A source close to the human rights activists said that Dmitriev needs to be transferred to a city hospital because, in his words, the availability of the necessary diagnostic and treatment equipment in the prison medical facility is questionable. According to him, on September 26 the lawyer will try to see Dmitriev, although the human rights activists’ interlocutor is almost certain that he will not be allowed in on the weekend.
Yuri Dmitriev is a historian and former head of Karelia’s Memorial. In 1997, he discovered mass graves of repressed citizens of the USSR in the Sандармох forest clearing and compiled memorial lists of repressed residents of Karelia.
Dmitriev has been in prison since 2016. At that time, he was accused of producing pornography involving his underage adopted daughter, lewd acts toward her, and unlawful possession of part of a firearm, and the trigger was photographs of his daughter found with him.
Dmitriev himself denied the charges and claimed that he took the photographs solely for medical purposes in order to track the child’s development. In April 2018, the court acquitted him on two charges and sentenced him to 3.5 years of restricted freedom under the weapons-possession article, but the Supreme Court of Karelia overturned that verdict.
After that, another case was opened against him — involving violent sexual acts, for which Dmitriev was sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony. In December 2021, a court in Petrozavodsk, by combining the sentences, sentenced him to 15 years in a high-security penal colony. More than 150 Russian cultural figures and more than 400 foreign scholars signed collective letters in his support, and Nobel Prize in Literature laureates Herta Müller and Svetlana Alexievich, as well as Goncourt Prize laureate Jonathan Littell, also spoke out; Memorial considers Dmitriev a political prisoner.
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