Russian adult content provider forced to entrap gay men online by Dagestan police

tal, 21 days ago

However, they turned out to be officers from the Centre for Combating Extremism, a special unit within the Russian police

I have to admit, I do wonder whether that group’s job is just going after homosexuals or whether they deal with all the stuff that the Russian government flagged as “extremist”, like terrorism and suchlike too.

EDIT: Apparently they have an English-language Wikipedia page. Looks like it’s the latter:

en.wikipedia.org/…/Centre_for_Combating_Extremism

The Centre for Combating Extremism (Russian: Главное управление по противодействию экстремизму МВД России, romanized: Glavnoye upravleniye po protivodeystviyu ekstremizmu MVD Rossii), also known as Centre E (Russian: Центр «Э» [tsɛntr ɛ]) is a unit within the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

The unit was established by decree No. 1316 of the President of the Russian Federation on 16 September 2008.[1] The unit has been especially active in the North Caucasus and also in Crimea following its annexation in 2014.[2] Their official focus is the suppression of extremism. The Centre E has been widely accused of prosecuting and harassing opposition groups, anti-regime bloggers, environmentalists and other civic activists.[3][4] One example of their work is the suppression of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia.[5]

Diplomjodler3, 21 days ago

Obviously, anybody who doesn’t like the Putin regime is an extremist. Duh.

PhlubbaDubba, 21 days ago

Ironically they probably do quite a lot of work against those North Caucuses groups they coordinated with here, Russia post Soviet era has been…less than accomodating to people in that region getting too loud about how they’re different from Russians

Caligvla, 20 days ago

Jehovah’s Witnesses of all people? What does Russia have against them?

Stamau123, 20 days ago

From the holocaust encyclopedia, it’s about nazis but this is close enough:

Jehovah’s Witnesses were subjected to intense persecution under the Nazi regime. Nazi leaders targeted Jehovah’s Witnesses because they were unwilling to accept the authority of the state, because of their international connections, and because they were strongly opposed to both war on behalf of a temporal authority and organized government in matters of conscience.

tal, 20 days ago

My understanding is that they’ve had an issue with them for some years. My guess is that it may be that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has a lot of links to the state, doesn’t like competition, and that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are kinda famous for aggressively recruiting (like, going door-to-door to try and win new converts).

kagis

foreignpolicy.com/…/why-is-putin-afraid-of-jehova…

On Wednesday, authorities in Russian-occupied Crimea announced that they had arrested a 30-year-old man suspected of promoting an organization that had been banned and deemed extremist in Russia. The day before that, prosecutors in the Russian city of Smolensk asked a court to sentence three adherents of the same group to up to nine years behind bars. On Monday, in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, prosecutors sought seven years for a man charged with “organizing the activities of an extremist group.”

So who are these scary extremists? Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination with an estimated 175,000 followers in Russia. In 2017, Russia’s Supreme Court declared the group an extremist organization, lumping its non-violent adherents into the same category as neo-Nazis and members of al Qaeda.

As is often the case with authoritarian states, it’s hard to tell exactly what has prompted the crackdown—and there’s likely more than one reason. Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves are bewildered.

“If it wasn’t so serious, it would be a joke. It’s absurd. Jehovah’s Witnesses have been anything but extremist, and we’re certainly not dangerous or violent,” said Jarrod Lopes, a spokesperson for the group’s headquarters in the United States. Jehovah’s Witnesses remain politically neutral for religious reasons and do not vote, run for office, or protest. That might have spared them the arrests and harassment levied against protesters and opposition politicians in Russia, but their apolitical stance might have singled them out in other ways. “That looks very suspicious to our authorities,” said Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Moscow-based SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, which tracks discrimination and misuse of Russia’s extremism laws.

After Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 amid mass street protests against allegedly rigged elections, the Kremlin made a conscious effort to foment nationalism—and support for Putin. This new wave of patriotism was built around support for the armed forces and the Russian Orthodox Church, which is closely interwoven with the Russian state. All of this made Jehovah’s Witnesses—who refuse military conscription based on their faith—all the more conspicuous.

“I think it makes states that want a lot of control uncomfortable, because they can’t really control this community,” said Emily Baran, a history professor at Middle Tennessee State University.

Suspicion of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia dates back to the Soviet Union, when the group was outlawed and repeatedly maligned in the press, which portrayed them as fanatics and accused them of being criminals, con men, and Nazi collaborators. It created a stigma that was never undone. April 1 marks the 70th anniversary of the deportation of thousands of Soviet Jehovah’s Witnesses to Siberia during Stalin’s rule.

“I think that some conspiracy theory appeared somewhere inside the governmental structures regarding Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Verkhovsky said. “And we cannot even discuss it in public because these theories are not presented to the public.”

tal, 20 days ago

So, historically, you often had churches and states that had close ties. The church would help control the public and keep it in line with the state. The state would protect the church and give it special treatment.

And in Russia’s case, I understand that the head of the church has taken a very pro-Putin position. The Russian Orthodox Church, as I understand it, is considered by Kyiv to act on behalf of Moscow, doing intelligence-gathering and such; they closed them down.

theconversation.com/holy-wars-how-a-cathedral-of-…

A curious new church was dedicated on the outskirts of Moscow in June 2020: The Main Church of the Russian Armed Forces. The massive, khaki-colored cathedral in a military theme park celebrates Russian might. It was originally planned to open on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, in May 2020, but was delayed due to the pandemic.

Conceived by the Russian defense minister after the country’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the cathedral embodies the powerful ideology espoused by President Vladimir Putin, with strong support from the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Kremlin’s vision of Russia connects the state, military and the Russian Orthodox Church. As a scholar of nationalism, I see this militant religious nationalism as one of the key elements in Putin’s motivation for the invasion of Ukraine, my native country. It also goes a long way in explaining Moscow’s behavior toward the collective “West” and the post-Cold War world order.

The Russian president himself appeared in earlier versions of the cathedral’s frescoes, along with Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. However, the mosaic was removed after controversy, with Putin himself reportedly giving orders to take it down, saying it was too early to celebrate the country’s current leadership.

Patriarch Kirill, who has called Putin’s rule a “miracle of God,” said the new cathedral “holds the hope that future generations will pick up the spiritual baton from past generations and save the Fatherland from internal and external enemies.”

So if you figure that Putin is looking to use the Russian Orthodox Church the way that rulers often historically used churches, and that the Jehovah’s Witnesses – who are famous for going out of their way to find converts – are recruiting people who could be Russian Orthodox, which the Russian Orthodox Church isn’t gonna like, it maybe makes more sense.