The Russian government has shown its displeasure with her recent activities and those of the Women of the Don by bringing criminal charges against Valentina Cherevatenko under the 2012 Foreign Agent law.
This was not the local six-monthly training camps that such men usually attended and rumours of the continuing unrest and violence in Azerbaijan alarmed people whose husbands and fathers had now been sent there (see Baku pogrom).
The director of the factory where Valentina was working gave her and her team access to his telex and they sent urgent messages to Gorbachev, Yeltsin and other decision-makers in the Soviet and RSFSR governments.
Set up in 1993 to help local women left unemployed in the wake of the Soviet collapse, over the past 23 years it had turned into "one of Russia’s largest human and civil rights NGOs".
In her role as a member of the Public Oversight Agency for places of confinement run by the Federal Penitentiary Service in the Rostov Region Valentina paid regular visits to the jailed Ukrainian airforce pilot Nadia Savchenko after she was moved to the Novocherkassk pre-trial detention centre in July 2015.
[11] Cherevatenko said that such preliminary meetings had already taken place between women from Ukraine and Russia, involving journalists, members of NGOs and action groups; specialists—such as psychologists, doctors and others—were also ready to help individuals, and support the process of dialogue.
"A great many initiatives are already being implemented," she said: "to overcome the breakdown in [formerly] close relations, to withstand propaganda and aid the formation of a critical approach, and to help those suffering from the effects of post-traumatic stress".
[12] She was accused of "malicious evasion” of the duties imposed on “NGOs that perform the functions of a foreign agent", and if convicted could pay a heavy fine or be given a two-year sentence in a penal colony.