Vacation on Syria’s Front Lines Goes Wrong for Russian Judge

Vacation on Syria's Front Lines Goes Wrong for Russian Judge

January 31, 2013 29 minutes ago

January 31, 2013, 8:28 pm

By ROBERT MACKEY and ELLEN BARRY

Last Updated, Friday, 11:43 a.m. A Russian judge who decided to spend his vacation moonlighting as a war correspondent in Syria survived being shot in the face and arm this week in the Damascus suburb of Darayya, according to the Web news agency he writes for as a volunteer.
The shooting of the judge, Sergey Aleksandrovich Berezhnoy, was caught on video by the crew from the Abkhazian Network News Agency he was accompanying as it reported on a unit of the Syrian Army fighting rebel forces outside the capital. The ANNA video report shows him snapping photographs on a ruined street before the incident and includes graphic scenes from the emergency surgery in a Syrian military hospital that saved his life.

A video report from an Abkhazian news agency embedded with the Syrian Army outside Damascus showed a Russian judge.

In an interview with Voice of Russia on Thursday, Mr. Berezhnoy told the state broadcaster: “Now I feel fine. They are making a dressing. Of course I am coming back to Russia. But I want to keep working here until I finished everything I planned. What is going on in Syria hurts me. They are destroying a culture, destroying a civilization, destroying the flower of a nation. And it is very frightening. The whole world needs to fight for Syria.”
What exactly Mr. Berezhnoy, a 57-year-old deputy chairman of a provincial arbitration court in the Russian city of Belgorod, was doing on a Syrian front line on Monday remains unclear. His wife told reporters that her husband had traveled to Syria “on a charity mission,” Russia’s state news agency reported. His boss told a Russian news site that he knew Mr. Berezhnoy was on vacation but had no idea where he had gone until reports of his misadventure in Syria surfaced.
According to Voice of Russia, the chairman of the Belgorod branch of the Union of Russian Writers, Vladimir Molchanov, said that Mr. Berezhnoy had “no special plans” for his vacation trip to Syria, save to “see with his own eyes and feel with his own soul” what was happening there, to better animate his writing. Mr. Molchanov also said that Mr. Berezhnoy had accompanied Marat Musin, a blogger who is described in an online biography as the news agency’s manager, a professor at Moscow University and the “deputy head of the Russian Committee for Solidarity with the Peoples of Syria and Libya.”
An account of the shooting published on Monday by Mr. Musin described the judge as a prize-winning prose stylist. Almost in passing, Mr. Musin also mentioned that Mr. Berezhnoy had fought, as a military intelligence officer, in the separatist wars that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. One of those conflicts was in Abkhazia, the breakaway Georgian republic now governed by Russia, Mr. Musin wrote.

Sergey Aleksandrovich who fought for five years as an intelligence officer in Abkhazia and in other hot spots of our vast Motherland did not utter a single groan. Surgery was made by a general, the head of the military hospital. The bullet will be extracted tonight or tomorrow morning.
Before the volunteer member of our agency and well-known writer was wounded, we drove to the front line in the vicinity of Sukaine mosque in Darayya. Sergey Berezhnoy is the winner of many literary prizes, namely for his military prose.

Mr. Musin went on to describe how the Russians embedded with the Syrian Army were forced to cross one “fire-swept street” after another as they attempted to make their way to safety. After a rebel sniper nearly shot the crew’s translator, Viktor Kuznetsov, in the head, Mr. Musin wrote:

The next to cross this street was Sergey. The first bullet did not stop him; neither did the second which hit his arm. He managed to run to the safety of a wall and stood up there.
I couldn’t understand why he was standing there instead of stealing into a hole. When we saw a stream of blood, we realized what had happened. The wounded Sergey Berezhnoy had to run across another fire-swept street. Then we were in a car to the hospital for tomography, x-ray and surgery.
To stifle his groans he tried to joke.
Please, light a candle for the miraculous survival of my friend.

Although most Russian media reports on the incident framed it as an example of the perils of “extreme tourism,” the agency’s casual reference to Mr. Berezhnoy’s past service in military intelligence got the attention of several reporters in Moscow, who were trying to puzzle out what he was doing in Syria.
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