In Russia, Incredible Bravery

“Elderly teacher flees Russia after facing criminal charges for telling students about atrocities in Bucha.” That woman is Natalia Taranushenko. What a teacher she must be. What a person.

The article under the headline comes from Meduza, the Russian news organization in exile. (It is based in Riga, the capital of Latvia, a free and democratic country, where Russians and others can actually report.) I will quote from the article:

In April 2022, during a schoolwide initiative called “Lesson of Kindness,” Russian language and literature teacher Natalia Taranushenko reportedly told her class about the brutal acts committed by the Russian army in Bucha during the town’s occupation . . .

After the lesson, one of Taranushenko’s students complained about her statements to his father, who proceeded to write multiple denunciations of the teacher to the authorities and demand she be fired from the school.

And so on. It is people such as Natalia Taranushenko who keep the flame of civilization alive.

• Ilya Yashin is an extraordinary man. He is a Russian politician and dissident — therefore, a prisoner. His specific crime is to have denounced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. His sentence, officially, is eight and a half years. But, as Russian dissidents say: Your real sentence is “for as long as Putin rules.”

A recent bulletin from RFE/RL (i.e., our combination of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty):

[Yashin] has been transferred to a punitive cell unit (PKT) in a prison in the western Smolensk region, his Telegram channel said on June 18. Placement in the PKT is considered the harshest type of incarceration in Russian prisons.

Spare a thought for the extraordinary, magnificent Ilya Yashin. (To know more about him, consult a couple of posts I have written: one in December 2022, here, and another in February 2024, here.)

• What about Vladimir Kara-Murza, that great man? Again, a bulletin from RFE/RL:

Kara-Murza has been transferred to a cell-type facility — one of Russia’s strictest prison regimes — for six months, his former lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, said. The administration of the maximum-security prison in Omsk where Kara-Murza is imprisoned moved him to the facility after he allegedly failed to hold his hands behind his back for several seconds after being ordered to do so, Prokhorov said.

(Prokhorov, a veteran and invaluable human-rights lawyer, fled Russia in April 2023 when he himself was on the verge of arrest and imprisonment.)

Look, they are killing him. They are killing Kara-Murza slowly, the way they killed Alexei Navalny. The way they killed Sergei Magnitsky. Boris Nemtsov, they killed abruptly — they shot him on a bridge within sight of the Kremlin.

I met Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s wife — widow — earlier this month at the Oslo Freedom Forum. A woman of incredible dignity. Almost impossible dignity. The grief she carries is palpably deep.

Here is Evgenia Kara-Murza, Vladimir’s wife (also earlier this month):

How long until she is a widow? The Free World ought to make the life of Vladimir Kara-Murza a cause. He is one of the greatest men we have known, ever.