Hi! This is the entire team of Verstka journalists who worked on yesterday’s te...

Hi! This is the entire team of Verstka journalists who worked on yesterday’s text about deserter Viktor Ryasnyansky and his family, who were hounded by the military for many months.

Russians whom the authorities take an aggressively keen interest in usually come to journalists for help only when the whole meager arsenal of resistance has already been exhausted. And hope is left resting on a miracle.

Over the nearly year that has passed since Verstka first got to know the Ryasnyanskys, we have seen probably the full possible arsenal of this family’s struggle against the state. Viktor, a young man with a whole host of serious illnesses, was sold into the Russian army, deceiving both the “seller” and the “buyer.”

Ryasnyansky was clearly not eager to fight, and the military most definitely had no use for a troublesome recruit whose mother, trying to save him, was constantly on his heels.

On the family’s side, we saw flight, sabotage, attempts to negotiate or frighten them with higher-ranking commanders, smash through walls headfirst, or soften them with tears. And on the side of the “ordinary” military men working for the system, a desire to “write off” the person or at least shift the решение of his problems onto someone else. But in such a way that no specific people in uniform would catch flak for it. Apparently, none of them managed that.

And now the Ryasnyanskys are calling for that very miracle to help. Faith that if they keep resisting as loudly as possible right to the very end, the mechanisms of the system will turn, and their family member will remain alive. That, probably, is the Ryasnyanskys’ main hope right now.

And we are simply trying to help them make it real by telling this story in a way that makes this cry for help heard by as many people as possible.

You can help too, if you read and repost our piece:

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Verstka

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