Former Donetsk separatist official detained in St. Petersburg on charges of discrediting the Russian military
Russian authorities detained Alexander Vaskovsky, a former member of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic’s provisional government and a Telegram blogger, in St. Petersburg on April 13.
Vaskovsky’s Telegram channel, Iz Donetska Razgoritsya Plamya (“From Donetsk the Flame Will Spread”), published a post about the detention along with an excerpt from a report charging him with discrediting the Russian military.
The charges stemmed from two posts on his channel, according to the post. One concerned corruption in the leadership of the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic; the other was Vaskovsky’s commentary on a report that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had offered the United States a prisoner exchange in return for lifting sanctions.
On Tuesday, April 14, Vaskovsky posted that he had been released and that a court date had been set. The case against him rested on an ”‘expert assessment’ by some philosophy PhD from the Herzen Pedagogical University, one Prilutsky A.M.,” he said.
The assessment concluded that “the Donetsk republic” is “a community of people whom I insulted on either ethnic or religious grounds,” Vaskovsky said. The experts also concluded, he said, that he had shown disrespect toward military commanders by quoting the report about Kadyrov.
Vaskovsky, 53, was born in Donetsk. In early 2014 he joined pro-Russian separatists, serving as co-chairman of the provisional government of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and later as acting chairman of the republic’s Supreme Soviet transportation committee. He subsequently co-founded and chaired an independent miners’ union, which organized strikes over unpaid wages in 2019. Vaskovsky wrote a book whose title translates as “From Donetsk the Flame Will Spread” — the same name as his Telegram channel. The book’s description identifies him as a member of the first government of the Donetsk People’s Republic and a deputy of the republic’s Supreme Council.
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