Four get jail terms for declaring independence from Kazakhstan

A court in the northern city of Petropavlovsk on Tuesday sentenced one person to nine years and another three to seven years in jail each on charges of separatism, according to local media reports.

The four, Vyacheslav Zuderman, Yelena Boldyreva, Madina Kaparova, and Olga Berezhnova, were accused of calls to seize power and violate the country’s territorial integrity following their declaration of independence from the Republic of Kazakhstan in March this year, Nedelya Severnogo Kazakhstana newspaper said.

The ‘declaration’ was announced on behalf of the so-called People’s Council of the Working People of Petropavlovsk.

They said they were doing it because Kazakhstan’s independence was “false”, its government was “incapable and dishonest” and the working people were living in “unfavourable” conditions.

In a media interview in April, the Council’s leader, Zuderman, who got the nine-year jail term, denied that the Council had separatist plans, saying that everyone living in Kazakhstan was “in fact citizens of the Kazakh SSR [Soviet Socialist Republic]”.

Zuderman is known for his anti-vaccine and anti-mask protests during the coronavirus pandemic, according to reports.

The trial was closed to the media and public.

Separately, a court in Astana sentenced another person to four years in a corrective camp for insulting Kazakhs and calling on them “to kill each other”, reports said.

Natalya Sviridenko was convicted of inciting ethnic hatred over her remarks during a TikTok stream in August. Sviridenko, who appeared to be drunk, called Kazakhs “chimpanzees” and “beasts”, and accused them of stealing and killing during the January 2022 unrest.

The court ruled that she made her remarks “with criminal intent to stir ethnic discord and insult other citizens’ ethnic dignity”, KazTAG news agency reported.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there has been an increase in expressions of both anti-Russian and anti-Kazakh sentiment in the country.

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