Guys, we’ve got an emergency, and I’m partly to blame for it. A couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be a good idea to show our film Chaika in Kushchyovskaya on the big screen. Just rent the local movie theater or community center and screen it for local residents for free.
Obviously, the film would attract interest there, because it was in Kushchyovskaya that the Tsapok gang carried out its murders, and in our investigation we proved its ties to the leadership of Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office.
The film drew attention even before the screening. Just not from local residents, but from the gangsters who, evidently, are still running everything there.
After a local resident, simply doing a friendly favor for a member of our Progress Party, called the director of the local movie theater and met with him, he was attacked and beaten with a metal rod just ten minutes after the meeting. Read this:
Honestly, I couldn’t have imagined anything like this.
After all, Kushchyovskaya is in Krasnodar Krai, not Chechnya.
The Kushchyovskaya massacre shook the entire country. Just about everyone went there, including Bastrykin himself and the heads of the other *siloviki* (security and law-enforcement agencies). It was assumed that even if the gang had not been fully crushed, it certainly would not commit crimes likely to trigger media coverage.
After the kind of public reaction our film generated—4 million views, coverage in every independent media outlet, and Putin’s answer (or rather non-answer) to a question about the Chaikas becoming the main story from his press conference—attacking the organizer of the screening was the height of stupidity.
And yet that is exactly what happened. This man—Artyom—is terrified; he left Kushchyovskaya immediately, and only with great difficulty were we able to persuade him to agree to have his injuries officially documented and to make the story public.
I admit, I underestimated just how safe and untouchable that conglomerate of prosecutors, police officers, and gangsters calling itself the Tsapki feels.
This didn’t even happen at night—it happened at 10 in the morning in the town center.
When journalist friends told me that in Kushchyovskaya people still refuse to give interviews or say anything about the Tsapki, I assumed they were exaggerating. What is there to be afraid of now? As it turns out, plenty.
The fact that Krasnodar Krai prosecutor Korzhinek personally and immediately shut down criminal cases opened against the Tsapki—and remained in office as prosecutor—takes on a new significance.
And even now, anyone who raises their voice against the Tsapki in Kuban gets hit over the head with a metal rod.
Krasnodar Krai needs a real federal special operation to dismantle the criminal gangs protected by the local “law enforcement” agencies. And that kind of federal operation is impossible as long as people like the Chaikas and the Lopatins remain in the leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation), of course, will try to help Artyom by whatever means are available to us, but right now what we need above all is publicity, so I’m asking everyone to help spread the word.