Maria Tomak

A few months ago I came across a book, Chechnya: Life in War (http://zhaina.com/history/105-chechnya_zhizn_na_voine.html), which its authors, Russian human rights activists, also call “Chechnya for dummies.” It is a collection of evidence about the Chechen wars, a detailed chronicle of...

Given the Russian aggression, the case of a mass-scale Maidan shooting would still be watched by “peripheral vision” if the notorious Kyiv Pechersk District Court’s judge Svitlana Volkova had not ruled the week before last to release Major Dmytro Sadovnyk, commander of a special-...

Head of the Belarusian Human Rights Center “Viasna” Ales Bialiatski, imprisoned for “tax evasion,” spent almost 3 years behind bars, from August 4, 2011, to July 20, 2014. He was supposed to be released only in February of 2016, and according to him, he was psychologically...

Senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute, a research fellow for Hoover Institution, a Radio Liberty journalist David SATTER in the 1970s was a Moscow correspondent in The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. David has written three books. One of them, Age of Delirium: The Decline and...

Ten years ago, on October 25, Federal Security Service (FSB) commandos stormed Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s airplane in Novosibirsk. Since then, the former co-owner and head of the company YUKOS has been behind bars. With his prison term to expire next August, many begin to doubt that he will be...

Before the November Summit in Vilnius, it is important to know what is happening in Brussels and Moscow, if there are any changes to views and moods. Especially in Moscow, not only because Ukraine’s European destiny has been decided there on more than one occasion – in a variety of ways...

A few dozens of people gathered at the Nikulinsky District Court of Moscow, where hearings on the Bolotnaya Square case take place. These are mostly lawyers, human rights activists, and relatives of the accused. Many of them are wearing badges “Freedom to prisoners of May 6.” Basically...

Last year, 87,000 applications were submitted to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, 40 percent of them being complaints about officials. Overall 42 proceedings on obstructing journalists’ legal professional activity are being considered by the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine. One-...

In the Nazi era, there was a forced labor camp and a death camp in a small German town of Braunschweig, whose inmates also included Ukrainians. This place claimed an estimated 4,800 Ukrainian lives. As a matter of fact, immediately after the end of World War II several monuments were built in...

An Indian daily, The Times of India,  has recently published the article “Netaji Papers Stolen from Russia.” The article quotes a monk from the Ramakrishna Mission’s Moscow chapter as saying that the Indian government’s Mukherjee Commission, which sought in Russian...