in daylight and din. A gutter that has rusted through is dripping outside my window, sounding like a bass drum keeping slow time for a funeral march. It is a noise that, during daytime, would be so unremarkable as to need someone to point it out to me. 'Listen. Do you hear that? I think your gutter's buggered.' But at night, when the anxieties emerge gaudied from their dressing rooms and begin to dance across the stage of my mind, the dripping gutter keeps time for the worries that need immediate attention. The gutter itself must be replaced. Reminding me (drip) every five seconds (drip) of the accelerating deterioration of the house, the floorboards need polishing, the walls painting, and then, of course … the deterioration of everything, of the friendships, of the faculties, and the organs, the memory, the prospects, the dwindling likelihood of ever understanding crypto … life's abstract imperfections blossom into a banal apocalypse given silence and darkness. I'm a better friend to myself during the day than at night. I think we all are. Maybe the night brings honesty, a more accurate reckoning of who we are. Maybe I'm cutting myself too much slack as I skip through my days. During daytime, I get on well with the ghosts of my past – but at night they seem a degraded crew who never got off their arses to have a go. The 'what ifs' and 'I shouldn't haves' mingle and mate in the mind until cause and effect give birth to a roughshod, idiot tribe of Ansons who have galloped headlong at disgrace. It's impossible to sleep with this going on. And sleep is a type of healing, so if you don't get enough you rise sick in the morning. At one stage I was getting about two hours a night. You'd be amazed at what an abstract, removed world this becomes when you're sleep-deprived, groggily walking around in a near dream. I was colourblind on two hours' sleep a night. I'm a much better sleeper than that now and the world is, again, ablaze with colour. Proust wrote in a cork-lined room so he had no distractions and his thoughts could be better heard. The stillness of night performs the same function as that cork room, allowing your worries to amplify until they're like those Red Army propagandists bawling through speakers in the icy Stalingrad night across the frozen Volga at the frostbitten soldiers of the German 6th Army: 'Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad. Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad.' A lot of people lie in bed listening to versions of that. Loading The dark is where evil traditionally lives – the night was always a time of tension. In past nights carnivores loped across plains with their noses to the breeze for your ancestors' scent – those who slept soundly woke in bears' bellies and have no descendants. Witches ride brooms and every haint and devil is at their pomp in blackness; ghosts that are knock-kneed and pot-bellied in sunlight are warlords by midnight; muggers and hatchet men lean into suburban hedges waiting for passers-by. A subconscious vigilance in the small hours kept our ancestors alive and it buzzes in us still. The brain is looking for threat and primed for negative thinking and, without the distraction of kids, PlayStation, and business meetings, becomes trapped in a negative loop. I used to try to get to sleep by thinking mild and pleasant thoughts. But my brain is as likely to be led into slumber by mental elevator music as a rhino is into a horse float. Now I reach for my e-book. The room remains in darkness and Sarah undisturbed. The e-book is a portal into the waking world from the swamp of my nocturnal thoughts. A way out of the night, an escape hatch, a path to Shangri-La … to all those Neverlands authors offer. 'I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works), and its bitter little embryos spying upon the love life of their parents.'
