Trial of Seven Ingush Protest Leaders Shifted from One Russian City to Another

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – Even before the first day of the trial, the authorities shifted the venue from one Russian city (Kislovodsk) to another (Essentuki), ostensibly to provide more room for family members given pandemic distancing requirements but clearly yet another effort by the powers that be to limit any show of support for these political prisoners.

            But that was not the end of the problems with this case today. The witnesses who were supposed to show up didn’t, and so the session which lasted 4.5 hours was devoted to listening to prosecutors read from some of the 120 volumes of evidence investigators and prosecutors have gathered (fortanga.org/2020/12/svideteli-obvineniya-po-delu-ingushskih-aktivistov-ne-yavilis-v-sud/).

            Lawyers for the defendant expect that the case will last over 15 to 20 work days, although if witnesses don’t show up or there are other problems, those days could extend over many weeks. What the powers that be do not seem to understand is that the longer this goes on and the more judicial errors and political moves surface, the angrier the Ingush are likely to become.

            It is bad enough that Moscow and Magas not only insist on having the trials outside the borders of the Ingush Republic and continue to make charges for which there is no evidence aside from anonymous witnesses. But it is even worse when officials can’t even manage to have their own witnesses show up.

            As Magomed Mutsolgov, chairman of the Ingush NGO Coordinating Council, warned in open letters to Moscow and Magas, if the two government’s don’t intervene to stop what is becoming a farce, the trust that the Ingush people have in the two of them, already low, will collapse altogether (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/11/putin-kalimatov-warned-ingush-trust-in.html).

            If that happens, mass protests in Ingushetia could soon resume; and they would likely be more radical both in their behavior and their demands than anything the powers that be have had to contend with up to now. In that event, the powers would have to decide whether to come down even harder or make concessions that could calm the situation.

            The former is more likely, of course, but a feint in the direction of the latter may nonetheless occur, given that neither Moscow nor Magas can easily afford the emergence of yet another hot spot within the current borders of the Russian Federation.