“The launch of historian Yuri Dmitriev is especially pressing, it’s a query of survival! » | EUROtoday

Lhe launch of individuals persecuted by totalitarian regimes should stay one of many major duties of worldwide diplomacy, even when this concern can’t be completely resolved by this implies. Currently, greater than 4,600 individuals are imprisoned in Russia on political grounds. All these folks should be launched! But, in some circumstances, the query of their speedy launch is especially pressing, as a result of it’s a query of survival.

This is the case of Yuri Dmitriev, one of many first and longest-serving political prisoners of the present wave of repression led by Putin. Arrested in December 2016 on trumped-up fees, he has been imprisoned for greater than 9 years. On January 28, 2026, he turned 70. He will spend this birthday in a excessive safety penal colony in Mordovia. Several of his persistent diseases have worsened since his incarceration.

Instead of receiving remedy, Dmitriev is often punished due to his poor well being: he has been positioned in a disciplinary cell on a number of events for attempting to take a seat up in mattress through the day or for not doing his morning workout routines with sufficient vitality. Suspected of getting most cancers, Dmitriev has been denied any prognosis and any acceptable remedy for 3 years. According to the decision, he should stay in detention for an additional six years. However, any delay in offering acceptable medical care might shortly show deadly.

Work of reminiscence

The purpose why a prison case was opened in opposition to Yuri Dmitriev is obvious: it’s his analysis work on the historical past of Stalinist terror in Karelia, in northern Russia, and his want to protect the reminiscence of those crimes. Yuri Dmitriev headed the Karelian part of the Russian Memorial Association. For thirty years, he looked for the burial websites of the victims of the Great Terror and reconstructed, from affected person analysis within the archives, the destiny of the murdered folks.

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