On the morning of April 13, security forces detained Z-blogger Alexander Vaskovsky in St. Petersburg. This was reported by the authors of his Telegram channel, “A Flame Will Flare Up from Donetsk,” as noted by The Moscow Times. A protocol was drawn up against him under the article on “discrediting” the army.
Photo: Telegram channel “A Flame Will Flare Up from Donetsk”
The grounds for prosecuting Vaskovsky were two posts on his Telegram channel dated January 5, 2024. One of them concerned corruption within the ranks of the “people’s council” of the “DPR.”
In another post, Vaskovsky commented on the news that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had предложил the United States lift sanctions in exchange for captured Ukrainian soldiers. The blogger wrote that such a proposal was a “surrender of national interests,” adding that during the Great Patriotic War “they would have shot [someone] for that.”
In 2014, Vaskovsky was appointed co-chair of the “interim government” of the self-proclaimed “DPR,” and later head of the “transport committee” of the “Supreme Council.”
Shortly before his detention, Vaskovsky’s channel published a post about protests by Chinese workers in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. In it, he criticized the Russian authorities and called on the “proletarians of all countries to unite.”
“When the ruling class is in a state of crisis and war, its will becomes even weaker. Even without a crisis, one local police officer can do nothing against those who rise up in his precinct; the entire district department cannot handle a rebellious district; all the city’s security forces cannot overcome a rebellious city; all the country’s security forces cannot cope with a rebellious country. A capitalist is also weak before an organized workers’ collective,” the channel’s publication said.
On April 3, Vaskovsky published a post claiming that the Kremlin had failed in its campaign to recruit students into unmanned systems forces. In his view, this was precisely why the Russian authorities began recruiting state-funded employees and enterprise workers.