Search
A court has arrested Dagestani human rights defender and founder of the Marem Centre, Svetlana Anokhina, in absentia on charges related to military “false information.” This was reported by the outlet “Kavkaz.Realii.”
Anokhina’s case has been sent to court. She is accused under an article for knowingly spreading false information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, with the artificial creation of evidence (paragraph “v,” part 2, article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). Another defendant is also named in the case, a 37-year-old native of Dagestan, but the Investigative Committee has not disclosed his name.
According to investigators, the accused, while abroad in 2022, “publicly spread knowingly false information on social media about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, presenting it as reliable.” The second defendant has also been placed in pre-trial detention in absentia.
News of a criminal case against Svetlana Anokhina first emerged in April 2023. At that time, it was reported she was also charged under the military “false information” article, but under the first, not the second, part.
Anokhina left Russia in 2021 after a search was conducted at the Marem shelter for women who survived domestic violence. At that time, security forces took Chechen woman Khalimat Taramova, whom Svetlana Anokhina had been assisting, from Dagestan to Chechnya. Taramova’s father, Ayub Taramov, was an associate of Kadyrov and at that time was the first deputy minister of housing and communal services in Chechnya.
After the start of the war, in April 2022, police visited Svetlana Anokhina’s elderly mother. Officers questioned the woman about her daughter’s anti-war post on Instagram. The human rights defender then suggested that police knew about her emigration and considered the visit an act of pressure because of her humanitarian work.
“The goal is this: to show that no one should dare move, that people know they’ll come after your relatives, your elderly parents, your children,” Anokhina commented.
In August 2023, a search was again carried out at her and her mother’s home as part of the case concerning “false information” about the Russian army. In the house at the time, along with the elderly woman, were the human rights defender’s eldest daughter and her three granddaughters.
In September 2024, law enforcement officers once again came to Anokhina’s mother. They took a saliva sample from the woman. The rights defender compared the actions of the security officials to the practice in Dagestan whereby people labelled “militants” by the authorities are found “liquidated,” and officials later identify them by matching DNA with relatives.
Anokhina linked the most recent visit from the security forces to the criminal case against her.