Ruslan Kozaba

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Ruslan Kozaba (2013)

Ruslan Petrowytsch Kozaba ( Ukrainian Руслан Петрович Коцаба ; born June 18, 1966 in Ivano-Frankivsk , Ukrainian SSR , Soviet Union ) is a Ukrainian journalist, conscientious objector and political prisoner.

biography

Ruslan Kozaba was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine in 1966 . In 1990, as a student, he took part in student protests against the communist rulers. After graduating from an administrative academy, he headed the fisheries and migration control in his native Ivano-Frankivsk. During the Orange Revolution in 2004 he was organizationally active for the protest movement. Until 2014 he worked as a freelance correspondent for the television channel 112 Ukraine .

Prosecution

During the war in eastern Ukraine , Kozaba, who personally visited Donbass , became widely known for his calls for a peaceful political solution to the conflict and against military action by the Ukrainian government. For example, he published a video on YouTube that hundreds of thousands of people had seen, in which he expressed his unwillingness to join the army and called for a general boycott of the current wave of mobilizations, which is illegal since no state of war has been declared. He also said that he would rather spend two to five years in prison than "knowingly murder my fellow countrymen in the East." It is "impossible in the 21st century for people to kill people just because they want to live independently". According to him, the war in eastern Ukraine is a civil war with little participation by Russian citizens.

Kozaba's appeal drew the attention of the Russian media, whereupon Kozaba, at the invitation of the broadcaster Rossija 1, took part in the political talk program “Spezialny Korrespondent” in Moscow , where he repeated his views.

After this performance, the Ivano-Frankivsk public prosecutor's office initiated criminal proceedings against Kozaba for high treason and obstruction to mobilization at the initiative of the SBU security service . On February 7, 2015, Kozaba was arrested and brought before the judge. During the trial, Kozaba refused to acknowledge his "high treason" and repeated his call to Ukrainians not to join the army. He compared the trial against himself to Stalinist show trials and called it an attack on freedom of speech.

Although the mobilization rate in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast was the lowest in the country, the prosecution could not find any witnesses who attributed their non-mobilization to Kozaba. Ivano-Frankivsk soldiers from the front appeared as witnesses, accusing Kozaba of sabotaging the rotation and thus making their personal military service conditions more difficult. The prosecution demanded 13 years imprisonment for Kozaba with the confiscation of his private property.

On May 12, 2016, Ruslan Kozaba was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. The court did not find high treason in his actions but found him guilty of "obstructing the lawful activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine".

Reactions

Amnesty International called on Ukraine to release the journalist immediately and named Kozaba a prisoner of conscience . According to Tatiana Masur, the head of AI's Ukraine branch, Kozaba has been punished for his civil position and his arrest violates the fundamental human right to freedom of expression . The organization Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union called the Kozaba case "persecution for political reasons". The Ukrainian human rights representative Valerija Lutkowska sees Kozaba's conviction as a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights .

Anti-Semitism Controversy

On May 8, 2019, the board of the Aachen Peace Prize Association announced that this year's Peace Prize would be awarded to Ruslan Kozaba in autumn. This led to considerable resentment among Ukrainian bloggers and Putin critics, who accused Kozaba of taking sides with the insurgents in eastern Ukraine and of trivializing the conflict as a civil war, and referred to a video in which he spoke on the subject of the Holocaust. In an article by journalist Karl-Hermann Leukert on the salon columnists' blog , it was said that Kozaba had not only played down the Holocaust in the video, but also believed that the Jews were to blame for it. Literally it said (after a translation by Boris Reitschuster ): "The Jews remember this period (meaning the Holocaust) probably with sadness, how they ran like sheep and were shot by the thousands, although they were shot by only one, two machine gunmen were guarded, although they could have crushed any convoy with their masses. But they just felt that they had to serve a sentence for cultivating National Socialism, cultivating communism. ”After the association's board member, Lea Heuser, spoke of a“ manipulation ”of the video, Kozaba gave a little later to have made these statements. He regretted these statements, but pointed out that they were out of context.

The association's board and member of the Bundestag Andrej Hunko (Die Linke) stated that they had no knowledge of the video at the time of the price decision. They considered the statements to be "completely unacceptable", but wanted to stick to the decision. Hunko was of the opinion that Kozaba had credibly broken away from his past. He has transformed himself from a representative of “questionable political positions” and a supporter of the Maidan, which ultimately led to the war in eastern Ukraine, to a “determined opponent and pacifist ”. This statement, which was posted on the association's Facebook page, aroused fierce criticism from supporters of the Maidan and opponents of eastern Ukrainian separatism because Hunko gave the impression that anti-Semitism was a feature of the Ukrainian independence movement. The statement was deleted after a few hours. On May 10, 2019, the association's board announced that it would revoke its decision to award the award to Kozaba, subject to a membership vote, which should take place on June 14, 2019.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Unwanted free thinkers. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . June 2, 2016, accessed May 11, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b Amnesty International назвала украинского журналиста Руслана Коцабу узником совести.
  3. ↑ a b Українська Гельсінська спілка назвала арешт Руслана Коцаби "переслідуванням за політичними мотивами" ( Memento of 28 May 2016 Internet Archive ). In: .telekritika.ua, February 10, 2015, accessed on May 11, 2019.
  4. ↑ Візит Байдена: кінець пільгового періоду для Києва? In: Deutsche Welle. December 7, 2015
  5. ↑ a b With arrests and "Internet soldiers" against Russia. In: Süddeutsche . February 26, 2015.
  6. ↑ "Он системно гадил украинской обороне" Кто такой журналист Руслан Коцаба, которого сумят зе Унерана. In: meduza.io, accessed on May 11, 2019.
  7. ↑ Суд заарештував на два місяці журналіста Р.Коцабу, якого підозрюють у держаній зраді. In: unn.com.ua .
  8. ↑ Валерія Лутковська: "Таке обмеження свободи, як у справі Руслана Коцаби, є недопустимим у демократичному суспільстві".
  9. ↑ Ruslan Kotsaba: The Russians bred Stalin and Hitler. In: dailymotion . September 1, 2018, accessed May 11, 2019 .
  10. ↑ From Aachen to Zyklon B. In: Salon columnists . May 9, 2019, accessed May 11, 2019 .
  11. ^ Controversy about Aachen Peace Prize Laureates. In: Deutsche Welle. May 10, 2019, accessed May 11, 2019 .
  12. ^ Scandal at the Aachen Peace Prize. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . May 11, 2019, accessed May 11, 2019 .
  13. ^ No Aachen Peace Prize to Ruslan Kotsaba. In: Deutsche Welle. May 11, 2019, accessed May 11, 2019 .
  14. ↑ board resolution of the Aachen Peace Prize eV to Ruslan Kotsaba. In: Aachen Peace Prize. May 10, 2019, accessed May 11, 2019 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kozaba, Ruslan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kozaba, Ruslan Petrowytsch; Kocaba, Ruslan Petrovyč (scientific transliteration); Коцаба, Руслан Петрович (Ukrainian spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian journalist and political prisoner
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Ivano-Frankivsk