Support our fund-raiser for Angel Nikolaev’s defence in court
Angel Nikolaev is an anti-war activist from Khabarovsk [in the Russian Far East]. He was arrested in the summer of last year for an anti-war action, and his case is now in court. We have only recently learned of Angel’s case, and found a defence lawyer for him. Before this he had only a state-appointed lawyer, with whose work he was dissatisfied.
We are collecting €2400 to pay current legal fees, and for three months of the trial.
By supporting our fund-raisers, you are not breaking any Russian laws. We are not classified as foreign agents, or as an extremist or terrorist organisation — and so far, collecting money to pay legal fees in Russia has not been outlawed.
Support our fund-raiser for Angel Nikolaev’s defence in court
Angel Nikolaev is an anti-war activist from Khabarovsk [in the Russian Far East]. He was arrested in the summer of last year for an anti-war action, and his case is now in court. We have only recently learned of Angel’s case, and found a defence lawyer for him. Before this he had only a state-appointed lawyer, with whose work he was dissatisfied.
We are collecting €2400 to pay current legal fees, and for three months of the trial.
By supporting our fund-raisers, you are not breaking any Russian laws. We are not classified as foreign agents, or as an extremist or terrorist organisation — and so far, collecting money to pay legal fees in Russia has not been outlawed.
Again, in contrast to Facebook, Google and Twitter, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov runs his company in relative secrecy from Dubai. After fleeing Russia, the brothers founded Telegram as a way to communicate outside the Kremlin's orbit. They now run it from Dubai, and Pavel Durov says it has more than 500 million monthly active users. Telegram was co-founded by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, the brothers who had previously created VKontakte. VK is Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, a social network used for public and private messaging, audio and video sharing as well as online gaming. In January, SimpleWeb reported that VK was Russia’s fourth most-visited website, after Yandex, YouTube and Google’s Russian-language homepage. In 2016, Forbes’ Michael Solomon described Pavel Durov (pictured, below) as the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia.” The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. As a result, the pandemic saw many newcomers to Telegram, including prominent anti-vaccine activists who used the app's hands-off approach to share false information on shots, a study from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows.
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