Star Tribune
Minnesota letter campaign aims to support political prisoners in Russia
Elena Mityushina told a small crowd gathered at the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis that she’s not typically an angry person. But she found herself dealing with feelings of hatred when she learned that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been killed.
“I’m not like that usually,” Mityushina, who is Russian-American, told the group Monday night.
President Joe Biden and other Western officials say President Vladimir Putin is responsible for the death of Navalny, who was serving a prison sentence for extremism charges. It’s spurred widespread mourning and questions about the future of the brutal Russian regime’s future nearly two years after its invasion of Ukraine.
Mityushina said she had felt angry when the war started, too, but she found it best to channel those feelings into action. So the Maple Grove resident founded Russians Against War, which helped organize Monday’s event to write letters to political prisoners in Russia. She evoked Navalny’s words that it is not a shame to do little, it is a shame to do nothing; Mityushina encouraged the group not to be overwhelmed by all that is happening in Russia.
Writing these letters to Russian political prisoners “gives them hope to survive another day mentally,” she said. She evoked Navalny’s words to not give up. “I believe in freedom … this is not about politics, this is about humanity. This is about democracy.”
This was the seventh letter-writing event since last spring, and more are planned in conjunction with the museum, Russians Against War and World Without Genocide. Many in the audience wrote letters in English to later be translated into Russian.
St. Paul resident Karen de Boer wrote a letter to Vladislav Nikitenko, who is serving a three-year sentence for antiwar posts and requests to initiate criminal proceedings against Putin and others for acts of international terrorism and starting the war. She wrote to Mikhail Simonov, who received a seven-year term for anti-military posts.
Navalny’s death “has been very hard to process and I felt very powerless a half world away, so this feels like one small thing I can do,” she said.
Mityushina instructed the crowd not to talk about the war or Putin, or even send poems because they would not make it past the prison censors. She urged them to write about what’s going on in the world, their personal lives, their hobbies and emotions. De Boer talked about moving to the Twin Cities from Hutchinson, how she directs a choir and is learning how to play the Irish tin whistle.
Russian asylum-seeker Constantine Kuletsky said that he and his wife Lena “still cannot believe that [Navalny] is dead, really.” The parents of three fled from a town a two-hour flight north of Moscow and arrived in the U.S. in fall 2022.
He said his hope rose at Mityushina’s words about Navalny, and “I started to believe we will continue our fight with this regime, and we’ll try to do anything that we can do to continue Navalny’s work. Someday democracy will be in Russia.”
Kirill Vanderberg had studied in St. Petersburg and attends St. Paul College as part of a cultural exchange program. After arriving here last August, the 20-year-old hopes to stay here permanently; he is too afraid to return. Vanderberg noted that his friend in St. Petersburg is trying to help the many who are being detained for bringing flowers into public spaces to mourn and honor Navalny.
He found it hard to explain his feelings about Navalny’s death in English, and spent several minutes typing his reaction in Russian on his phone.
Then Vanderberg shared his thoughts with a Star Tribune reporter over a translator app: “I couldn’t reconcile those two words: ‘Navalny’ and ‘death.’ This person inspired hope in a great future Russia, giving hope where it seemed there was none. … We haven’t lost hope; we will remember him in our hearts and build the future with our own hands. Many people are now imprisoned for their views, and we must not devalue the work that Alexei, political prisoners, and all activists around the world have put into our future.”
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
