Russian surgeon fired, threatened by FSB officers for shouting “Glory to Ukraine!”

Russian surgeon Viktor Pavlenko shouted jokingly “Glory to Ukraine!” at a corporate party, whereafter he was fired, a case was opened against him for “discrediting” the army, and the Federal Security Service officers threatened to “ram his nose down his throat”. The news was reported in the Telegram channel of the Lipetsk region committee of the CPRF party, of which the doctor is a member.

Medical workers were celebrating their professional holiday on June 17 at a recreation center near Yeltsy, Lipetsk region. On the same day the mayor of Yeltsy Yevgeny Borovskikh, employees of the prosecutor's office and the FSB were resting and drinking at the center. The report notes that the employees started “harassing the surgeon with a Ukrainian surname,” because they allegedly heard Pavlenko shout the phrase “Glory to Ukraine!”

The 67-year-old head of the surgical department was taken to the district police department, the FSB officers handcuffed him and promised to “ram his nose down his throat” unless he confessed on camera and apologized to his superiors. He was held there for several hours. The doctor with 40 years of experience was dismissed from his position as department head and is about to stand trial for “discrediting” the Russian army.

In an interview with Podyom Pavlenko said he shouted the phrase “absolutely without any intent,” explaining that the phrase “had nothing to do with Bandera.”

“We were taking a walk around the area, there was a place with a wooden watchtower, looking around I just shouted the phrase. I wasn't thinking about anything. We were all a little drunk, of course. It was a joke, because I thought it was just our hospital staff there, but the city mayor and the whole administration turned out to be there. The mayor said right there that such a man should be fired.”

The doctor was forced to write a statement renouncing his post and becoming an ordinary doctor. The surgeon himself explains that his father was a communist, a former front-line soldier and a military counterintelligence officer, so he was brought up in the spirit of communism. “Well, how could I have discredited the army?” Pavlenko said.

Earlier, Nizhny Novgorod activist Alexei Podnebesny was fined 30,000 rubles for “discrediting” the Russian army because he wrote the word “special operation” in quotation marks. The court felt that the quotation marks indicated “an ironic, opposing, disparaging meaning of the word.” Already more than 2,100 Russians have been accused of “discrediting” the Russian army (Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Offences Code) during the war in Ukraine. They were fined a total of over 25 million rubles. Fifty-two criminal cases were opened for spreading “fakes” about the army.