Photo Gallery Hurting the Victims
Galina Sashina was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and now heads an association of survivors of German concentration camps in Volgograd, the former Stalingrad. The group receives aid as part of Volgograd's partnership with the western German city of Cologne. But now such aid is under threat.
Galina Sashina with Werner Völker, the head of the Volgograd-Cologne city partnership: Last summer, the State Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament, passed a law that forced nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are politically active and receive funding from abroad to register themselves as "foreign agents."
Putin originally pushed through the NGO law to undermine those of his government's opponents who received funding from abroad. But now the law is seeing extensive use even against non-political organizations. This expansion has also come to threaten the broad network of German-Russian partnerships that have sprung up since the end of the Cold War, such as the Cologne-Volgograd project.
