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RUSSIA: Liquidating the SOVA Center: the official end of religious freedom in Russia

Photo: SOVA’s Olga Sibireva. From Twitter.

RUSSIA: Liquidating the SOVA Center: the official end of religious freedom in Russia

By destroying the leading organization monitoring religious liberty violations, the Putin regime can no longer pretend that relics of freedom of religion remain in Russia.

by Massimo Introvigne

Bitter Winter (04.05.2023) – The Moscow City Court decision of April 27 “liquidating” the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, a leading Russian NGO monitoring violations of freedom of religion or belief, is one of the saddest news coming from Russia in recent times. We are all indebted to SOVA, not only for information not available anywhere else, but also for in-depth analyses explaining why the Putin regime behaves as it does in its assault against religious liberty. SOVA has announced that it will appeal, but it seems unlikely that a politically motivated decision may be overturned.

On the other hand, paradoxically the Moscow City Court decision makes the situation of religion in Russia clearer than it was before. To be honest, I was surprised that even after the war of aggression against Ukraine was started, SOVA was still allowed to continue its precious work. I was even more surprised that, as we reported in Bitter Winter, on September 28, 2022, SOVA’s Olga Sibireva was allowed to travel to Warsaw and speak during the OSCE Human Dimension Meeting in Warsaw at a side event organized by the NGO CAP-LC, and supported by our magazine, on “Anti-Cult Ideology and FECRIS [the anti-cult European Federation whose Russian branch supports the invasion of Ukraine]: Dangers for Religious Freedom.” I was a speaker in that event too, and found Sibireva’ speech moderate, balanced, and well-informed. However, it comes out that her participation at the Warsaw event is precisely one of the “crimes” and the “gross and irreparable violations of the law” for which SOVA has been liquidated.

I had repeatedly asked myself why SOVA, and a few other “normal” voices, had not yet been suffocated in Russia. A tentative answer was that the Putin regime still wanted to pretend that different views on religion coexisted in Russia, from the lunatic ramblings of the Russian FECRIS and its leaders Alexander Dvorkin and Alexander Novopashin to SOVA’s moderate attitude. There was no freedom of religion in Russia, but at least some limited spaces were left where one could not change the dire situation of religious liberty but could at least talk about it.

The most important of these spaces is now being closed. Russia is serving notice to the world that not only the practice of religious liberty, but even the possibility of discussing about freedom of religion or belief have been abrogated in the country. The Putin regime is now officially one of the pariah states, together with China and North Korea, where the repression of religious freedom is not even hidden.

Friends of freedom of religion throughout the world should mobilize for SOVA. They will probably not save it—but at least they should ask democratic states and international religious organizations to note the official declaration of end of any relic of freedom of religion in Russia. There is something that can and should be done, and talking is not enough. Magnitsky-type sanctions should hit the main architects of the repression of religious liberty in Russia, including Dvorkin and Novopashin. Interreligious and ecumenical dialogue, and invitation to international conferences, should cease for these religious leaders—bishops, starting from Patriarch Kirill, muftis, and Buddhist leaders—who aid and abet Putin’s regime and its bloody religious repression (they also support the war of aggression against Ukraine). Business as usual with Russia can no longer continue in the religious field either.

Photo: SOVA’s Director, Alexander Verkhovsky. Credits.

Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

Further reading about FORB in Russia on HRWF website

RUSSIAN FAKE NEWS CORNER: JWs prepare an anti-Putin coup!

Jehovah’s Witnesses prepare an anti-Putin coup, says Russian lawyer Alexander Korelov

FECRIS-connected anti-cult lawyer Alexander Korelov claims he has all the evidence: Russia will react and “destroy the United States, the spiritual garbage dump of humanity.”

How often will the Belgian Federal Parliament go on hosting conferences stigmatizing minority belief communities?

HRWF (18.10.2022) – On 19 May 2017, Alexander Korelov, the lawyer of several well-known radical Russian Orthodox propagandists hostile to Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious minorities in Russia, such as Alexander Dvorkin, was invited by FECRIS (European Federation of Research and Information Centres on Cults and Sects) at the Belgian Parliament to a controversial conference chaired by Belgian MP André Frédéric.

The Belgian politician is the president of AVISO, identified as an anti-cult association in Belgium affiliated to FECRIS. In 2021, he was appointed president of FECRIS after being a member of their board for several years, along with Alexander Dvorkin, former vice-president of FECRIS for several years and known as an extremist Orthodox propagandist and cult-hunter. This Belgian personality is very useful for FECRIS as he can give them access to the premises of the Belgian Federal Parliament for their conferences and hereby enjoy a certain aura and apparent but false legitimacy.

On 14 June 2022, André Frédéric hosted another FECRIS conference, as its president, in the premises of the Belgian Federal Parliament. And he published an article in a leading francophone newspaper Le Soir referring to their fight for assistance to victims of cults. Victims of any sort of perpetrators always deserve to be helped but in the case of FECRIS, the so-called assistance hides an ideological anti-cult agenda. In reality, FECRIS, its affiliates and other anti-cult groups repeatedly stigmatize and libel a number of belief or religious groups they do not like or they were formerly members of but they have lost quite a number of cases in various courts, an area that HRWF has specifically investigated.

So, how long will the Belgian Federal Parliament go on tolerating conferences stigmatizing minority belief communities?

Alexander Korelov claims to have evidence that Jehovah’s Witnesses prepare a coup against President Putin, says Bitter Winter in a breaking news published on 17 October. Though, it is worth reminding that Jehovah’s Witnesses are apolitical, conscientious objectors to military service and opposed to violence.

Russia has now imprisoned 100 Jehovah’s Witnesses (95 men and 5 women) for the peaceful practice of their religion. This is the highest since the 2017 Russian Supreme Court ruling that effectively banned the Witnesses’ activities.

The 100^th Witness to be imprisoned in Russia is Dmitriy Dolzhikov, 44. He was arrested in September after Russian officers raided 13 homes of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Chelyabinsk. (see link to report) Dmitriy was subsequently transferred to a pretrial detention center in Novosibirsk Region, over 900 miles away from his home.

Sergey Klimov, 52, has been in prison the longest—since June 2018. (link) Another 249 of Jehovah’s Witnesses have been to prisons and pretrial detention centers, some of whom have spent more than five years behind bars. Russia has persisted in persecuting Jehovah’s Witnesses, which has included beating and torturing believers, despite the European Court of Human Rights’ 2022 judgement by that declared Russia’s ban unjustified and illegal. (link)

Scope of the repression of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia and Crimea:

303 criminal cases, involving 643 believers, across71 regions
100 in prison
18 under house arrest
1,789 homes of Witnesses raided since the 2017 Russian Supreme Court ruling that liquidated the Witnesses’ legal entities in Russia and Crimea

In Ukraine and in Ukrainian Crimea, until its annexation in 2014, no Jehovah’s Witness was ever imprisoned for the practice of his/her religion. On which side are the anti-cultists?

Sensational revelations: Jehovah’s Witnesses prepare an anti-Putin coup

by Massimo Introvigne (*)

Bitter Winter (17.10.2022) – https://bit.ly/3exE6ER – On October 13, during the conference “Religion, War and Peace” at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne’s Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Rosita Šorytė discussed a “sensational revelation” about a coup against the Putin regime that is reportedly under preparation in Russia.

The revelation was launched in Russia on October 11 by the website of Archpriest Alexander Novopashin, the Vice President of the Russian national anti-cult umbrella organization Russian Association of Centers for Religious and Cultic Studies (РАЦИРС/RATsIRS), which is connected with the European anti-cult federation FECRIS. The graphic presentation of the article including the revelation is reminiscent of traditional Russian anti-Semitic iconography.

The statement is by a well-known Russian lawyer, Alexander Korelov, which regularly helps or represents leading anti-cultists such as Alexander Dvorkin or the same Novopashin when they are accused of defamation by groups they stigmatize as “cults.” Korelov introduces himself as “lawyer of RATsIRS.” In 2017, the Secretary General of the MIVILUDES, the French governmental anti-cult mission, Anne Josso, shared the stage in Brussels with both Dvorkin and Korelov at a conference organized at the Belgian Parliament by the FECRIS. To this very day, a text by Korelov appears on FECRIS’ official website.

Korelov claims that after it was “liquidated” and banned in Russia in 2017, “the extremist cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses did not cease to operate. As we expected, they went underground, holding their meetings in safe houses, receiving instructions from the American center through instant messengers, blogs, and so on. But lately the picture has changed. From the leading centers located in the United States, instructions are sent to the illegal divisions of the cult in our country through ‘closed’ channels, which indicate an attempt by the cult to organize a coup d’état in Russia similar to the Maidan in the now former Ukraine.”

Not without noting the use of the expression “former Ukraine,” we can focus our attention on Korelov’s thesis that “in Russia, the Western intelligence services intend to repeat the already developed scheme, implemented in Kyiv in 2014. Its essence is this. To begin with, ‘peaceful protesters’ are being taken out onto the streets, the backbone of which is primarily adherents of cults,” among which the lawyer mentions also Pentecostals and Scientologists. Then, “all kinds of dissatisfied elements, the mentally ill, drug addicts, criminals and just curious people are drawn to them. Everything seems to start peacefully, under pacifist slogans. Gradually, the crowd begins to ‘warm up’ with specially trained provocateurs, as well as on social networks.” And finally, the government is reversed: “According to the information at our disposal, this is precisely what is being intensively prepared in the milieu of cults. Now we have absolutely certain data that Jehovah’s Witnesses are turning from an extremist organization into a terrorist one. We warned about this already several years ago.”

Perhaps overlooking the fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses moved their headquarters from Brooklyn to Warwick in 2016–2017, Korelov insists that “the leaders from the Brooklyn center are turning Russian adherents into cannon fodder to achieve their goals. Just like in Ukraine, the United States is fighting with the hands of Ukrainians and mercenaries, so in Russia they are ready to waste biomaterial they do not need in the form of adherents of this cult. The American leadership of Jehovah’s Witnesses is made of people unencumbered by moral standards. They are ready for anything. At the same time, ideological support is being launched among American-sponsored religious scholars, who have already started talking about the need for a ‘rehabilitation’ of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are accused of operating “‘sleeping’ extremist cells under the leadership of their center in the United States. And the fact that the Brooklyn [again] center of this cult is under the complete control of the American secret services is not longer a secret.” Pentecostals, Scientologists, and even “neo-Pagans” are also being prepared by the U.S. intelligence to support the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ coup, or so Korelov believes.

All these “cults” are described as “just puppet organizations in the hands of a behind-the-scenes puppeteer. This is an element of the socio-political structure of the United States, which they are trying to impose on the whole world. It is also obvious that all American cults are guided from a single center,” a claim also recently promoted by Novopashin.

“Cults” and the United States themselves are portrayed by the lawyer as “something vile, unworthy. Notice the stupidity of their leaders. The same Hubbard—the founder of Scientology—was a degenerate personality. What about the false prophecies of the Adventists? It clearly smacks of mental illness. Therefore, when mentioning American cults, you can twist your finger at your temple. The United States is the spiritual garbage dump of humanity. I have never taken their public-state matrix seriously. In their country there are no people capable of thinking globally, there is no knowledge of their own, everything is bought. Primitive, in a word. […] The United States has a very vulnerable socio-political system that can be destroyed in a few months. You just need to know their vulnerabilities and be able to influence them.” Russia had not destroyed the United States immediately, Korelov explains, “because too abrupt changes mean hundreds of millions of people who die from wars and upheavals in all countries. I doubt that anyone is ready to take responsibility for such sacrifices. Everything must be progressive and carefully thought out. This is the art of politics.”

However, the lawyer believes that the events in Ukraine and now the preparation of an anti-Putin coup through the Jehovah’s Witnesses represent the beginning of the end for the United States, as Russia could not fail to react. “Russia is not at war with Ukraine. Russia, in fact, is at war with the Satanists of the West FOR Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, to save people, to protect them from the arbitrariness of the United States and other pseudo-democratic states.” In Ukraine, he claims, “there are US bacteriological laboratories that spread the infections around the world, there are secret concentration camps where Ukrainians are tortured and killed, they organize the trade in Ukrainian children and much more. I have seen how the brainwashing technologies of the cults turn the people of the former Soviet republic into zombies. […] The once flourishing Soviet republic of Ukraine has been turned into a Nazi hell by the American occupiers. I can say with absolute certainty that the United States is carrying out genocide of the population of Ukraine. They methodically send Ukrainians to their death under the pretext of confrontation with Russia, they shoot and hang, or corrupt Ukrainian children in towns and villages. It is scary to watch when our troops enter the villages, and there are dozens of hanged children”—hanged by “the United States and NATO.”

One can regard these preposterous claims as the ravings of a lunatic. However, Korelov is really a well-known lawyer in Russia, and the web site that published his revelations is an official organ of both the Russian main anti-cult organization and the Russian Orthodox Church. He has even spoken at the Belgian Parliament, together with the crème of Western anti-cultists and the Secretary General of a French governmental agency. Accusing the peaceful and non-political Jehovah’s Witnesses of terrorism and of preparing a coup is obviously ridiculous. However, “revelations” of this kind serve as warrants for further persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses and devotees of other groups labeled as “cults.”

“I know that Russia, a country of believers and traditional values, has a much greater development potential than the entire ‘collective West’ put together,” Korelov concludes. Besides, “God is with us. We will win.”

(*) Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

Photo: Rosita Šorytė discussing Korelov’s revelations at the Bordeaux conference (Bitter Winter)

Further reading about FORB in Russia on HRWF website

Further reading about FORB in Belgium on HRWF website

RUSSIA: Leading anti-cultist calls Ukrainians “nazis,” “satanists,” and “cannibals”

Russian leading anti-cultist calls Ukrainians “nazis,” “satanists,” and “cannibals”

Archpriest Alexander Novopashin is vice-president of Russia’s largest anti-cult organization, and still styles himself as a “corresponding member” of FECRIS.

By Massimo Introvigne

Bitter Winter (04.07.2022)- https://bit.ly/3aaZjly – A journalist friend of Bitter Winter received from the Diocese of Novosibirsk of the Russian Orthodox Church the text of an interview by Archpriest Alexander Novopashin published by the Komsomolskaya Pravda on June 24, and a CV explaining why Novopashin matters and the interview was important. He sent it to us, knowing we follow Novopashin with interest.

He is, as the CV (which is also published on the website of the missionary department of his diocese) explains, a “corresponding member” of FECRIS, the European Federation of Centers of Research and Information on Cults and Sects. The same web site emphasizes the role of Novopashin as vice-president of the Center for Religious Studies, the Russian anti-cult umbrella organization whose President is the FECRIS board member Alexander Dvorkin.

As Bitter Winter has reported, after the Russian aggression against Ukraine the Center for Religious Studies disappeared from the list of FECRIS member organizations on FECRIS’s web site, although no official statement or press release explained why. As far as we know, Dvorkin is still a member of FECRIS’ board. And if FECRIS does not consider Novopashin as a “corresponding member” any longer, it should say so clearly and take action against his website.

All this is of some interest in view of the “important” interview with Novopashin his diocese is advertising and has republished. We are accustomed to Russian propaganda, and to the fact that Russian FECRIS-connected anti-cultists such as Alexander Dvorkin accuse “the cults” of having worked with the American intelligence to create the democratic movement in Ukraine.

However, the FECRIS “corresponding member”’s interview is extreme even by Russian standards. The interviewer starts by telling Novopashin that, “There is a Z sign on your service church car. Your position regarding the special military operation in Ukraine becomes immediately clear.” The anti-cult leader answers that he “expressed [his] position on the very first day of the special operation, calling it anti-terrorist, by the way. Because the political regime of Ukraine is undoubtedly terrorist, extremist, misanthropic, Nazi. The Z sign means a world in which there is no place for Nazism and Satanism. For me, Nazism and Satanism are synonymous words.”

Novopashin reminisces that in the good old Soviet times Ukrainians felt they were not really separated from Russia. But then Ukraine rapidly went “downhill, according to the plans prepared by Western and American experts who are pretty well versed in destructive activities. The work to split our people has been carried out incessantly, especially intensively for the last thirty years, and, unfortunately, not without success. It took a lot of money to do this. But the work on the separation of Ukrainians and Russians reached its apogee after Euromaidan. Ukrainians seem to have been completely changed. They have become different. And this is understandable, because the pressure on their consciousness was unprecedented. And it continues for this purpose.” The West, Novopashin explains as an expert on “cults,” used the same “psychotechniques” used by “cults.” In fact, it used them in Ukraine by infiltrating or sponsoring “cults” there.

The aim of the dual conspiracy of the West and the “cults” in Ukraine, Novopashin explains, was to promote “Nazism.” “A significant part of the population of Ukraine is imbued with this ideology… but Ukrainian youth have suffered especially. Actually, the West was counting on it, the youth, initially.”

In fact, Novopashin explains, Ukrainians are so Nazi that even children in schools prepare dishes for the holidays and give them names “like ‘Blood of Russian babies’ and so on. Although, of course, Ukrainian school teachers helped them in coming up with the names. Children are made cannibals.”

They do not actually eat Russian human flesh or drink Russian blood in schools, but they become cannibals psychologically, Novopashin believes. When they grow up, they pass to “action.” For example, Novopashin says, “a seemingly prosperous Ukrainian girl writes in social networks that prisoners of war should be sold for organs. And she gets likes. The worst thing is that these are not just statements, they are a call to action.” Because of the Western and cultist “brainwashing,” in Ukraine now “the whole air is poisoned by Nazi ideology, Ukrainians are forced to breathe it. Of course, even in this case, not all become ukronazists or radical nationalists, but the others just turn a blind eye to what is happening… However, when they are given a machine gun in their hands and told to go and kill the Russians, they go and kill. Including civilians, children, pregnant women, the elderly. Maybe they are not neo-Nazis in spirit, but they are killing… Do you understand?”

One objection by the interviewer is that there are Russian-speaking Ukrainians fighting for Ukraine against Russia. Novopashin answers that they have been brainwashed and have become “Russian bastards.” “This is just about what can be done to a person, daily, hourly affecting her consciousness. Deprive her of critical thinking, remove the protective barrier—and then you can upload anything into a person’s head. And as a result, depending on the information with which she is fed, a person can mentally degrade. Russians, who have mentally degraded, cease to be Russians, they become ‘Russian bastards.’ Russian bastards hate everything Russian: faith, culture, history, literature. The Azov Regiment is made of Russian bastards. Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Yurievich Glazyev says that Russian bastards are worse than fascists, and declares that we, Russians, cannot have any dialogue with Russian bastards.”

How did the West operate? It understood, Novopashin explains, that it should destroy the Russian Orthodox Church, and it did it through the “cults.” “Cultist, primarily neo-Pentecostal, and neo-pagan organizations began to be created in Ukraine from the beginning of the 1990s, in which tens of thousands of Ukrainians were fraudulently involved. The neo-pagans showed themselves to be the most aggressive. They sawed down wayside crosses, set fire to Orthodox churches and chapels. But the neo-Pentecostals were not much better than them. They did not set fire to churches, but… It is well known that neo-Pentecostal missionaries were sent from Ukraine to Russia, whose goal was to ‘reform the consciousness of Russians on the basis of the Euromaidan values,’ spread the ‘theology of Maidan,’ create cultic communities in the form of sleeping cells on ‘enemy territory,’ that is, on our territory, which could be quickly awakened in case of any disturbances. Let me remind you that this was the case on the Maidan, when thousands of members of the cults came to the square in the center of Kiev.”

With the war, Novopashin insists, the cat is out of the bag and Ukrainian “cultists” show their true Satanist self. Many “members of the Ukrainian national security forces,” the anti-cultists explains, “perform Satanic rituals, paint their bodies not only with swastikas, but also with Satanic and occult symbols. In fact, these are cults… The Nazis declare themselves servants of Satan and challenge God.”

Novopashin admits that he has no evidence that the Ukraine military perform human sacrifices to Satan or cannibalism. “But if the Nazi Satanists, he asks, painted with occult and pagan signs, cut the prisoners’ throats, do not spare the elderly, rape, and then brutally kill women and children by carving swastikas on the dead bodies, is this not the same act of sacrifice to their pagan gods?”

But why should the West promote such horrors in Ukraine? The “FECRIS corresponding member” has the answer: “To destroy everything that connects Ukraine with the Greater Russia, the Russian civilization, with Russia, with the Russian world. Such an ideology is always destructive… The special operation of denazification is carried out not only to destroy the hydra in its lair, but to protect the whole Russian world.” However, Novopashin believes that destroying the hydra in Ukraine would not be enough. The West, he says, is already at work in other countries. “After an end will be put to Ukrainian Nazism, some other aggressor country will appear, through which the United States will begin to threaten Russia. A civilizational war cannot be avoided.”

These theories seem to suggest that the Archpriest is not operating with a full deck, but it is important to note that Novopashin is not a lonely madman. His interviews are reprinted nationwide, and advertised by his diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Maybe, but we do not know for sure, the membership of his organization in the FECRIS has been recently suspended, but he claims to be still with FECRIS as an individual. And Novopashin and Dvorkin did not develop these ideas overnight when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russian anti-cultists started making preposterous claims about “cultists” being used by the CIA to create a democratic anti-Russian movement in Ukraine at the time of the Orange Revolution in 2004, and continued in 2014 and beyond. During all these times, they were part of FECRIS and hailed by FECRIS as particularly effective members. It would be difficult now for FECRIS to claim it didn’t know what the positions of its Russian affiliates were about Ukraine.

Photo: Archpriest Alexander Novopashin. From VKontakte.

***************************************************

Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

Further reading about FORB in Russia on HRWF website

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