Q Toon: Za Vashe Zdorov'ye

It has been less than a month since my last cartoon highlighting the mortal danger faced by LGBTQ citizens of Russia. I normally try to avoid repeating the same topic only a few weeks apart, but this past week, a prominent LGBTQ activist in Russia was attacked and killed near her home in St. Petersburg.

A Russian LGBTQ activist, Yelena Grigoryeva, was fatally stabbed in St. Petersburg Sunday night after her name was listed on a website that encourages people to “hunt” LGBTQ activists, inspired by the torture-themed film "Saw."
Reports in the Russian newspaper Fontanka said that a suspect, a “40-year-old resident of Bashkortostan,” had been detained by police.
Grigoryeva, 41, was active with Russia’s Alliance of Heterosexuals and LGBT for Equality and other activist causes, according to the Russian LGBT Network.
According to friends' and colleagues' online posts, Grigoryeva was worried about her safety after she found her name and personal information listed on the snuff site.
“I learned today that Lena asked a mutual friend to take care of her cat in the event of her death when she was threatened with murder,” friend and fellow activist Dinar Idrisov wrote on Facebook.
“The state of Russia was obliged to guarantee her the right to life,” Idrisov wrote. “Lena and her lawyer appealed to law enforcement agencies both on the fact of violence and on the fact of threats, but there was no noticeable reaction.”

Grigoryeva had found her name and personal information, including her photo and address, on the hit list web site only days before her murder.

Grigoryeva wrote that the site, which organizes a “hunt for homosexual, bisexual and transgender people,” went online in spring 2018 and was shut down several times but always popped back up. The website posted the personal data of “presumably LGBT+” activists, “including photos and addresses,” and offered prizes to those who completed an attack.
“Law enforcement agencies have still not done anything to find the creators of this ‘game’ and bring them to justice,” Grigoryeva wrote. She called on those opposed to the website to contact the Russian prosecutor’s office and the FSB, Russia’s intelligence agency.

The Putin regime will prosecute the 40-year-old Bashkortostanian and shut down the latest iteration of the hit list web site, thus maintaining its plausible deniability of responsibility. And the site will pop up somewhere else where its fans can easily find it. Putin inspired, nurtured and loosed these trolls; and like genies, gremlins, or the denizens of Pandora's box, once they're out, they're not going back into captivity.

LGBTQ citizens are not the only Russians in danger of state-sanctioned physical attacks, of course. Trump's buddy Putin may be able to distance himself from Grigoryeva's case, but another incident this week is too suspicious not to have some ties to the government. Opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was jailed for planning an unauthorized election protest in Moscow, and very quickly ended up in the hospital.

Navalny’s attending physician, Anastasiya Vasilyeva, said on Facebook that she doesn’t believe the Kremlin foe is suffering from what his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, had said was a “severe allergic reaction.”
Vasilyeva and cardiologist Yaroslav Ashikhmin briefly spoke to Navalny late on July 28 through the crack of a door and said she could not rule out that he had been poisoned.
Yarmysh earlier tweeted that Navalny had arrived at the hospital with “severe facial swelling and red rashes on the skin.” She also said that Navalny had “never experienced an allergic reaction before.”
Officials gave no details of Navalny's condition, and Russia's Interior Ministry did not respond to requests from Western news agencies for comment.
Vasilyeva noted that Navalny had a rash on his upper body, skin lesions, and discharge from his eye. She called for samples of his bed sheets, skin, and hair to be tested for signs of chemical agents.
Vasilyeva also said she found it suspicious that authorities did not allow her to examine him properly.

Add to this the peculiar habit many Putin critics have of falling to their deaths from upper story windows, and one gets the distinct impression that despite Vlad's protestations of "Let them live as they wish," doing so is distinctly hazardous to one's health.