Ukraine Cracks Down on ‘Traitors’ Aiding Russian Troops

Ukrainians by and large stand with the national cause to toss Vladimir Putin’s oversize jackboots into the dustbin of history, but some are cozier to the Kremlin’s cause than many in the West might think. If they thought their misguided loyalties would go unnoticed, though, they were mistaken.Nearly 400 people in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region alone have been detained under anti-collaboration laws enacted quickly by Ukraine’s parliament and signed by President Zelensky after Russia’s February 24 invasion.Offenders face up to 15 years in prison for collaborating with Russian forces, making public denials about Russian aggression, or supporting Moscow. Anyone whose actions result in deaths could face life in prison.“Accountability for collaboration is inevitable, and whether it will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow is another question,” Mr. Zelensky said. “The most important thing is that justice will be served inevitably.”Although the Zelensky government has broad support, even among many Russian speakers, not all Ukrainians oppose the invasion. Support for Moscow is more common among some Russian-speaking residents of the eastern Donbas, where an 8-year conflict between Moscow-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces had resulted in more than 14,000 deaths even before this year’s invasion.Earlier this month, Ukraine’s government placed a billionaire lawmaker and Jewish community leader, Vadim Rabinovic, on a list of 111 people it called traitors in the war with Russia. According to the JTA, last year Mr. Rabinovich launched a failed attempt to impeach Mr. Zelensky over the government’s shuttering of three television stations deemed to be pro-Russian.Some businessmen, civic and state officials, and members of the military are among those who allegedly have gone over to the Russian side, and Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations said more than 200 criminal cases on collaboration have been opened. Mr. Zelensky has even stripped two SBU generals of their ranks, accusing them of treason.A “registry of collaborators” is being compiled and will be released to the public, the head of Ukraine’s Security Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said. He refused to say how many people were targeted nationwide.Under martial law, authorities have banned 11 pro-Russian political parties, including the largest one that had 25 seats in the 450-member parliament — the Opposition Platform For Life, which was founded by Viktor Medvedchuk, a jailed oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin.Authorities say pro-Russian activists in southeastern Ukraine, the scene of active fighting, are acting as spotters to direct shelling.“One of our key goals is to have no one stab our armed forces in the back,” the head of the Kharkiv branch of the SBU, Roman Dudin, said in an interview with the Associated Press. He spoke in a dark basement where the SBU moved its operations after its building in central Kharkiv was shelled.The Kharkiv branch has been detaining people who support the invasion, call for secession, and claim that Ukrainian forces are shelling their own cities.Allegations of collaborating with the enemy carry strong historic resonance in Ukraine. During World War II, some in the region welcomed and even cooperated with invading forces from Nazi Germany after years of Stalinist repression that included the “Holodomor,” a man-made famine believed to have killed more than 3 million Ukrainians. For years afterward, Soviet authorities cited the cooperation of some Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis as a reason to demonize today’s democratically elected leaders of Ukraine.Human rights advocates know of “dozens” of detentions of pro-Russian activists in Kyiv alone since the new laws were passed, but how many have been targeted nationwide is unclear, a coordinator at the Center for Civil Liberties, one of Ukraine’s largest human rights groups, Volodymyr Yavorskyy, said.“There is no complete data on the [entire] country, since it is all classified by the SBU,” Mr. Yavorsky told the AP.“Ukrainian authorities are actively using the practice of Western countries, in particular the U.K., which imposed harsh restrictions on civic liberties in warring Northern Ireland. Some of those restrictions were deemed unjustified by human rights advocates, but others were justified, when people’s lives were in danger,” he said.A person in Ukraine can be detained for up to 30 days without a court order, he said, and antiterrorism legislation under martial law allows authorities not to tell defense attorneys about their clients being remanded.“In effect, these people disappear, and for 30 days there’s no access to them,” Mr. Yavorskyy said. “In reality, [law enforcement] has powers to take anyone.”The government knows the implications of detaining people over their opinions, including that it risks playing into Moscow’s line that Kyiv is repressing Russian speakers. But in wartime, officials say, freedom of speech is only part of the equation.“The debate about the balance of national security and ensuring freedom of speech is endless,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told the AP.Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office, said her agency has documented “cases of arrests and detention allegedly made by Ukrainian law enforcement authorities, which may involve elements of human rights violations,” and is following up with the Ukrainian government.She said her office is looking into eight cases that “appear to be disappearances of people considered as ‘pro-Russian,’ and we have documented two cases of unlawful killings of ‘pro-Russians,’” along with cases of vigilantism, in which law enforcement and others punish those suspected of being pro-Russian,In the town of Bucha, now a symbol of horrific violence in the war, Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said collaborators gave invading troops the names and addresses of pro-Ukrainian activists and officials in the city outside Kyiv, with hundreds of civilians shot to death with their hands tied behind their backs or their bodies burned by Russian forces.“I saw these execution lists, dictated by the traitors — the Russians knew in advance who they’re going to, at what address, and who lives there,” Mr. Fedoruk, who saw his own name on one list, said. “Of course, Ukrainian authorities will search for and punish these people.”In the besieged port city of Mariupol, officials accused collaborators of helping the Russians cut off electricity, running water, gas and communications in much of the city.“Now I understand perfectly why the Russians were carrying out such precise, coordinated strikes on objects of critical infrastructure, knew about all locations and even times when Ukrainian buses evacuating refugees were supposed to depart,” Mayor Vadym Boychenko said.

Ukraine Cracks Down on ‘Traitors’ Aiding Russian Troops

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