News report

factual reporting

Sergei Koltyrin has died

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The former director of the Medvezhegorsk City Museum, Sergei KOLTYRIN, died yesterday in the town’s prison hospital. His brother Vladimir passed the news to the Sever.Realii website.

“He died last night,” said Koltyrin’s brother. “He had cancer. That’s all I can tell you. He wasn’t in the ordinary hospital but the other one and, as they told me, it’s not exactly the place you’d send children on vacation. They’ll write what they like in his death certificate.”

The republican department of the Investigative Committee confirmed the news of the historian’s death. As soon as they receive the papers from the Federal Penitentiary Service, they commented, they will begin to check what happened.

Radio Liberty, 2 April 2020 (in Russian)

In May 2019, Sergei Koltyrin was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in a corrective labour colony. For other news items and reports about his case — https://dmitrievaffair.com/tag/sergei-koltyrin/

The last resting place of Les Kurbas

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Acclaimed curator and theatre director from New York Virlana Tkacz and artist Waldemart Klyuzko will give a talk in London tonight about Les KURBAS, Ukraine’s most important theatre director, who radically transformed Ukrainian theatre in the 1920s.

Kurbas lecture poster, May 2019

Wednesday, 8 May, 7 pm
Main Hall of the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family,
21 Binney Street, Mayfair, London W1K 5BQ

Kurbas and almost three hundred other representatives of Ukraine’s intelligentsia were shot at Sandarmokh between 27 October and 4 November 1937. They have become known as Ukraine’s “Executed Renaissance”.

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Were last year’s excavations at Sandarmokh legal?

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As the prosecution continues to present its evidence of “new offences” by Yury DMITRIEV at his second trial in the Petrozavodsk City Court in Karelia, a related dispute is being pursued at the national level over the identity of those executed and buried at Sandarmokh.

In early February, the Kommersant daily newspaper reported
on this “second front” in the Dmitriev Affair.

Sandarmokh, Solovki transport memorial (photo Kurilova)

Solovki transport memorial, Sandarmokh (photo, Anastasia Kurilova, August 2018)

In January 2019 there was an appeal for Yury Chaika, the Russian Federation’s Prosecutor General, to personally investigate the excavations at Sandarmokh last year by the Military History Society (MHS).

The request came from a deputy of the Karelian Legislative Assembly, Emilia Slabunova of the Yabloko Party. The authorities, she believes, had confused the status of memorial complex with “a site of interest” when granting permission for the MHS to carry out its exploratory excavations. She was referring to the archaeological investigation carried out by the Society at Sandarmokh between 25 August and 5 September 2018.

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The Ordeal resumes

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On Friday, 19 October 2018, the first hearing in Yury DMITRIEV’s second trial takes place. He will be represented, once again, by Victor Anufriev. At his defence lawyer’s insistence, both the charges against Dmitriev, the old and the new, will be heard as part of the same proceedings.

Dmitriev rearrested

Yury Dmitriev is re-arrested in June 2018 (photo from Frankfurter Allgemeine)

Meanwhile, attempts to sway public opinion and prejudge the outcome of the trial are again being made by Kremlin-controlled media.

On Tuesday 16 October, Meduza [R] reported, a camera crew from REN TV came to the head office of Memorial in Moscow: “They were asking us why we were defending Yury Dmitriev and how such people as Sergei Koltyrin came to be involved with our organisation,” said Alexandra Polivanova; “they were also waving around photographs from the Dmitriev case files, which should not be in their possession.”

Memorial called the police.

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Update on Koltyrin arrest

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On 3 October, Sergei KOLTYRIN and Yevgeny Nosov were remanded in custody until 27 November.  The charges concern a 13-year-old boy.  The Interfax news agency has asserted, citing an unnamed source, that Koltyrin has written a confession.

As with all proceedings against Dmitriev, the prosecution is able to hold them behind closed doors because of the age of the alleged victim.  Defence lawyer Victor ANUFRIEV, who has represented Dmitriev from the beginning, will be representing Koltyrin as well.

There appears to be no information about Nosov, except that he does not appear to have a lawyer.

Human Rights in Ukraine
3 October 2018