Last week a number of events took place in a logical sequence. On August 3, Vitaliy Shilov, the head of the Belarusian House in Ukraine, a Belarusian opposition figure who emigrated to Ukraine and organized the opposition Belarusian diaspora there, was found hanged in the forest near Kiev. We did not write about this event because it does not directly affect Muslims and it has been widely reported without us. But what affects some often affects others.
For example, last week in Crimea, 19-year-old Osman Adjiosmanov, who had disappeared the day before, was also found hanged. Again, this news does not seem to be directly related to religion or politics. But today the editor-in-chief of the Crimean News Agency (QHA), Aydin Tash, was found dead in Ankara. While some sources presented his death as natural, opposition sources insisted that he was either strangled or hanged.
Finally, 62-year-old political journalist Dmitry Zapolsky died suddenly yesterday in Riga while on a trip with his family. Some Muslims know him as a person who once announced his conversion to Islam and was married to a practicing Russian Muslim. But more people know him as a person who worked in St. Petersburg television in the 1990s and was close to Ksenia Sobchak’s team. He wrote an exposé book about the St. Petersburg mafia that controlled the city and seized power in the country, with the characteristic title «Putinburg». Here you can see a presentation of this book and learn many interesting facts mentioned in it. And here is a conversation-dialogue between Zapolsky and the well-known opposition journalist Mark Feygin. And here the seemingly vigorous Putin exposé Zapolsky suddenly dies during a trip, the head of the anti-Kremlin Crimean Tatar agency either dies in a similarly mysterious way or is found hanged in Ankara, while the previously disappeared leader of the Belarusian opposition diaspora and the young Crimean Tatar are unequivocally found hanged in Kiev and Crimea. And if Crimea is a territory controlled by Russian special services, then all the other mysterious accidental deaths occurred abroad.
One might think that this is not surprising — inconvenient people are killed, and more often it happens abroad. That’s true, but it’s worth remembering, when you read about those who report from abroad about what’s happening in their homeland, that «they are so brave because they are not in Russia». With the new repressive laws, a wave of blockades, and the closure of media outlets in the country that provide critical information about the government, it becomes clear that the truth about what is happening in Russia can usually only be written from abroad, and the reverse is becoming more and more of an exception, and a disappearing one at that. However, those who are abroad, as all these events show, are not «in a safe house» but practically on the front lines. Moreover, if the media funded by states interested in reporting the truth about Russia (obviously in their own interests, but still useful and necessary for us) do indeed have foreign financial support, then many projects abroad have to fight for survival, just like the people who work in them.
Therefore, by financing from abroad those who write the truth about what is happening in the country, you are not helping those who are «so brave because they left,» but rather those who left to bring you the truth and took the corresponding risks.