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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

I work on an organisation that does anti-corruption reporting. We have some software for that and the search box has "Vladimir Putin, TeliaSonera" as a placeholder example.

Few months back a new hire quit on his second day when he saw that, because he was afraid he might get into trouble since he has to regularly travel to Russia (he was from, eh, somewhere in Eastern Europe or the Balkans or some such – I forgot).

We had some discussions about whether that was completely paranoid and stupid, or whether it was somewhat reasonable/understandable.

I was firmly in the last camp. Yes, maybe the chance of actually suffering consequences is small and in that sense it's paranoid, but people buy lottery tickets with a lower chance of winning. The arbitrariness of it is the point.

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Stifling thought crime does indeed seem best by punishing even trivial offenses. The gestapo cannot be everywhere, so encourage people to self censor or else.

Unfortunately his concerns are all too reasonable. Here's a recent case where Putin's people had a dual Russian-American citizen arrested while visiting her family, and then slapped with a 12-year jail term for the crime of donating $51 to a humanitarian charity (from within the US):

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2024/08/15/us-russ...

While small, the chance of getting caught up in these shenanigans is far higher than that of buying a winning lottery ticket. And the potential penalties much worse than could be alleviated by most any prize won in the lottery. (If they were from one of Russia's allies, such as Serbia or Hungary, they probably wouldn't have much to worry about. But if they're from a NATO country, then definitely so).

"Humanitarian" charity is not exactly a fitting description of the organization she donated to (though I agree that the sentence is out of proportion). To flip this around: imagine that someone was going through US customs and border clearance, and it became known that they donated money towards Russian FPV drones that hit Ukraine. Would you support giving this person a jail term or not? Now imagine that this person is a US citizen. Does that change your answer?

Can you provide us with any indications that the charity in question (Razom) channelled money towards actual military drones for Ukraine?

We see they had a project in 2022 that did provide some drones, but this seems to have been in the context of supporting search and rescue operations and the like, not military operations.

Razom maintains that it does not provide military supplies of any kind. Let alone "weapons and ammunition" per the FSB charges.

Overall the charges seem to have as much credibility as the initial charge against her of "swearing in a public place".

Huh, they significantly sanitized their website following all the media attention. Now it does say it's all about medical supplies. However, one can't sanitize the entire Internet. Here's a page that mentions that Razom funds drones: https://dobro.ua/member/operator/bf-razom-dlia-ukrayiny/

But in any case, my question stands. Let's say a US citizen donated to a fund that supplied drones to Russia. Said drones do not carry a military payload, but can be used for recon and artillery targeting. What would you think about this person?

Good catch. It seems the U.S. organization did provide funds for military drones for Ukraine, at least for a certain time after 2016. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Sounds like a perfectly wholesome thing to do, in fact, given the situation Ukraine has been facing since 2014.

Whether it continued to do so by the time of her donation (in late 2023) -- being as Razom does seem to have shifted its emphasis in recent years (completely independent of any recent "sanitizing" of their website as you allege, but based on my own recollection of their messaging 2022-2023) -- is a different matter.

That's all I have time for at the moment. I may comment further again in 1-2 days.

At first I believed it was trumped up charges, but now I realize theres more to the story. We went from ukrainian charity, to they provided funds for military drones in 2016. And the western media is not reporting this of course. Its as much propaganda as the russian media...

Not intentional propaganda (as far as Western media goes), just the usual cut-and-paste reporting with no particular directives from the editors to look more deeply into the story. It may reflect a bias, but in this case most likely an entirely unconscious bias. This is quite different from the state-originated propaganda (especially coming from deeply authoritarian governments such as that of Russia) which is very intentional and often more or less scripted and templated.

Meanwhile let's remember that the arrest (and draconian sentencing) were in themselves a very deliberate form of propaganda. It's not like the various Russian agencies could begin to care about a $51 donation. They did what they did for certain reasons, one of which was to send some very specific messages -- on one hand to the U.S. government; but also to their own people, both inside the Motherland and abroad.

That latter message being: "We're watching you, wherever you are, and however small and unimportant you think you are - so don't you even begin to think of crossing us."

This case was probably particularly appealing to them in part precisely because the charges could be presented as borderline plausible (rather than being simply trumped up from scratch). Even if they would ultimately prove to be quite flimsy if evaluated by the standards of countries with actual working justice systems, as seems to be the case here.

It's just another part of their playbook.

> Would you support giving this person a jail term or not? Now imagine that this person is a US citizen. Does that change your answer

How is that relevant? You're trying to equate someone's personal opinion to the Russian government putting someone in prison for 12-year due to $51?

And that's far from the most egregious example. There are plenty of people in Russian prisons for much less than that (e.g. reciting poetry or ambiguous social media posts).

Anyway regardless of anyone's personal opinion that's not how sanction enforcement or the US judicial system on the whole works. The U.S. Treasury Department has allowed transactions related to humanitarian causes (and a bunch of other cases) so what are you even talking about?

She's definitely unlucky that Putin was looking to replenish his supply of prisoners he can exchange for gun runners, etc, in Western prisons...

If he was from the balkans his reason was definitely false and he just didnt wanna work at your place. We dont have that here, especially not for leaders not from our countries

Like I said, I don't recall exactly where he was from and can't be bothered to look it up, because it doesn't matter. But just because most people from location X don't have opinion Y, doesn't mean some don't.

Either way, I certainly don't think he was making stuff up. He could have left at any time without any reason. We weren't holding him captive.

I reread your comment now I apologize. He was afraid of not getting arrested in Russia, rather then in his home country in the balkans. My bad.

Not so much arrested as denied entry.

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