The first hearing in Yury DMITRIEV’s new trial was postponed on 27 September until next month, to allow the accused and his lawyer time to acquaint themselves, once again, with the case materials of his first trial [from 1 June 2017 to 5 April 2018]. The next hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, 17 October 2018, at the Petrozavodsk City Court.
“Recently, for one reason and another, I’ve visited different villages in Russia,” writes Yury MIKHAILIN (an administrator of the Dmitriev Supporters’ Facebook page).
“In many of them there stands a memorial to soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War [1941-1944] and in almost every case it is not simply a monument. Names are carved on a plaque, recalling those who left the village to fight at the Front and never came back. “In each of these villages, I have been thinking, there is a similar list of those who were arrested in the 1930s and also never returned.”
Continue readingOn Thursday the Supreme Court of Karelia decided not to change the measure of restraint imposed on Yury DMITRIEV after he was charged with new offences, reports the Interfax news agency. His lawyers had challenged the decision of the Petrozavodsk City Court on 21 August to extend his detention in custody for a further three months.
Continue readingA lengthy article about the POW execution theory in Russia’s Kommersant newspaper (7 September 2018) is even-handed and thorough. It needs little more than the following passage, however, to show the “new hypothesis of Karelian historians” for what it is:
“Officially, there is no data to show that the Finns carried out mass executions at Sandarmokh. Mr Verigin also confirmed for us that Finland has not transferred any information to Russia about sites where shot POWs are buried in Karelia. The historian further confirmed to Kommersant that he has not yet examined Finland’s historical archives”.
Five bodies are discovered, allegedly Soviet POWs shot by the Finns, during the Continuation War, 1941-1944 (photo, Sergei Markelov)
Continue readingOn 4 September, Karelian historian Sergei Verigin and spokesmen for the Russian Military-Historical Society held a press conference about their recent excavations at Sandarmokh.
Their words were widely reported by the official RIA Novosti / Russia Today news agency — but only in Russian. The usual simultaneous publication in English and other languages was, for some reason, lacking.
The Dmitriev Affair 