Russian journalist who has spent years documenting abuses in Chechnya beaten, fingers broken and head shaved

A new attack against a journalist in Russia has once again put on the table the dangers of reporting on what is happening in Chechnya. Elena Milashina, a well-known journalist for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was traveling to the Chechen capital Grozny from the city’s airport with lawyer Alexander Nemov when they were attacked. The attackers shaved Milashina’s head, broke several of her fingers and covered her head with green antiseptic. While they were being beaten, they were told: “You have been warned. Get out of here and don’t write anything.” team,” the human rights organization Memorial said in a statement on Telegram. “Several masked people beat up Elena and Alexander, took their phones demanding they unlock them, destroyed their equipment and documents. They beat them with sticks and kicked them,” Novaya Gazeta confirmed in a statement. The newspaper (which with the beginning of the war, he lost his license to operate in Russia) has been persecuted by the Putin regime for years. Your readers too. In each report they include a note for the user: “We remind you that ‘Novaya Gazeta Europa’ has been declared undesirable. Do not link us on social networks if you are in Russia.” A photograph of Milashina published on social networks showed her sitting in a hospital bed with her face covered in a green antiseptic substance (a common method in the old USSR to shame dissidents), her head shaved, and bandages on her left arm and right hand. Focus on abuses against rights in Chechnya, Milashina has followed in the footsteps of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist highly critical of the Kremlin’s policies in the Caucasus, who was shot dead in 2006. Milashina, who has investigated what she said was the mass arrest and torture of gay men in the region, was evacuated by Russia’s Novaya Gazeta last year after Kadyrov described her as a “terrorist” in a social media post. But Milashina and Nemov were back in Chechnya to cover the sentencing against Zarema. Musayeva, a Chechen woman accused of assaulting a police officer. For a long time, Nemov acted as an advocate in the case of this 53-year-old woman who was kidnapped by Chechen security forces and accused of using violence against a government official and fraud. “The defense is waiting for the acquittal by the Zarema court,” wrote the lawyer a few hours before the start of the hearing. Shortly before noon, a Grozny district court sentenced Musaeva to five and a half years in prison. Milashina and Nemov did not attend. The car they were traveling in was blocked by armed men in three cars. They were severely beaten, their equipment and documents were stolen. After the attack, the victims were taken to hospital. Milashina was diagnosed with a closed head injury, the fingers of both her hands were broken. Apparently they broke them when they insisted that she provide the unlock code for her mobile. “They tied my hands, they put me on my knees, they put a gun to my head,” the victim herself said from the hospital. Nemov was stabbed in the leg. ‘STRIPPING’ KADIROV

Elena Milashina has been working at Novaya Gazeta for more than 25 years, since 1997. According to her colleagues, she came to the newspaper with the intention of writing about animals and culture, “but life had other plans.” Few like her have revealed what is behind Kadirov’s brutal regime. The journalist has also recently inquired about the role of Kadirov and the Wagners in the struggle for power. On the day of the Prigozhin mutiny, Milashina wrote that in the coming days there was a risk of a clash between the Chechens and the Wagnerites. The journalist published a report on how these two armies are organized and why a confrontation could be a disaster for Russia. Almost two hours after Putin’s speech to the citizens of Russia about Prigozhin’s betrayal, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadirov , made a statement: in the same vein as Putin, he called what was happening “a heinous betrayal” that amounted to “a stab in the back.” Like Putin, she did not name his ally, with whom she had recently sided even in criticism of the Defense Ministry’s leadership. Milashina is convinced that the break in this “alliance” was absolutely scheduled. “This is not a mistake of two passionate personalities, but a conflict of two completely different survival strategies.” Last summer, with a deceptive calm at the front, most of the Kadyrovites mobilized in Ukraine returned to the Chechen republic. But already at the end of August, when it became clear that the Ukrainian army had become more active, Kadyrov was forced to urgently transfer to Ukraine the battalions that had just been created in Chechnya, directly subordinate to the Ministry of Defense. “Recruitment for these new military units turned out to be a failure. A year ago, the Chechens would have stood in a huge queue to join the Russian army, but now it was impossible to summon them there with gingerbread,” Milashina said. under the command of General Alexander Lapin, against whom on October 1 Kadirov issued a famous defiant statement criticizing the general’s command style (without explaining what his soldiers were doing, involved in those withdrawals). Kadirov’s example opened new horizons for Prigozhin, who in the end went too far. When Prigozhin, in a head-on clash with the top of the Defense Ministry, began indiscriminately emphasizing his own indispensability at the expense of all his allies, Kadyrov took umbrage. And there began a struggle to appropriate certain achievements at the front. In addition, Prigozhin wanted martial law and the economy of war, directing all spending towards the Ukrainian offensive. But Kadirov is a subsidized viceroy, the republic from him received “unprecedented help from the Russian federal budget.” And he does not want to lose it. Both armed leaders were definitively at odds when the Ministry of Defense ordered that all participants in volunteer formations (or the mercenary formations themselves) must sign a contract with the Ministry of War before July 1. A dead end for Prigozhin, but not for Kadirov. KADIROV: “WE’RE GOING TO SOLVE IT” Kadirov reacted in the early afternoon saying that he had instructed the competent authorities to identify those involved in the attack. However, it was he who at the beginning of last year openly threatened Milashina, calling the journalist a “terrorist” and “accomplice of terrorists” and demanding her arrest. “We are going to solve it. I ordered the competent services to do everything possible to identify the attackers,” Kadirov said today. “We are talking about a very serious attack that requires quite strong measures,” said Dimitri Peskov, press secretary to the President of the Russian Federation. “Both were kicked, punched, reminded of their work, the courts, the trials, everything that Elena Milashina wrote. Clearly, this is not an attack by gangsters, this is an attack for their activities,” explained the head of the NGO Team Against Torture, Sergei Babinets, who went to the hospital with Milashina and Nemov, who are being treated in Beslan, in the neighboring Republic of North Ossetia. Milashina has lost consciousness several times while she was making her first statements. Both can hardly walk. Babinets believes that the attack is “generally due to the publications of Elena Milashina, which are completely truthful and not complimentary to the Government of the Chechen Republic.” “There is the truth about what was happening with human rights,” he added.

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