Iryna Danylovych: Russia against the nurse, or Freedom Is Our Religion

Project investigation into falsification of charges against journalists in Russian-controlled courts of Crimea.

Iryna Danylovych belongs to the category of people who, according to the level of education and professional skills, attitude to duties, civic consciousness, and activity, sense of dignity and responsibility, in any democratic and civilized country, would become the pride of society and the state.

In any democratic country, but not in Russia. In Russia, which ousted its most influential intellectuals abroad on “philosophical steamships” and instead called for “cooks” to rule the state. Neither dignity, skill, nor honesty is valued. The Russian government does not have such values, so it considers them superfluous even for its citizens. Therefore, the worthy, skillful, and honest in Russia fall the first victims of the dictatorship.

Iryna Danylovych was born in 1979 in the town of Kozyany, Vitebsk Region, Russia. She moved with her family to Crimea in 1983. She entered the medical institute and graduated from the narcology faculty. Due to a lack of funds, she transferred to study at the Simferopol Medical College in the paramedic-midwifery department. She lived in Belgorod for four years and worked at the bar. However, she returned to Ukraine. After returning from Belgorod, Iryna regained her Ukrainian citizenship and moved to Feodosia. She took an active part in the trade union movement and became the head of the Crimean branch of the Physicians’ Alliance trade union. Subsequently, she created the online project Crimean Medicine Without A Cover, in which she exposed the violation of the rights of medical workers and the shortcomings of the health care system in Crimea. She cooperated with independent mass media, in particular, the RFE/RL project Krym.Realii, the INzhyr media project, and the Crimean Process initiative.

Iryna Danylovych was abducted by FSB officers on April 29, 2022, and kept in the basement until May 7 without any status or legal assistance. Riot police officers searched the home of the human rights defender. They seized equipment and books and informed her relatives that an administrative arrest had been made in relation to Iryna because “she was transferring non-classified materials to another country,” but her whereabouts were not provided. She was interrogated on a polygraph and subjected to psychological pressure: they threatened to “take her to the forest [to kill]” or “to Mariupol,” she was fed once a day, and she was not allowed to go to the toilet.

As journalists noted on the ZMINA human rights center website, “for a day she worked as a nurse at the hospital, and after work until the next shift, she tuned into a journalist. She attended trials against Crimean Tatar activists and became one of the first correspondents of the Crimean Process. This publication covers political persecution in the courts of the occupied peninsula…

She filmed a lot for various blogging initiatives and led her Facebook group dedicated to her specialty – health care. She was not afraid to openly talk about these problems to Ukrainian and foreign journalists. Against the background of public attention to the situation with the pandemic and an apparent shortage of speakers from Crimea, her speeches sounded very loud. On account of Iryna Danylovych, the exposure of the Feodosia state health care sector in multimillion-dollar frauds with bonuses allegedly paid to local doctors, the scandal with violations of epidemiological norms by the doctors of the Kirovske District Hospital, who dispersed to their homes the patients diagnosed with covid, an investigation into the falsification of the number of people who died from covid.

Of course, all this activity could not remain unnoticed by the Russian special services. The human rights organization Front Line Defenders pointed out the pressure exerted on the journalist because of her activities. Thus, in December 2021, a series of discrediting publications appeared in the Fox and Crow Telegram channel, branding Danylovych as a “foreign agent.”

NUJU Information Service