Anatoly Bagmet, head of the investigative department of the Moscow Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee (Moscow SKP), told Interfax on June 11 that an unspecified number of medics are being charged with negligent homicide. They each face up to three years in prison if convicted.

Earlier in the day, Bagmet had stated that Trifonova’s death in the Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention facility this past April, which drew widespread comparisons to the scandalous death of Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, was the result of a medical error. An investigation, he said, had found that medics had forgotten to remove a catheter from the woman’s leg after an operation, which created a blood clot that dislodged and killed her.

Vladimir Zherebenkov, Trifonova’s lawyer, maintains that his client died as a result of the fact that an investigator intentionally denied her access to necessary medical care. The catheter, he believes, was left in place intentionally by doctors in the Vladimirsky Moscow Regional Research Clinical Institute in order to perform the biweekly hemodialysis treatments Trifonova needed to survive.

The Moscow businesswoman was detained last December under suspicion of large-scale fraud and placed in Matrosskaya Tishina. Having been diagnosed with diabetes and chronic kidney failure, she was moved to a Moscow hospital where doctors confirmed that her condition could not be treated at the detention facility. Despite this, Investigator Sergei Pysin moved her back to Matrosskaya Tishina, then to another hospital, then back to the detention facility, where she died of acute heart failure on April 30.

As a result, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev called for a federal investigation of Trifonova’s death. The presidium of the Moscow Regional Court ruled that a lower court decision prolonging her detention in Matrosskaya Tishina had been illegal, and the judge who made that ruling has now stepped down. Several penitentiary service officials were fired, and Investigator Pysin has been charged with neglect of duty.

Zherebenkov maintains, however, that Pysin’s crime was not neglect, but intentional acts that brought about the death of his client. He is currently pursuing a number of cases against figures that he claims had a hand in Trifonova’s death. Most recently on May 27, the lawyer filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General of Russia regarding the fact that one high-ranking Moscow SKP official was fired as a result of Trifonova’s death, but, weeks later, remains at his post.

Moreover, civil rights advocates at the anti-corruption organization Justice noted with concern that the new cause of death – a blood clot – had only been established six weeks after the initial one – acute heart failure. Other critics expressed skepticism as to why it took six weeks before medical experts noticed a catheter in the woman’s body.

After Sergei Magnitsky’s death, President Medvedev fired dozens of penitentiary service officials and signed a law meant to ensure that individuals detained on suspicion of economic crimes not be held in pretrial facilities like Matrosskaya Tishina. While government supporters hailed these measures, their effectiveness has been disputed. Human rights advocates argue that Trifonova’s death is evidence that “practically nothing serious was done after Magnitsky’s death.” In addition, jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky staged a one-day hunger strike last month to draw attention to the fact that judges were blatantly disregarding the new law on economic crimes. President Medvedev held a meeting with court officials days later to attempt to address the disparity – notable particularly because the law was introduced by Medvedev himself. Whatever changes might result from that discussion have yet to be seen.

According to Russian Federal Penitentiary Service representative Sergei Tsygankov, the 53-year-old Vera Trifonova died at 12:35 pm on April 30, 2010, in the intensive care unit of the hospital at the Matrosskaya Tishina criminal investigation detention facility (SIZO) in Moscow. Local police were called to the scene, established that there were no signs that the death has been violent, and have launched an investigation.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the rights organization Justice that his client was refused proper medical care to such an extent as to constitute an intent towards her “physical destruction.”

According to a press release from the organization, medics had diagnosed the businesswoman with severe diabetes and had determined that she had only one working kidney.

Zherebenkov explained that Trifonova’s health began to sharply declined when she was arrested in December 2009 and placed in Matrosskaya Tishina. When she complained that her lungs were filling with liquid, she was brushed off and told to “sleep standing up.” After demands by her lawyer, Trifonova was eventually moved to a Moscow city hospital, where she immediately recovered. Doctors at the hospital confirmed that Trifonova required specialized treatment that included regular cleansings of her blood – a procedure not possible at the detention facility.

At that point, says the lawyer, Investigator Sergei Pysin told Trifonova that she would get different accommodations if she plead guilty to the fraud she was charged with. The woman refused, and despite doctors’ orders that Trifonova not leave the hospital even for investigative proceedings, Pysin brought her back to Matrosskaya Tishina.

Zherebenkov believes that Pysin had at that point prepared a medical document from Matrosskaya Tishina doctors declaring Trifonova’s condition to be stable and fit for investigative proceedings. On the basis of that document, he says, Odintsovsky Court judge Olga Makarova turned down Trifonova’s April 16 request to be released on bail, and instead extended her detention for another three months.

That same day, the press release goes on, a decision was made to move Trifonova to a female penal colony in Mozhaysk, seventy miles west of Moscow. Officials at the penal colony refused to admit her, however, and she was taken to the Mozhaysk city hospital. According to Zherebenkov, doctors at the hospital did not know how to help the woman because they lacked the proper equipment to cleanse her blood, a procedure that she needed two to three times a week.

In the days that followed, the investigator repeatedly promised the Zherebenkov that they would find some way to move Trifonova to a hospital outfitted for her condition. But in the meantime, the businesswoman’s condition was quickly deteriorating. On April 26, the lawyer resorted to using an ambulance rented by Trifonova’s relatives to bring her to a local medical institute to undergo treatment.

Trifonova was finally brought back to Matrosskaya Tishina on April 29, and was supposed to have been brought back to the original hospital in Moscow today. As is now obvious, it was already too late.

“They purposefully destroyed her, and sent her to the Mozhaysk prison so that she would die there,” says Zherebenkov. He believes that the investigator “filled the order” of one of Trifonova’s business partners who owed her several million dollars.

According to RIA Novosti, officials from the Federal Penitentiary Service responded to the lawyer’s accusations that Trifonova was denied medical care by referring to the fact that the paperwork ordering her to undergo medical evaluation had needed to be signed by the investigator “who disappeared somewhere and we were unable to get in touch with him.”

Zherebenkov says he plans to file a criminal suit against Pysin and appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. “Vera Trifonova repeated the fate of Sergei Magnitsky, because our SIZOs are instruments of torture and a means to pressure people,” he said.

The press release from Justice, the main source of information for this article, is available in Russian by clicking here.

Rally organizer and coalition co-founder Konstantin Doroshok said that a founding assembly was held on Wednesday, but leaders have yet to settle on a name for the new union.

The January 30 protest in Kaliningrad, in which between 7 and 12 thousand people participated, was notable both for its massive size and for the diversity of political forces represented. The new coalition features similar diversity, including the Kaliningrad branches of the parties Solidarity, Justice, A Just Russia, Patriots of Russia, Yabloko, and the Communist Party.

According to the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, coalition leaders invited the local branch of the Right Cause party to join the union, but leader Mikhail Tsikel declined the proposal. The ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party is also not included in the coalition.

Doroshok said that the union’s main goal is “to break the political monopoly of United Russia,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling party, which has dominated the country’s elections at every level since its inception in 2001.

Ekho Moskvy reported that Kaliningrad residents have been threatened with losing their jobs or having their wages slashed if they take part in the coalition’s upcoming rally on March 20. Likewise, students have been promised that they will be expelled.

Meanwhile, the Kaliningrad Public Chamber was set to meet on Thursday with the Public Chamber of Russia to discuss the situation in the region, which has been a media spotlight since January’s massive rally. A relatively new institution, the Public Chamber is an oversight body intended to monitor government activities.

Protesters in the January 30 rally gathered in Kaliningrad to collectively demand that high vehicle tariffs be annulled and that Kaliningrad Governor Georgy Boos and Prime Minister Putin both resign. Boos immediately cancelled his vacation plans and promised to meet with opposition leaders, although he cancelled multiple times before finally meeting with Doroshok on February 26.

Another rally of more than a thousand Kaliningrad residents was held in the city of Yernyakhovsk on February 28, and a demonstration of comparable size to the one on January 30 is scheduled for March 20.