I hope you won't serve Putin for much longer: Editor-in-Chief's response to the Russian ambassador

Dear Mr. Ambassador,

I'm glad you're reading Vijesti, so you learned the facts about the persecution of the lawyer. Maria Boncler, because in the Russian "patriotic" media one could only hear about the "disgusting liberal lawyer and traitor", and I doubt that the services of the regime that you yourself zealously serve are delivering such reports to you through diplomatic mail.

I didn't have to publish yours. pismo because Montenegrin law allows me not to do so when you do not deny a single detail from Spiegel's article, which Vijesti translated and reprinted. I published it so that our readers could see how the "smooth" propaganda of the Russian regime works when something hits a nerve, and in Montenegro it cannot use the cruel mechanisms that it created against its journalists and critics in a country of "rule of law".

I'll admit right away that I don't know the details of the Boncler case either, but I trust Der Spiegel and similar media outlets more than any of Putin's state organs. I also trusted independent Russian media outlets like Der Spiegel and Vijesti when they existed. The autocrat shut down such outlets (Novaya Gazeta, TV Dozhd, etc.), blocked more than 18.500 websites for reporting on the war, declared 288 (mostly) Russian journalists and media outlets "foreign agents," and banned 28 media outlets as "undesirable."

Since February 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented that the regime you serve has sent 26 journalists to prison on charges of “fake news,” “terrorism,” “extremism,” and other “anti-state” acts, while some are not even known why they were imprisoned. Ten exiled journalists have been sentenced in absentia to prison terms.

Since your boss came to power in 1999, 25 journalists have been killed (CPJ data), and since February 2022, many have left the country of the "rule of law", where people go to prison even if they say that the imperial regime's aggressive war for territories is exactly what it is - a war.

The state explanations for many Russian journalists and media outlets that the regime has declared "undesirable" and "foreign agents" literally state that they spread "false information about the decisions of Russian state bodies and their policies", "discredited the domestic and foreign policies of the Russian authorities in order to create a negative image of our country", "blamed the Russian leadership for the unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, the occupation of its territories, claiming that the annexation of Crimea, the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions to the Russian Federation is illegitimate", "spoke against the special military operation"...

In that war, 31 civilians were killed in Ukraine by May 13.341, including 710 children, and 32.744 civilians were wounded, including 2076 children (data from the UN Human Rights Office from June 16).

I know you know very well that this is a war on foreign territory in which five times more Russian soldiers have died so far than in all the wars waged by the Russian state from the end of World War II until the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – estimates of the number of deaths made by independent organizations (which you also declared undesirable) range from 110.000 to 250.000, and the black balance exceeds one million when the wounded are included. Of course, in a country of the "rule of law" you cannot find this data, because it has been declared a military secret since the beginning of the aggression against Ukraine. I also saw today that the regime has limited calls via Telegram and Signal.

Isn't this enough to paint a negative picture of human rights in Russia under Putin's regime, Mr. Ambassador? And I haven't even mentioned the politically motivated trials and imprisonment of opposition leaders (Alexander Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza), the repression of civil society through this same law on "foreign agents" (which Putin's blind and/or self-serving followers wanted to introduce here as well, but they couldn't), the persecution of LGBT people and organizations, the lack of real political competition, restrictions on the opposition, the misuse of state resources in elections... All of this has been stated in reports by reputable international organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the ODIHR/OSCE observation missions (which you didn't even invite to observe the last two election cycles, for God's sake?)

And even though you are right about the “rule of law” under the regime you are a part of, that is, that “the judicial system and mechanisms for ensuring legality and order function reliably and in accordance with the legal framework”, I will just remind you that Hitler's Nazi regime passed racial laws against Jews and other “non-Aryans”, before it set about exterminating them. And that was, much like today under Putin's regime, the “rule of law”.

Your claim that "much does not depend" on the journalists and editors of "Vijesti" and that this is "the need to follow not one's own views, but advice from outside, which is not conditioned by a good relationship with Russia, but by the desire to provoke negative emotions towards it", which "shows your desire to fit in with those on whom, as you believe, Montenegro's prosperous NATO present and EU future depend", is as true as the other one in the letter that milk and honey are flowing in Russia under Putin, from human rights, through the economy to "high authority on the international scene".

Journalists and editors of "Vijesti" do not follow anyone's "advice from outside" in their work, nor do they "fit in" with anyone, which we have proven over the past three decades. Ask our readers, who clearly distinguish civilization from savagery.

And what does the fact that "the vast majority of Montenegrins have sympathy for the Russians" have to do with criticizing an autocratic regime that oppresses its neighbors but also its own citizens? I am sure that the vast majority of citizens also sympathize with many other peoples, of course for different reasons. It is an old trick, Mr. Ambassador, to identify the regime you serve with the people. And a transparent one. Russians have a wonderful culture and art, they have made a huge contribution to science, when necessary they fought fiercely for freedom and made great sacrifices in that fight. And Russians are not Putin, I know you know. Our readers know it too, we agree on that, they are immune to your transparent tricks.

In the end, I am glad to live and to be a journalist in a country, which - whatever it is - is a hundred times more democratic than Russia under Putin's regime, which I am sure you will continue to humbly serve as long as it lasts. I hope it won't be long.