Yesterday on the air of Echo of Moscow (a Russian radio station), Central Election Commission Chair Ella Pamfilova said that she thinks of me as a son. And, judging by the context, a wayward one.
Well, even if I am a wayward one, I still want, as a relative, to ask my newly acquired mother a public question.
Dear Ella Alexandrovna, what is happening in Kaliningrad? Do you know about it? Why are you staying silent?
We have an election monitoring headquarters there. And yesterday real thugs showed up there who, for some reason, had been issued police IDs.
These thugs conducted a search, and one of them said he wanted to use the office bathroom.
After that, the thugs said the search was over. But now, they said, there would be another search in connection with a different case.
And—surprise, surprise—during the second search, a stack of ballots was "found" in the bathroom.
All of this was happening while we were issuing credentials to our observers.
Two staff members from the headquarters were detained and taken away, including coordinator Yegor Chernyuk, whom Andrei Loshak featured in his film.
But it gets worse.
A little later, about a dozen thug-like faces burst into the headquarters. Maybe police officers, maybe who knows what. Some of them were not entirely sober.
And they simply seize our office. Here is the video, you can watch it.
Then these half-drunk thugs simply change the lock on our office and declare that we can no longer use it.
Do you think that was the end of it? No. We still have to keep issuing credentials and organizing election monitoring. In fact, we need it even more now—because it is obvious that fraud is being prepared in the Kaliningrad region.
So we rented a local conference hall. Now the police—the same half-drunk thugs—are trying to force their way into that hall and drive us out of there too.
Dear Mama Ella Alexandrovna, this is an obvious, completely illegal, brazen attempt to sabotage our election monitoring in the Kaliningrad region. We want you to respond to it publicly, since yesterday on air you said you would do everything possible to support monitoring.
To those who signed up with us in Kaliningrad: we will figure something out and still manage to distribute the credentials.
To everyone: you can see what kind of "elections" these are. Anyone who goes to vote will simply be supporting all of this. They will be taking the side of the half-drunk thugs who arrest people for no reason, plant ballots, and seize offices.
Do not go vote; do not take the side of these brutes. Campaign against them.
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