‘Russian Courts Now Agree with Putin that “Russia has No Borders,’” Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 11 – Russian courts now are behaving very differently than did their Soviet predecessors, Vadim Shtepa says. They aren’t ignoring those Russian citizens who have left the country but regularly imposing fines on them for supposed crimes committed abroad in a transparent attempt to harass them and earn money for the Kremlin.

            More than that, and involving far greater sums, the editor of the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal says, Russian courts are now bringing charges against foreign countries like Finland and demanding astronomical sums in compensation (svoboda.org/a/ot-korei-do-karelii-vadim-shtepa-o-rossiyskom-sudoproizvodstve/33068121.html).

            Shtepa draws this conclusion on the basis both of his own experience in which a Russian court has fined him for remarks he made at a conference abroad and of that of a Karelian court which is now seeking 20 trillion rubles (200 million US dollars) for supposed Finnish acts of genocide against Russia during World War II.

            A Russian court fined Shtepa a much smaller sum – 5000 rubles (50 US dollars) – a fine he didn’t want to pay but that his lawyer advised him he might want to in order to avoid problems should he seek to give up Russian citizenship. If he doesn’t pay, the fines will go up and he would face real problems in that event.

            It turns out, he continues, that “all who have the misfortune to receive a Russian passport in fact are now hostages of this state.”

            The expansive vision of Russian courts about their powers over Russian citizens now abroad pales in comparison with that concerning their ability to sue foreign governments like Finland’s.  And what a Petrozavodsk court is now doing regarding Finland opens the door to even more such abuses against other countries in the future.

            According to Shtepa, the motivation of the courts and the Kremlin behind them is not only to show that the Russian state is contemptuous of international law but also to earn real money for the Putin regime so that it can engage in wars like the one it is currently waging in Ukraine.