Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Credit: Reuters Photo
London: On the last day of January, a woman took her son to see paediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova at Polyclinic No. 140 in northwest Moscow. The boy, aged seven, had a problem with one of his eyes.
The conversation that the boy's mother alleged took place during an 18-minute encounter at the clinic would change both women's lives and land the 68-year-old doctor in prison.
The case hinged on a denunciation - part of a rising trend of Russians informing on fellow citizens for their views on the war in Ukraine and other alleged political crimes. Critics say the wave of denunciations is helping President Vladimir Putin's government crack down on dissent.
In a video recorded as she was walking away from the clinic, the mother, Anastasia Akinshina, said she had told the doctor the boy was traumatised because his father was killed fighting for Russia in the war in Ukraine.
"Do you know what she told me? 'Well, my dear, what do you expect? Your husband was a legitimate target of Ukraine,'" Akinshina said, mimicking the doctor's voice and intonation.
Fighting back tears, Akinshina said she had raised the incident with the hospital administration and suspected they planned to hush it up.
"So the question is: where can I complain about this bitch now, so that she'll be kicked out of the fucking country or sent to the devil in jail?" she said in the video, which went viral on social media and thrust her into a high-profile criminal trial as the key prosecution witness.
At the trial, Buyanova denied making the comment. But despite a lack of further adult witnesses, the denunciation was sufficient to destroy her 40-year medical career and her life. The doctor, who had been in pre-trial detention since April, appeared before a Moscow court on Tuesday, her grey hair closely cropped.
She was found guilty under a wartime censorship law of "publicly spreading deliberately false information" about the armed forces and sentenced to five-and-a-half years in a penal colony. Buyanova was born in Ukraine but is a citizen of Russia, where she has lived and worked for three decades. Her lawyer Oscar Cherdzhiyev told Reuters the defence believed Akinshina acted out of malice because of the doctor's Ukrainian origins.
Akinshina did not respond to written questions for this story, or answer her phone.
At the trial, she stated: "We are Russian. Buyanova hates Russians. She feels hostility towards me, that's what I think," according to a transcript by independent Russian outlet Mediazona.
Two hospital staff who saw Akinshina after the consultation with Buyanova described her in evidence as being distraught.
The prosecution's case was based almost entirely on Akinshina's account, along with a transcript read out in the trial of an interview with the child, conducted by an officer of the FSB security service. At first, Akinshina said the boy was not in the room when the comments were made, but later changed her story, telling the court she originally spoke in a state of shock.
The judge rejected the defence's request to put its own questions to the child.
Russian rights group OVD-Info has recorded 21 criminal prosecutions in politically-motivated cases based on denunciations since the launch of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Eva Levenberg, a lawyer with the group, told Reuters.
Levenberg, who lives in Germany, said OVD-Info knew of a further 175 people who had faced lower-level administrative charges for "discrediting" the Russian army as a result of people informing on them in the same period, and 79 of these had been fined.
Reuters was unable to independently confirm the numbers Levenberg provided.
Russia's Justice Ministry did not respond to requests for comment about the data or the use of denunciations to support prosecutions, including in the Buyanova case. In response to a question posed by Reuters, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin does not comment on court rulings.
'Scum and traitors'
Putin has said the country is in a proxy war with the West, and citizens need to help root out internal enemies. In March 2022, weeks after the invasion, he declared that the Russian people "will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths."
Since the start of the Ukraine war, according to OVD-Info, the authorities have detained more than 20,000 people for various forms of anti-war statements or protests, and launched criminal cases against 1,094 individuals.
In news reports, court cases and on social media, examples have come to light of neighbour informing on neighbour, churchgoers denouncing priests and students reporting on teachers.
For some, the resulting current climate is reminiscent of the atmosphere of mutual distrust and suspicion under Soviet Communist rule.
Olga Podolskaya is a former municipal deputy for the Tula region, south of Moscow, who by her own account earned a "pesky" reputation as an independent local politician prepared to stand up to the authorities. In the first hours after the Ukraine invasion, she added her signature to an open letter describing it as "an unprecedented atrocity" and urging citizens to speak out against it.
Four months later, she was the subject of a public denunciation that asked for her finances to be investigated after she collected public donations to pay off a fine related to a protest in 2020. The denunciation was filed under the name "Olga Minenkova", but Podolskaya said no such person was ever identified, and she suspects the identity was a fake one. Reuters has seen a copy of the denunciation, but could not establish who filed it.
Further public accusations followed, against her and her husband. Asked how she felt at the time, Podolskaya said it made her think of her great-grandfather, executed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1938 after someone informed against him.
"The time of denunciations and 'enemies of the people' had returned. I realised that they were hinting I should leave the country," said Podolskaya.
She left, in April 2023. In September that year she was placed on the Ministry of Justice's public "foreign agent" list. To protect her security, she asked Reuters not to disclose where she is based now.
'From a bygone era'
Doctor Andrei Prokofiev was targeted in 2023 by a prolific informer called Anna Korobkova who wrote to his employer demanding he be fired for anti-war comments he made to a foreign news outlet.
Korobkova did not reply to a request for comment.
In a letter last year to Alexandra Arkhipova, a sociologist who was the target of one of her denunciations, Korobkova said informing was "in her blood" as her grandfather had worked with Stalin's NKVD secret police. Arkhipova posted the letter on Telegram.
Korobkova said she sent 764 denunciations to government agencies in the first year of the war alone, focusing on Russians who speak to foreign media. She likened her work to "using submarines to destroy enemy ships".
Reuters was unable to confirm the extent or impact of her activity.
Prokofiev told Reuters he suffered no repercussions, as he lives in Germany. But he fears going back to Russia: "I don't think I would make it out of the airport. They would start a criminal case right away."
Prokofiev took a particular interest in Buyanova's case because, when he lived in Russia, his son was one of her patients. He describes her as a quiet, modest person - "an elderly figure from a bygone era" who tapped awkwardly with just one or two fingers on her computer.
There has been some pushback against her trial. Prokofiev was among a total of 1,035 doctors who declared solidarity with Buyanova in an open letter, warning the case would put young people off entering medicine. Some of the doctors appeared in their scrubs speaking out in a video compilation posted on Facebook.
Alexander Polupan, the doctor behind the Buyanova initiative as well as letters in support of dissidents including the late Alexei Navalny, said at least seven medics were questioned by police after signing them. Reuters could not verify those interrogations, and the Russian interior ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Polupan himself left Russia last year, "when it became clear I would be arrested any day", he told Reuters.
Rachel Denber, Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asian Division of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said prosecuting an older defendant from a respected profession sent a signal that nobody can afford to defy the official line on Ukraine.
Even if Buyanova had said that Russian soldiers on the battlefield were legitimate targets for Ukraine, the assertion would be correct under international law, Denber said.
"That is the Geneva Conventions," she added.
International law governing war allows for the use of lethal force against clearly identified enemy combatants in certain situations.
At the trial, prosecutors gave details of messages and images on Buyanova's mobile phone that did not relate to the dispute with Akinshina but were used to present a picture of someone with pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian views.
The defence said someone else had used the device and the messages weren't hers.
In her final speech at the summing-up, the doctor was tearful. She asked the court to take into account her age, fragile health and decades of service.
Supporters in tee-shirts printed with Buyanova's unassuming image shouted "shame" at the sentencing.
Before the verdict was read, Buyanova expressed shock at what was happening.
"I can't get my head around it," she told reporters. "Maybe I will later."