Meduza’s daily newsletter: Wednesday, September 11, 2024 Investigating the Beslan terrorist attack coverup, Putin’s top human rights adviser demands military service from all young people, and Russian students are getting a new textbook on UAVs

Revisiting the evidence that Russian officials are still covering up their role in the Beslan school siege’s death toll

Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Milashina recently published an update to her ongoing investigation into the Beslan school siege, which killed 333 people, including 186 children. For the tragedy’s 20th anniversary earlier this month, President Putin visited the area and met for the first time in 19 years with a support and advocacy group of parents whose children were among the siege’s victims. During that meeting, Putin expressed surprise that the government’s official investigation into the terrorist attack is still unfinished. The president dodged responsibility for the delay and suggested appealing to Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin instead. According to Elena Milashina, federal investigators have deliberately dragged their feet and classified evidence to prevent the public from learning that the authorities didn’t prioritize saving hostages when they raided the school to end the siege.

Where does Milashina get her information?

After dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the lack of progress in Russia’s Beslan investigation, the terrorist attack’s victims and their relatives turned to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled partially in the plaintiffs’ favor, finding that Russian special forces used “excessive deadly force” and ordering the government to pay 3 million euros in compensation. The verdict had no impact on the official Beslan investigation, but it did publicly release some case documents that the Russian government provided to the European Court in its own defense. 

Elena Milashina studied these records and republished testimony excerpts from soldiers, rescuers, and firefighters who participated in emergency services after special forces stormed the Beslan school. She also compared these accounts to former hostages’ eyewitness statements collected by State Duma deputy Yuri Savelyev, who wrote a minority report in 2006 on the school siege, challenging the findings of a special parliamentary commission.

Where the witness testimony clashes with Russia’s official narrative

Russian officials insist that special forces didn’t storm the Beslan school until after two explosions rocked the gymnasium building and a fire broke out. The authorities say all the hostages who died in the terrorist attack were killed in these explosions and the gym fire. When the military supposedly learned that no living hostages remained in the school, commanders authorized the use of flamethrowers, tanks, and explosives to destroy the ceilings in the school’s southern wing, where the last remaining terrorists were hiding in the basement.

However, former hostages told Yuri Savelyev that the gym was attacked from outside with grenade launchers, not bombed by the terrorists. Additionally, the case materials shared with the ECHR include testimony from FSB officers who admitted that Russian forces used grenade launchers, flamethrowers, tanks, and other indiscriminate weapons during their initial assault on the school. 

The Russian authorities assert that hostages were never moved to other parts of the school, but surviving eyewitnesses told Savelyev that the terrorists moved roughly 300 captives to the cafeteria and classrooms in the school’s southern wing, where they forced people to stand in front of windows as human shields, waving torn curtains at soldiers. In the case records she reviewed, Milashina found testimony from two tank commanders who said the FSB’s operational headquarters ordered them to fire on the school. “But we refused to shoot at the school because the hostages were standing in the windows and waving little white cloths,” one of the tank commanders testified. 

Milashina found that investigators collected “carbon copy” testimonies from emergency workers who said in virtually identical statements that they found only five bodies in the school’s southern wing, claiming that the bodies couldn’t have been moved beforehand because investigators had already inspected the scene. (However, the case records show that investigators didn’t arrive until after emergency workers finished inside the school, meaning that the officials who collected these testimonies knew they were false.) Milashina also discovered that the Russian government’s evidence shared with the ECHR inexplicably included an account from one emergency worker that contradicts everyone else’s testimony, claiming that first responders removed roughly 60 bodies from the school’s workshops, cafeteria, and first-floor classrooms.

On September 4, 2004, emergency workers laid the bodies of 237 hostages in the Beslan school’s courtyard. Of the victims, 116 had been removed from the gym building, their remains burned almost beyond recognition. To this day, the authorities remain silent about where the bodies with gunshot and shrapnel wounds were evacuated from. Officials conducted no autopsies to determine the actual causes of death for those killed in the school.

Milashina’s conclusions

The Novaya Gazeta journalist argues that FSB forensic explosives experts reached the school before state investigators could cross the military’s concentric barricades and access the site. The FSB agents seized the terrorists’ weapons and removed the bodies of hostages killed in the southern wing. Milashina argues that the authorities concealed these deaths to evade responsibility for storming the school without regard for the hostages’ safety. State investigators say independent researchers can’t find anyone who saw hostages killed outside the gym because no hostages were killed in the school’s southern wing. “But in reality, it proves the opposite: No one survived in the southern wing,” writes Elena Milashina.

We got The Beet. Don’t miss Meduza’s weekly newsletter (separate from the one you’re reading here)!

Meduza’s feature reporting

• 🎒 To tackle Russia’s ‘demographic problem,’ schools prepare to teach children the virtues of home, marriage, and reproduction
• 🌍 A year after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death, Russia’s influence campaign in Africa continues apace — but it may have new competition

The news in brief

• 🪖 Chairman of Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council says ‘all young people’ should do military service in some capacity, regardless of health issues
• 🎭 Nizhny Novgorod police make an example of stand-up comedian Dima Gavrilov, jailing him for 13 days for “insulting Russians’ dignity” during a Tbilisi performance last year and filming his apology video
• 🎭 Latvia’s foreign minister has banned stand-up comic Maria Markova from entering the country to perform in Riga, calling her “a propagandist of the Russian television channel TNT”
• 🤳 A new Dossier Center investigation examines Kremlin influence schemes on Telegram, the Sergey Kiriyenko team’s competition with Margarita Simonyan’s networks, Telegram’s personnel vulnerability in Russia, and how Russian intelligence agencies use the messenger’s anonymity to conduct sabotage in Europe and Ukraine
• 🕯️ Russian journalist and human rights adviser Nikolai Svanidze dies in Moscow at the age of 70 after a long illness
• 💄 The South Korean multinational conglomerate LG has filed paperwork in Russia to register the trademark “OHUI” (which means roughly “f**k me” in transliterated Russian) for a line of cosmetic products
• 🇬🇧🇺🇸 British government sources have “indicated” to The Guardian that a decision has already been made to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia (Washington has also hinted that it’s about to lift its own restrictions on long-range weapons supplied to Kyiv)
• 💰 Despite coming policy changes from America and Britain, “a full Ukrainian victory would require the West to provide hundreds of billions of dollars worth of support, something neither Washington nor Europe can realistically do,” Western leaders have told Kyiv, reports The Wall Street Journal
• 🎒 Publishing house Prosveshcheniye and drone manufacturer Geoscan release textbook on UAVs designed for Russian students in eighth and ninth grades
• ⚛️ Putin instructs government cabinet to explore restrictions on exports of uranium, titanium, nickel, and other materials (so long as it doesn’t harm Russia) in response to Western supply sanctions
• 🪖 Russian forces launch large-scale counterattacks in Kursk region’s border areas, reportedly reaching some towns deep behind Ukrainian troops’ lines

No country can be free without independent media. In January 2023, the Russian authorities outlawed Meduza, banning our work in the country our colleagues call home. Just supporting Meduza carries the risk of criminal prosecution for Russian nationals, which is why we’re turning to our international audience for help. Your assistance makes it possible for thousands of people in Russia to read Meduza and stay informed. Consider a small but recurring contribution to provide the most effective support. Donate here.