
© REUTERS / Metroplitan Police
The ordeal imposed on Russian citizens traveling or sojourning in Western states shows that hysterical Russophobia and official paranoia is out of control. It's "open season" to criminalize all Russians.
The cases of Maria Butina detained in the US, and that of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the two men who traveled to Salisbury in England, are illustrative of a totally irrational anti-Russian mindset that has run amok.
All have been accused of being Russian agents. Butina is facing five years in an American jail if she is convicted of spying. Her lawyer
maintains she broke no laws while in the US.
The only thing she seems "guilty" of is networking with various social and political groups - and of being Russian.
The two men mentioned, fortunately, made it back to Russia before British authorities incarcerated them too on false charges.
Petrov and Boshirov have been charged in absentia by British police in connection with the apparent poison-attack on a former Russian spy living in Salisbury. The British government accused the two men of being assassins belonging to Russian military intelligence, GRU. The basis for accusation is the pair were filmed by public CCTV cameras being in Salisbury town on the weekend that ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were allegedly poisoned with a nerve agent.
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