Disappearing Crimea's anti-Russia activists

By artappraiser on Thu, 12/04/2014 - 2:50pm |

Opponents of Russia's annexation are being abducted and killed amid reports of escalating human rights abuses.

By Mansour Mirovalev from Simferopol, Crimea for Al Jazeera, 4 Dec., 2014

URL:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/12/disappearing-crimea-anti-russia-activists-201412110405525656.html

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Story about a very different kind of dissident and exile; couldn't help but wonder if he still sympathizes with Edward Snowden, which isn't revealed:

Once Celebrated in Russia, the Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile
By Danny Hakim, New York Times, Dec. 2/3, 2014
LONDON — When a SWAT team appeared at Pavel Durov’s door in St. Petersburg, he started thinking about his future in Russia.

He was home alone, and he peered at them through a monitor.

“They had guns and they looked very serious,” said Mr. Durov, once Russia’s biggest celebrity entrepreneur. “They seemed to want to break the door.”

Not long ago, Mr. Durov, 30, was seen as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg. He founded a social network, VKontakte, which is more popular in Russia than Facebook, and made a splash by publicly offering Edward Snowden a job.

Then the Kremlin tightened its grip over the Internet and President Vladimir V. Putin’s allies took control of VKontakte. Mr. Durov eventually sold his remaining stake for millions and fled Russia in April, after resisting government pressure to release the data of Ukrainian protest leaders.

Mr. Durov, known for his subversive wit and an all-black wardrobe that evokes Neo from the “Matrix” movies, is now a little-seen nomad, moving from country to country every few weeks with a small band of computer programmers. One day he is in Paris, another in Singapore.

“Me myself, I’m not a big fan of the idea of countries,” Mr. Durov said, wearing a custom-made cross between a hoodie and a sport coat.

When he arrived with little warning in London for his first interview outside cyberspace since leaving Russia, he was en route to San Francisco, where he appeared at a technology conference on Tuesday. He is surfacing to showcase his new messaging app, Telegram, for people craving privacy and security.

His odyssey reflects the changing nature of the Internet in Russia [....]

by artappraiser on Thu, 12/04/2014 - 8:39pm

Putin the Christianist. in his annual address to the Federal Assembly, from the Kremlin Dec. 4 Engish transcript:

...Crimea is where our people live, and the peninsula is of strategic importance for Russia as the spiritual source of the development of a multifaceted but solid Russian nation and a centralised Russian state. It was in Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus or Korsun, as ancient Russian chroniclers called it, that Grand Prince Vladimir was baptised before bringing Christianity to Rus.

In addition to ethnic similarity, a common language, common elements of their material culture, a common territory, even though its borders were not marked then, and a nascent common economy and government, Christianity was a powerful spiritual unifying force that helped involve various tribes and tribal unions of the vast Eastern Slavic world in the creation of a Russian nation and Russian state. It was thanks to this spiritual unity that our forefathers for the first time and forevermore saw themselves as a united nation. All of this allows us to say that Crimea, the ancient Korsun or Chersonesus, and Sevastopol have invaluable civilisational and even sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.

And this is how we will always consider it....

by artappraiser on Thu, 12/04/2014 - 10:40pm

Disappearing Crimea's anti-Russia activists

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