DISINFO: Russia brought real people back and gave away little animals in prisoner swap
SUMMARY
These are 'pseudo-dissidents'. There are dissidents, and these are those who did not serve out their prison terms. People who have returned to us, they are genuine people, for whom loyalty to the oath, which the president mentioned when meeting them, is not empty wording. These are true people. Those who left us were little animals. Good riddance to them.
RESPONSE
Hate speech about the prisoner exchange that took place on August 1, 2024, between Russia, the United States, Germany and other countries. People released from Russian prisons and expelled to the West were imprisoned for the so-called denigration of the armed forces of the Russian Federation— statements against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
UN experts expressed grave concerns about decisions by Russia’s Constitutional Court to dismiss challenges to the constitutionality of the country’s legislative provisions that criminalises all “public actions aimed at discrediting” the Russian Armed Forces. “The decision to deny constitutional protection of the right to freedom of expression constitutes a new low in Russia’s clampdown on the freedom of expression and the free flow of information,” the UN experts said.
Since the beginning of the Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, any objective information on civilian causalities, war crimes, investigated by ICC, committed at places such as Bucha, Mariupol, Kremenchuk, children's hospital Okhmatdyt in Kyiv, is considered "false information" by Russia and criminalised as "public actions aimed at discrediting" the Russian Army.
On the other side, the most famous Russian citizen returned to Russia is Vadim Krasikov, a Russian security officer who was sentenced to life in Germany for killing the Chechen refugee Zelimkhan Khangoshvili. To secure the release of this state assassin, Russia took hostages and arrested practically random victims, such as U.S. journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva. The Kremlin's tactics are not new.
In 2004, the tactics of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime became clear when a team of Russian agents allegedly assassinated a former Chechen leader, a refugee in Qatar, with a car bomb. The explosives, it turned out, had been carried in a Russian diplomatic vehicle. The Russians, both military officers, had been sent to Qatar as temporary embassy staffers about a month before the attack, and they lacked diplomatic immunity. A third alleged Russian conspirator was saved by his official diplomatic status.
After the Russians were caught, top officials in Moscow waged a campaign to intimidate Qatar into releasing the agents. Seeking bargaining chips, the Russians also grabbed two unlucky Qatari wrestlers who happened to be passing through Moscow on their way to a competition in Serbia. The Russian state assassins were sentenced to 25 years in prison in Qatar, but the Kremlin secured their return home.
Among the people released from Russia are also Oleg Orlov, the co-chair of the Nobel-winning human rights group "Memorial," and the dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who survived two poisonings in Russia.
Comparing freed Russians and a US citizen to "little animals" is dehumanizing language. During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Such dehumanisation opens the door to cruelty and genocide, as shown by the research in "Less Than Human: The Psychology of Cruelty."
See previous cases about these former prisoners such as about Evan Gershkovich, There is no freedom of speech in Europe and Kara-Murza was not poisoned.