“I don’t want to get used to the war” was the message painted on a fence outside the former Stables Department building in Petersburg in February 2025. Photo: Bumaga
Author of graffiti “I don’t want to get used to the war” released after sentencing
The Petrograd District Court sentenced activist Alexander Arseniev to twenty months in prison on criminal charges of vandalism and “discrediting” the [Russian] army, his lawyer, Alexei Pryanishnikov, reported on his Telegram channel.
Arseniev was released in the courtroom after his stay in a pretrial detention center was counted as time served. According to Arseniev’s case file on the court’s website, the final hearing in the case took place today. As this article went to press, the court’s decision had not yet been entered into the file.
Arseniev wrote “I don’t want to get used to the war” on a fence near the Stables Department and at Gazprom Arena in February 2025. The graffiti outside the stadium was repainted overnight.
Last March, Arseniev was detained in Moscow and extradited to Petersburg, where he was remanded in the pretrial detention center. Spray paint cans and an acrylic marker were found police searched his flat.
Repression in today’s Russia is not on par with the mass repression of the country’s past. Nevertheless, it fulfills the same function by intimidating society and changing the behavior of millions.
Many people also feel that this repression is intensifying. But human rights data show the opposite: for a year now, the number of new politically motivated cases has remained at the same level — around 500 per quarter.
In the “Repression Barometer” report for the first three months of 2026, researchers from Memorial’s project in support of political prisoners made clear that Russian authorities appear to regard the current level of politically motivated arrests — which plateaued at 500 per quarter — as optimal.
Out of a population of around 140 million, that is not very many cases. By comparison, around four times as many murder cases are opened over the same time frame. Repression does not affect the majority. In 1937–1938, for example, more than 1.37 million people out of the U.S.S.R.’s population of 162 million were arrested in cases involving “counter-revolutionary crimes” and around half of them were shot.
But modern repression performs the same role as the mass repressions of the 1930s by creating a sense of an all-powerful, punitive hand of the state that effectively changes the behavior of millions.
But why is it so powerful when only a small number of people are punished? Political cases become a weapon for intimidating the population not through scale, but through unpredictability.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people make online comments that could be classified as “fake news,” “discrediting” the Armed Forces or “justifying terrorism.”
But criminal cases are opened against only a few — and it is precisely this selectiveness that makes the system so effective. It is impossible to predict where the boundaries of permissibility lie and at what point the state will decide to impose a punishment.
The same logic applies in cases involving “extremist” symbols, a category that today includes many things from the logos associated with Alexei Navalny’s activities to pentagrams and rainbow flags. In reality, such images can be found on many social media pages, but criminal cases are opened only in isolated instances.
Each such case sends a signal. Formally, rules exist. But in practice, they are applied selectively — and no one can be certain they will not be next.
The state cannot currently imprison millions. But it does not need to. Imprisoning hundreds unpredictably is more than enough to create the impression that anyone could end up behind bars.
The wording of the relevant laws also plays into this. They are extremely vague and even lawyers cannot always calculate the risk of simple actions. For most people, doing nothing is the best way to make sure they remain on the right side of the law.
A good example is cases involving “foreign agents,” where the law does not forbid private users from reposting or quoting their content without a disclaimer. But because of the chilling effect of a growing number of restrictive laws, people are afraid to quote or repost material from such branded outlets. The problem is compounded by the existence of other statuses like “undesirable” and “extremist,” for which legal consequences for sharing their material do exist. But many people, fearful of crossing the line, prefer to keep away.
Fear takes hold first and foremost among the most informed and engaged people who read independent news and follow human rights organizations. Aware of the risks, they begin to express themselves more vaguely, participate less often in public discussions and withdraw from active involvement.
The victims of unpredictable repression, meanwhile, are increasingly ordinary people who write comments or publish posts on VKontakte without realizing the risks they are taking.
Despite covering barely a quarter of the total number of incidents, the media — both pro-government and independent — plays a major role in creating the impression of widespread repression. Absurd and plainly unjust cases receive such wide coverage — like the story of the hookah on an Easter kulich — that their very absurdity intensifies the fear of the unpredictability of repression.
Within this logic, criminal cases against public figures who have left the country — writers, actors, bloggers, politicians and television presenters — look like a separate area of work for the security services. There is no practical point to these repressions: hardly any of these people will be extradited from Europe, where they have settled. But such cases receive widespread public attention, which further helps create an atmosphere of fear. Celebrities are not spared, so what can ordinary mortals expect?
Thus, contemporary Russian repression does not need to become mass repression at all. Its effectiveness rests on a combination of unpredictability and public signaling: most cases remain almost invisible, but individual stories become a signal to everyone else.
If human rights defenders are right and the authorities really do regard the current level of repression as “optimal,” then perhaps they believe nothing more is required. There is no need to imprison millions to frighten millions more. It is enough to maintain a constant stream of cases and, from time to time, show society that anyone could be next.
May 21st marks Circassian Remembrance Day, or the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Russo-Caucasian War. This war, spanning from 1763 to 1864, resulted in the loss of independence for the North Caucasus region and, for the Circassians (one of the region’s indigenous peoples), in genocide and mass exile from their historical homeland.
In the 1990s, Circassian activists, public figures, politicians, and scholars successfully secured official recognition for this date as a day of mourning. Since then, two official narratives have coexisted in the North Caucasus, particularly in Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, and the Krasnodar Krai: one asserting the voluntary integration of North Caucasians into Russia, and the other describing a colonial war, genocide, and expulsion.
The state actively supports the first narrative in every way possible, while the second is methodically squeezed out of the public discourse.
Every year on May 21st, a mourning procession, comprising both walkers and horsemen, winds its way through Nalchik. They proceed along the central thoroughfare, passing the monument to Maria Temryukovna, the Circassian wife of Ivan the Terrible, which bears the inscription “Forever with Russia,” before continuing on to another monument: Psezhig (The Tree of Life), created in memory of the Circassian victims of the Russo-Caucasian War.
Since 2016, Ored Recordings has been releasing projects timed to coincide with this somber date. The liner notes for these albums remains unchanged: again and again, we speak of trauma, and of the immense difficulty in discussing it, as the state systematically closes off any space for dialogue. While in the early years we opted for highly neutral phrasing, since 2022, officials have begun banning commemorative events; consequently, finding the right words has become increasingly challenging. We are permitted to remember, mourn, or reflect only within strictly prescribed forms. Thus, cultural projects and musical releases serve as an insufficient, yet absolutely necessary, form of resistance against assimilation and suppression.
This year, we decided to shift our focus away from the trauma itself or the specific subject of the Russo-Caucasian War, choosing instead to present a cross-section of new Circassian music — music that is not merely being preserved, but is actively evolving.
Shyshagh (ЩIыщIагъ, meaning “underground” in Adyghe) offers a snapshot of an imagined Circassian underground scene, as curated by Ored Recordings.
Three artists have contributed their distinct visions of independent Circassian music to this compilation.
For this release, Cherim (Maykop born, Tbilisi based) has departed from his signature industrial hip-hop and hauntological ambient styles, recording two indie-folk ballads featuring lyrics that are at once simple and deeply poignant. The tracks contain echoes of both Soviet-era pop music and the lo-fi underground tradition exemplified by acts such as Low or Rivulets.
Temir (from Nalchik, based in Paris) is an electronic producer, collagist, and vocalist who translates Circassian aesthetics into the realms of deconstructed club, ethereal pop, and other forms of emotive avant-garde music. Ethnographic archives from the last century, along with rehearsal raw recordings from Jrpjej, served as the foundation for these qafe without dancing.
Two additional tracks come courtesy of duos featuring Timur Kodzoko (originaly from Nalchik, Göttingen based), a co-founder of Ored. From our archives, we unearthed an old rehearsal recording by Zafaq, a dormant Circassian Black Metal project. It is raw, instrumental bm-rooted in traditional melodies, yet one that explicitly rejects the aesthetics of folk metal. In 2020, the drums were handled by Amar Abazov, founder of the Zhest records.
The second track comes from Shkhafit (meaning “free” in Adyghe), a drone-folk project by Timur and his son, Astemir Kodzoko. It is a semi-improvised acoustic ambient piece performed on the shichepshin (Circassian fiddle), as well as various other string and wind instruments. It evokes the ghosts of an unfulfilled future and the spirit of new pshynatles-sagas. It is a soundscape where Mark Fisher visits Murdin Tesh.
Shyshagh stands as Ored Recordings’ most ironic and chaotic release to date. As yet another May 21st passes, we see no immediate light at the end, yet we remain ready to unite and carry on!
Cherim – recorded in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2026. All music by Cherim Tsei. Production for the song “Pari (Nothing)” by Temir.
temir – recorded in Paris, France, in 2026. All music by temir. “Duguj” based on Jrpjej rehearsal recordings. “Zechir” based on archival Circassian recordings.
Zafaq – recorded at the House of Radio, Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, in 2020. Timur Kodzoko – guitar Amar Abazov – drums
Shkhafit – recorded in Göttingen, Germany, in 2026. Timur Kodzoko – strings, bowed instruments, and effects Astemir Kodzoko – physharmonium and wind instruments
Cover photo: Tulip tree in the village of Golovinka, Lazarevsky District, Krasnodar Krai/Shapsugia. Photo by Lilit Matevosyan Cover design: Milana Khalilova Text: Bulat Khalilov (English translation by Bella Mirzoeva)
Source: Ored Recordings (Bandcamp). I have included the entire album here for your listening pleasure, but I would urge to download it from Bandcamp, paying what you can to Ored Recordings to support their fine mission. That’s what I just did. \\\\\ trr
Lena Karbe’s documentary film Inner Emigrants examines what people in Russia think about the war with Ukraine. Deutsche Welle spoke with the filmmaker about making the picture and the conclusions we can draw from it.
One of the psychologists featured in the film “Inner Emigrants” on the job. Still courtesy of Karbe Film GmbH
Lena Karbe’s documentary film Inner Emigrants (Innere Emigranten) is currently playing in cinemas in Germany. Born in Russia, the filmmaker has lived and work in Germany for fifteen years. Her new picture looks at the work of three crisis hotline psychologists in Russia. Viewers see them volunteering their evenings by talking to people in need of counseling.
The film was shot over three years, from 2022 to 2024, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war and people’s thoughts about it are the picture’s focus. Its protagonists oppose the war and wonder whether they can take a stand against the war and society’s attitude to it. Instead of engaging in open protest, they choose inner emigration. Our correspondent sat down with Lena Karbe after a screening of the film in Cologne to talk about how the picture was made and the conclusions we could draw after seeing it.
DW: How and when did you get the idea of making this film?
Lena Karbe: The idea occurred to me immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m a documentary filmmaker, but I have always done projects about other countries of the world—about China, for example. I “transferred” my interest in political topics to other countries because I’m from Petersburg myself and have lived in Germany for fifteen years, and I probably needed the distance to be able to make a film about the country where I was born. The start of the full-scale invasion was the shock that accelerated these processes for me. I realized that I couldn’t make a film about something else at the moment.
As is often the case in filmmaking, I fortuitously happened upon an article about a crisis hotline and got in touch with its coordinator. He immediately took a big interest in the project, probably because at the time (this was April 2022) all of us were in a state of shock and the idea of starting a project like this seemed like a way of finding a constructive channel for all our conflicting feelings. So all the initial steps happened quite quickly.
Meaning that the hotline’s coordinator and the psychologists to whom you reached out fairly quickly agreed to be in the film. What were their motivations? After all, involvement in this project presents a certain risk for them.
In some sense, they were in absolutely the same situation as their callers and I were in—a situation of absolute uncertainty. We were all in a state of shock. It was absolutely unclear what the future held in store.
All my films follow their characters over the course of several years. I said from the outset that I would like to make a record of the time, meaning that it would not be a quick project. I wanted to document the situation over several years, and this was the film’s psychological function for everyone involved in it. It helped us to cope with our complicated states of mind.
So it helped you figure yourselves out?
Yes. And yet, the context is vital: a crisis hotline that anyone whosoever can dial. We thought it would help us find out more about what the country’s populace actually thinks, because information from Russia is quite limited and one-sided in Germany. Like many others, I found it quite hard to deal with the alleged fact that the entire population of Russia holds the same opinion—if you believe the information out there. I wanted to see and hear it for myself.
How did you manage to do this project? The press release for the film says that it was shot in complete secrecy. At the presentation you said that you shot completely openly in the subway, for example, and on the streets. Didn’t it require a great deal of courage to do that?
As I’ve already said, I’m a documentary filmmaker. It’s my main occupation, and with certain projects it is clear from the get-go that they cannot be done differently. So I wouldn’t call that courage. I think it’s just a consequence of the decisions you make.
Meaning it’s professionalism.
Meaning there’s no other way to do it.
The film is called Inner Emigrants, an allusion to the German term “inner emigration,” which is applied to writers who didn’t flee Germany during the Second World War. Why did you give the film this particular title?
Despite the fact that there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between the realities of inner emigration in German literature and the situation in Russia, there are very many similar elements in this phenomenon and the behavior of many people in Russia now. It was this particular point that aroused my curiosity.
If you believe certain statistical data, the silent majority makes up somewhere around sixty percent of the Russian populace, and many of those people would say that they are inner emigrants.
The poster for the film “Inner Emigrants.” Image courtesy of Mindjazz Pictures
This kind of film, in which I wanted to understand the moods in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, could be made ten thousand different ways. It was vital to me that this wasn’t a journalistic project. I endlessly admire the work of my journalist colleagues, but documentary filmmaking, the genre in which I work, is a more universal approach. Its goal is not to inform people but to delve into a phenomenon and make the viewer feel something. I hope that by film’s end the viewer has come to feel for themself the complexity and ambiguity of inner emigration and the contradictoriness of the term itself.
I saw two important points in the film. The first was the way you showed what lies behind the statistics you cited. The psychologists are a kind of mirror. On the one hand, they are the film’s protagonists, who have their own quite ambivalent thoughts and feelings. One of them is disgusted by people who tell him over the phone that they support the war. This disgust is manifested to a lesser degree in the other protagonists. At the same time, they show us what happens behind the scenes. Do you agree with what I took away from the film?
Yes. I think people’s reactions to this film can vary widely, which is quite important. It’s dangerous to lose touch with Russian realities entirely. I’m speaking now from the perspective of those of us living in Germany. Because even in 2022, coverage of events in Russia—video footage—was already quite limited, and now there’s practically none. I would very much like for this film to lead to a dialogue. It’s obvious, but not so obvious to some, that the Russian-speaking population in Germany is quite diverse. And we don’t talk to one another.
Do you mean dialogue with Russians living in Germany?
Yes. And of course, even though we currently have no contact with Russia, it’s important that we don’t completely shut ourselves off from everyone. It seems to me that generalization is the big problem. When it comes to very strong, extreme emotions, we slip into a childish, categorical mindset and start lumping everyone together.
You mean that we divide everything into black and white, while there are in fact shades of gray?
Yes.
My second takeaway from the film boils down to the question “What should we do?” What should we do ourselves, and what should we do about those who are clearly saying things that don’t align with their own beliefs and values? The film both does and doesn’t give an answer to this question. On the one hand, the final shot shows someone going out in public with a placard and protesting the war. The final shot always serves as a highlight. In this way, you show that something can be done. On the other hand, the psychologists in the film argue that they cannot change how people feel about the war, meaning that changing their minds is both impossible and pointless. Do you think this is really the case? Or is there a point in talking with people, say, with the “Putinists” living in Germany?
Filmmaker Lena Karbe. Photo: Julia Weidner
When I speak of dialogue, I mean first of all that we have set aside hatred, if possible. Hatred is a destructive emotion, and we won’t be able to build a future for Russia based on it. I think there is a type of people with whom it is impossible to have a dialogue, nor is it our task to change their minds. I even had in mind a dialogue with ourselves, so that we don’t stop thinking and seeking the truth, so that we avoid being categorical and generalizing. If we lump everyone together, it’ll be tough.
Do you have the will and the means to keep making films in and about Russia?
Definitely not right now, but we’ll see how things change. I hope that this film can be considered a record of its time. Now, at any rate, I’m taking a professional (but not a personal) timeout from observing the situation.
My background is quite important to me. I wouldn’t rule out [making a new film about Russia], but not in the near future
Karbe spent nearly four years traveling undercover to Moscow to chronicle the experiences of three psychologists maintaining an anonymous crisis hotline at the start of the Ukraine war, while at the same time struggling to reconcile their totalitarian regime’s strict demands with their own beliefs.
Born and raised in Russia herself, Karbe (now a German citizen) wanted to explore why Russia’s silent majority was staying silent as the war on Ukraine took hold. “Are they complicit, or — as many Russians say — ‘neutral’?” asks Karbe.
The director says “Inner Emigrants” is “a cautionary tale.”
“What we see in Russia today is that silence allows the totalitarian regime to grow stronger,” she says. “It shows how quickly civil liberties can be dismantled and repression can become normalized, as the majority chooses to turn inward rather than to resist openly.”
Mindjazz Pictures managing director Holger Recktenwald says the film “offers a rare and intimate insight into the psychological inner world of a society living under massive propaganda and state repression since the invasion of Ukraine.”
It asks the question “what silence, conformism and ‘inner emigration’ mean in a totalitarian system,” Recktenwald adds.
It was a film of “strong relevance for German audiences: it sheds light on the mechanisms of authoritarian systems, highlights the psychological strain in the context of war and propaganda, and at the same time opens up a respectful space for debate about responsibility, complicity, resistance, and empathy — without relativizing or blurring perpetrator-victim structures.”
“Inner Emigrants” is produced by Karbe Film and Macalube Films, in co-production with See-Through Films, in co-production with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, and Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, with the support of Filmfernsehfonds Bayern, Centre National Du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, FFA Filmförderungsanstalt, La Région Île-Defrance and Deutscher Filmförderfonds (DFFF).
It is the second feature documentary from Karbe. Her first film, “Black Mambas” (2022), world premiered at CPH:DOX, where it won the F:ACT Award.
I’ve spent most of the last 48 hours doomscrolling through people’s reactions to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The people I follow most regularly have split into predictable camps. There are people like me and Adam Serwer who are trying to put the court’s decision into the larger context of the long-standing white hostility to Black voting rights and Black political power. There are the folks like Ian Millhiser who have tried to explain the immediate legal effects of the court’s unconscionable decision. The activist set is taking some time to digest what has happened and plan for next steps, with some vowing to “fight” and ultimately “win” in some fashion.
Predictable, too, has been the reaction from the right. White supremacists and, to the extent there’s a difference, Republicans have been giddy. I read one particularly risible piece of trash in National Review crowing about how the Supreme Court’s decision will allow Republicans to gerrymander away Black political power while stopping Democrats from restoring that power. I think that legal analysis is wrong. But what struck me was not the stupidity of the argument but how happy they were to make it.
That happiness, from whites, is something that most of the articles and analyses, including mine, have failed to capture sufficiently. It is as distressing to me as the actual decision and the terrible results that will result from it.
The Voting Rights Act was once considered a pillar of American democracy—so much so that it was extended and expanded in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan. It was reauthorized in 2006 by President George W. Bush, and that reauthorization passed the Senate 98–0. In just 20 years, the VRA has gone from being such a mainstay of the democratic project that even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives didn’t dare vote against it to something that barely hooded mouthbreathers at National Review are happy to trash.
I don’t really know how to process that information. It’s not just that we’re going back to a Jim Crow state of affairs—it’s that white people are happy about it. As if the 60 years of post-apartheid America that were ushered in by the VRA were just an unfortunate detour, and now white people can get back to their preferred route.
Republicans always want you to believe that they’re not racist “in their hearts,” that they just happen to prefer a set of policies that coincidentally result in inequality, oppression, and less opportunity for non-white Americans. But this reaction to the death of the VRA proves they’re lying. They hate Black people, and they hate Black people who have political power most of all.
And now, they’re happy to finally be able to take that political power away.
Is there even one series with a cover like this (you know what I mean) that actually has good ratings? Why on earth are they making THIS????
Source: Ororo.tv. Racist comment translated by the Russian Reader, who has unfortunately read and heard thousands of such comments in Russian during his thirty-plus years on the Russia desk. ||||| trr
John Watson and Sherlock Holmes’ fates intertwined one last time in the Season 2 finale of Watson, which serves as a series finale as the CBS medical drama has been canceled.
In the closer, as Watson (Morris Chestnut) traveled with Mary (Rochelle Aytes) to Baltimore to get surgery for the glioblastoma that had been causing his Sherlock visions all season, a disoriented Holmes — in the flesh — was admitted to the Holmes Clinic in Pittsburgh. When Watson got word, he abandoned his surgery plans and returned to treat his friend. He deducted the cause of Sherlock’s illness but the delay of his own life-saving surgery cost him, and Watson suffered a debilitating seizure.
He eventually woke up and professed his love to Mary who reciprocated. With his surgeon coming to Pittsburgh, the finale ended with Watson in the OR and a vision of him and Mary living at 221B Baker Street in London, the future he had laid out for them in their heart-to-heart hours earlier. (In the Sherlock Holmes lore, the brilliant detective shared his apartment at the famous address with Watson.)
Speaking to Deadline, Watson creator/executive producer Craig Sweeny addressed how he approached the finale and its ending and provided one explanation for the Baker Street flashforward.
“The season finale was tricky to write in that, even while we were filming it, we didn’t know if the show was coming back or not,” he said.
CBS’ cancellation decision came after Watson had wrapped production on Season 2.
“We opted to treat it mostly as a season finale, with a coda appended that nods to a possible future for Watson and Mary,” Sweeny added. “The coda, set at Baker Street, has several possible interpretations — among other things, it could be a fantasia Watson is seeing as he’s on the operating table in what may be his dying moments. I have my own interpretation but prefer not to comment on it beyond what’s on the screen so audiences can make up their own minds.”
At the time of the Watson January 2025 series premiere, Sweeny told Deadline that he had built the show on the presumption that Sherlock is dead. “I don’t want to be held to that if there’s some great story that presents itself, but I don’t believe that we’re ever going to feature Sherlock as an ongoing character in the show Watson at this time,” Sweeny said back then.
Following the Season 2 finale, Sweeny explained to Deadline how the idea of bringing Sherlock onto the show started and evolved — from a hallucination stemming from Watson’s brain tumor to a real person — and what the Season 3 plan for the Watson/Sherlock storyline was.
“In Season 3, Watson would also have been Sherlock’s doctor treating ongoing complications from the ailment that plagued Holmes at the end of Season 2,” Sweeny said. “We originally conceived the Watson/Holmes storyline to have Holmes exist only as a delusion in Watson’s head as a means for Watson to learn about his glioblastoma, but quickly revised those plans after we saw what Robert Carlyle brought to the role of Sherlock Holmes. Watson’s Holmes and Watson were fun to write and watch, and so we devised a way for Sherlock to be present in the real world.”
The Season 2 finale of Watson left storylines open-ended for the young doctors too, including the ongoing investigation into Beck’s death, the search for Sasha’s birth mother and Sasha (Inga Schlingmann) breaking up with Stephens (Peter Mark Kendall). Season 3 would’ve wrapped their fellowship arcs.
“The heart of Watson was the cases, so if we had come back we would have continued to hunt the strange and amazing scientific outliers that made up our strongest episodes,” Sweeny said. “Of course, medical fellowships last three years, so a major theme of season three would have been exploring what would have happened to Ingrid, Stephens, Adam, and Sasha at the end of their Fellowships and how many new doctors would be worked into the mix.”
Sweeny took the opportunity of the Watson finale to reflect on the series’ two-season run.
“We had a lot more to say with the show, so of course it’s sad we won’t be making any more,” he said. “But I’m grateful that we got to write and produce 33 episodes. I love to write procedurals with cases that are set at the edge of what humans know, and Watson gave me and our team the chance to do that every week.”
Sweeny previously spent five years on CBS’ Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson procedural Elementary, most of them as executive producer. He went on to acknowledge Watson executive producer Dr. Shäron Moalem, who “shared insights from decades working in genetics and was singularly important in crafting cases set on the vanguard of what’s possible.”
Sweeny also praised the work environment on Watson and its No.1 on the Call Sheet.
“Making Watson for two seasons was a rewarding experience for the producers, cast, and crew. We had tight-knit communities in Los Angeles and Vancouver,” he said of the series, which was written in Los Angeles and filmed in Vancouver. “I’ve been blessed to have career highlights and happy experiences on shows, but I’ve never known anything quite like the warm and collegial vibe that prevailed on Watson. I’m especially grateful to Morris Chestnut for his role in making that happen. When Morris was considering the role, we met for coffee and talked about the environment we both hoped to foster. His tireless leadership and example helped make the Watson set a happy experience for everyone who worked there.”
As he closes (prematurely) the chapter on Watson, Sweeny chooses to focus on the positive.
While thanking the “special group of people” who worked on the series, his producing partners, the cast, the writing staff, the casting and post departments, he said, “Naturally, all of us mourn the loss of the show and the community around it while also being grateful for the opportunity to make as much Watson as we did.”
IN A WORLD OF MIKE JOHNSONS — BE A MARSHAWN An angry Louisianan, known only as Marshawn [sic], gave an impassioned speech in a state Senate hearing this week in the lead-up to the vote to eliminate a majority Black district that — until last week — was protected by the VRA.
If you watch ONE THING today — let it be this
“I have no doubt in my mind that the map’s gonna pass,” Marshawn said. “If y’all can give us less than zero seats, you would do it. Y’all do this under the orders of somebody that said the Civil Rights Act was harmful to white people, that it caused reverse racism.”
“You showed us what you want to do. And I believe the country as a whole is rebuking your party. Y’all are in a death spiral. That’s why y’all have to redistribute. That’s why y’all have to cheat. That’s why Trump got to go to Texas and say he was entitled the five more seats. It’s because y’all know what y’all doing is abhorrent.”
“So I’m positive y’all gonna be okay with the maps. But the beautiful thing is, the children that y’all have made and the people that’s younger than y’all don’t support none of this racism that y’all want. The MAGA party is the last breath of the Confederacy. And I’ll be happy to see millennials and Gen Z bury y’all. There will be no more of your party. The midterms gonna come, y’all gonna get wiped out. Trump gonna get dragged out of the White House and I’m gonna love every second.”
“Because y’all loved every second of the suffering that he caused to everybody in this country and worldwide. We starvin’ Cuba. We bomb Nigeria. We holding Zimbabwe and Zambia hostage for the minerals. We don’t want to give them AIDS support. The pro-lifers that say all life is special, y’all letting kids die of AIDS. What part of your Bible say that?”
“Point out the scripture. I think everybody would love to see it. And we would love to see y’all in the midterms.”
In September 2022, Zambian officials were notified that one of their citizens had been killed in action, in Ukraine. Lemekhani Nyirenda’s death has sparked interest in Russia’s continued presence in Africa and how Africans are treated within Russia’s borders. Nyirenda’s death is one recent example of how Russia — and, before it, the Soviet Union — used and abused Africans to create their reputations as anti-imperialist and anti-racist states. There is a growing amount of literature being written on Soviet-African relations, particularly on Soviet interests and engagement on the African continent as a foreign policy concern. Yet less attention is being paid to the African experience within the Soviet Union. The experiences of African citizens reveal the paradoxical nature of Soviet anti-racist ideology and praxis. While the USSR recruited and welcomed thousands of African students to study technological and scientific disciplines to fight the legacies of imperialism in their home countries, Soviet citizens often treated the Africans in their midst with disdain and hostility.
This December will mark the 60th anniversary of the death of an African student in Moscow. The Ghanaian citizen Edmund Assare-Addo, who was studying medicine in Moscow, was found dead on a country road on the outskirts of the Soviet capital in 1963. As the historian Julie Hessler has shown, the contested death of Assare-Addo marked a watershed for Soviet-African race relations. It sparked one of the USSR’s largest protests since the 1920s, with some 500 African students marching through Moscow. Many of them arrived from St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) and other Soviet cities to participate. Wearing traditional Russian fur caps with ear-covering flaps, they gathered by the Kremlin’s gates, holding up signs saying, “Stop Killing Africans” and “Moscow, a second Alabama.”
While the Soviet media was relatively silent about the unrest, Western media covered the African student protests widely. Students interviewed by the New York Times on Dec. 19, 1963, complained of regular harassment by Soviet citizens and physical assaults. There was a discrepancy between the ideal of an anti-racist, multinational Soviet society and the existence of Black Africans within its borders.
Race relations between Black residents and students in the Soviet Union and their white (Slavic-presenting) counterparts are difficult to trace. As the USSR did not use race to categorize or organize society, it is hard to know how many African students studied there. Soviet citizens, however, were categorized within the ethno-federal state by “nationality,” with categories like “Jewish” or “Tatar.” Yet there was a clear ideological rejection of race and racism.
What we do know is that thousands of Africans moved to the Soviet Union, beginning in the 1950s, to gain access to Soviet higher education and military training. Generally, 1957 is seen as a turning point in the Soviet approach toward Africa and Africans.
In the 1920s and ’30s, African Americans were a focal point for Soviet anti-racist ideological practice. Dozens of African Americans moved to the Soviet Union for better economic opportunities and the chance to experience life in a country that officially condemned racism. The writer and poet Langston Hughes was the most famous of these visitors. His early writing on his experience reflected the hope that African American visitors to the USSR held for a society that actively struggled against racism. Other African American visitors, such as Homer Smith and Paul Robeson, lived in the Soviet Union for years, where they enjoyed special privileges as representatives of the “oppressed class of workers and an oppressed race,” according to the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928. The combination of foreignness (Americanness) and Blackness worked to the advantage of Black Americans. I would argue that, because African Americans were Americans, they were not only representatives of some of the most oppressed workers, but also of a pantheon of modern industrial developments — the United States.
There were considerably fewer Africans present in the Soviet Union during the early Stalinist era, yet those who were there did notice the difference between how the USSR talked about imperialist oppression and how it depicted Africans. The historian Woodford McClellan’s study of Black students at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), a training academy in Moscow during the 1920s and ’30s, includes an example of Black African students taking issue with the depictions of Africans and Black people in Soviet public media and discourse. For example, some objected to the portrayal of Blacks through Blackface in plays, while others complained of being called “monkey” and the prevalent juxtaposition of Black Africans with apes and monkeys in theaters. My research on early Soviet children’s books up through the late 1930s reveals that, even in one of the most experimental periods in Soviet artistic production, Black people — specifically Africans — were often depicted as wild, animalistic figures far removed from modernity.
It was following the 1957 International Youth Festival in the Soviet Union that one could see the impacts of these depictions in Soviet children’s and popular culture. There were visible tensions between Soviet citizens and the Africans in their midst. African students recruited to study in the USSR received benefits and opportunities unavailable to Soviet people. They received stipends from the government, had more freedom of movement around and outside the Soviet Union, and could shop at foreign stores that were off-limits to most Soviets. Coupled with these privileges was the fact that foreign students from the global south often had different curricula from their Soviet counterparts, focusing on transferable skills they could implement when they returned to their home countries. Return was key in the eyes of Soviet officials. African students were not allowed to remain in the USSR for extended periods after completing their studies. In her essay describing her 1976 trip to the Soviet Union, the African American writer and feminist Audre Lorde noted the difference between her lodgings in a first-rate hotel and a shabby hostel where some African and Asian participants in a conference were housed.
So how did the Soviet Union get to the situation in December 1963 in which African students accused their Soviet hosts of racism and, worse, of killing one of their own? In accounts from the 1960s to the Soviet collapse in 1991, African students described carrying knives to protect themselves and being called racial slurs by their Soviet classmates. When Assare-Addo died, rumors swirled. African students alleged he was killed because of his interracial romance with a white Soviet woman. Such relationships were not unusual for the time. As Harold D. Weaver has written when detailing his experiences as a Black American in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, there were numerous sexual escapades between African men and Soviet women. This was one of the touchstones of racial strife between Soviets and Africans, particularly between men: the assumption that African men were taking white Soviet women (and most African students and residents in the Soviet Union were men). Clearly, anti-racist ideology reached its limits when it replicated long-standing Western stereotypes of Black men as violators of white women.
Interracial relationships and, worse, interracial sex, were stigmatized throughout and after the Soviet era. Research by the sociologist Charles Quist-Adade on mixed-race, Afro-Russian children in the late 1980s and early 1990s highlights the racist undertones of Soviet views of interracial romances between Soviet women and African men. His respondents and their white, Soviet mothers describe regular public and private hostility toward them. Soviet women who had romantic engagements with African men were called prostitutes and shamed by their families and communities.
Worse was the treatment of Soviet women who became pregnant with mixed-race children. Women reported being pressured to end their pregnancies or give up their children for adoption to make their lives easier. Soviet women generally were not allowed to follow their African partners to their homes on the African continent, so those who chose not to terminate their pregnancies were often forced to raise their children alone, with little social support.
Some heartbreaking testimonies include childhood ostracization in school, name-calling and feelings of rejection throughout their school years. Yelena Khanga, an Afro-Russian television presenter and producer, is known for her work on the early 2000s daily talk show “The Domino Effect.” In an interview with NPR, she shared her feelings of isolation and loneliness among her Soviet classmates. Her Russian boyfriend even referred to her as his “little monkey” as a racialized term of endearment.
Compounding these feelings of isolation were the continued depictions of Africans as wild and Africa as a dangerous place. A popular Soviet children’s cartoon from 1970, “Katorok,” features a song, “Chunga Changa,” which depicts Africans as jet-black, barely human figures who commune with wild animals while dancing. Worse, the song’s lyrics include a recitation of the stanza “chew coconuts and eat bananas.” What kind of feelings could these depictions engender toward Africans? Moreover, as waiting lines for basic consumer goods grew longer and few had access to foreign goods, the privileges of African students and visitors aggravated public hostilities against them. Ultimately, a general attitude of “how can these people come here and live better than we do, on our dime, when they are so underdeveloped and behind?” flourished.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 represented a nadir for Africans living in the newly formed Russian Federation. Suddenly, they found themselves the unwanted guests of a government that no longer existed. They began to bear the brunt of anger about the Soviet system. Beatings, verbal assaults and murders of Africans, among other visible minorities, exploded. The 2010s were a harrowing period for any visible minority in Russia, as stabbings and physical assaults became commonplace in the major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. [Actually, the peak of this “harrowing period,” in St. Petersburg at least, was the late 2000s — trr.] Quist-Adade’s respondents described being harassed in the street and told they had AIDS because they were mixed-race (or had a mixed-race child).
Most recently, Africans and Afro-Russians have decried the racism and discrimination they face daily. From racial slurs to discrimination in housing, Black people struggle for equality in the Russian Federation. Lemekhani Nyirenda’s odyssey of studying in Russia, only to be accused of drug trafficking and sentenced to 9 1/2 years in a Russian prison, is the latest example of Black people’s hardships in Russia. That Nyirenda’s death occurred in Russia’s brutal campaign in Ukraine while Russia is courting additional African support is the culmination of the decades-long tension between ideology and praxis in the Soviet Union and Russia toward Africa and Africans.
The conception of Africans as representatives of “backward” countries needing Russian material aid has continued and flourished in the latter years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. Nyirenda’s death, allegedly as a member of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries, is ironic because it is this same group that has boots on the ground across the African continent, extracting precious minerals and resources at the expense of Africans.
The experiences of Africans and African Americans in the Soviet Union are often flattened into a single “Black” experience. However, African Americans were treated better than people from Africa and were respected by their Soviet counterparts as representatives of the United States, the USSR’s most significant competitor and a model of industrial modernity. Moreover, Africans were representatives of countries that were seen as the little brothers of the Soviet Union in the quest to decolonize and liberate the Third World. Africans were in the USSR to learn skills to improve their home countries, which were often depicted as wild and backward. Unfortunately, these assumptions about Black Africans led to Afro-Russians’ ostracization in the late Soviet era and beyond. From throwing bananas at Black soccer players to wearing Blackface in ballet performances, some of the worst stereotypes of Blackness continue to thrive in the Russian Federation. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not end one form of internationalism in which the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, participated — which is that of global anti-Blackness.
Over four years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, some of the Russians imprisoned in its early days are still in jail. Even people with no previous political activism have been landed with long prison sentences in order to crush dissent.
Yevgeny Zateyev and Anna Arkhipova attend a court hearing in the case against the Vesna movement, one of the leading voices of antiwar protest in Russia. A court in St Petersburg sentenced six defendants in the case to prison terms of up to 12 years. (Andrei Bok/ SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Russia’s political prisoners are “outcasts in their own land,” Sergei Dudchenko, a biker tortured and framed by the security services, told his trial judges this month before being handed a seven-year prison sentence.
Those arrested for opposing the war in Ukraine had “fewer rights than a stray dog, and on top of that they bear the humiliating brand of ‘terrorist’ — and all this for their active civic stance.”
Dudchenko and his friend Nikolai Murnev, who received the same sentence, were arrested with others in October 2022 in Stavropol, in southern Russia.
While in detention on minor charges (petty hooliganism and drug possession), they were brutally tortured. A case was put together that they were preparing a “terrorist act” — setting fire to a military recruitment office. Another of the group died in pretrial detention, one fled the country, and one turned state’s witness.
The invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, “split life into before and after, it divided the world into black and white,” Dudchenko told the court.
Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Jews, and others had “paid an unimaginable price” to resist Nazism in World War II. How, decades later, could “so much hatred and anger” be directed against Ukraine?
Within days of the invasion, Dudchenko made a solo protest — a motorbike ride with the Ukrainian flag. In court, four years later, he said: “When I sped along, with the banner of the oppressed streaming behind me, past an astonished crowd of militarists, I felt the human in me come into bloom.”
Dudchenko is one of dozens of wartime protesters who have exercised one of the few constitutional rights that remains accessible: to say a “final word” before sentencing.
Some who exercise this right, like Dudchenko, are citizens whose antiwar protest was their first political action. Some, like the powerlifting champion Yulia Lemeshchenko, are Russians who joined the Ukrainian armed forces. She told her trial, in November of last year: “I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but for me, Ukraine is home.”
Some are political activists, like Anna Arkhipova, one of six members of the Vesna protest network sentenced at a show trial in St Petersburg last month. “When the war began, it was my conscience that would not let me stand idly by,” she stated.
On Sunday May 17, Try Me For Treason: anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, an English-language film featuring readings of speeches, will be released on YouTube.
The title comes from a speech by Andrei Trofimov, who is serving ten years for pro-Ukrainian statements on social media — plus three for ending his “final word” to a closed court by saying: “Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a d–khead.”
At the second trial, before getting the three extra years, Trofimov scorned the charges of “discrediting the armed forces” and “justifying terrorism,” and invited prosecutors to charge him for deserting to Ukraine’s side. “Try me for treason. I betrayed your deranged state,” he told the judges.
The fifty-minute documentary was put together on a zero budget by a group of actors in Britain, to make the Russian antiwar movement more visible internationally.
Maya Willcocks, the actor-producer who reads a speech by Darya Kozyreva, said: “These are not well-known political leaders, they are people who have taken a stand against the state. I felt it was very important to have their words translated into English and out there for people to hear — to send the message that occupation is a crime, whether in Palestine or in Ukraine.”
Anthony Aldis, the videographer, said: “What I found compelling about these stories is that the beginning of any fightback is very often when people stand up against an apparently unassailable power.
“These people are not organized. It’s a raw push against something that they don’t believe they can beat, but they think they have to take a stand anyway, in solidarity with someone else who is being attacked and murdered.
“That idea is very important to us in the West, given what we face here in the UK, and in the USA, with the rise of the far right.”
As one of a small group of translators that helped prisoner support groups, I worked on the script, and on the book Voices Against Putin’s Warfrom which it derived.
Having traveled to Russia and Ukraine since Soviet times, I was struck by the political depth and heterogeneity of antiwar protest, even as it is constrained by state terror to individual acts of defiance. Those punished with long sentences range from pacifists who quote Leo Tolstoy to Soviet-era dissidents who ooze contempt for the judges, and Russians who go out of their way to justify Ukraine’s defensive military action.
It would be easy — and stupid — to dismiss the “final words” as atomized cries into a dark, authoritarian night. Rarely are they pleas to judges or government; more often, they are consciously crafted appeals to society.
The “last words” often try to situate those who say them historically. Sergei Dudchenko, born in 1987, said in court that “people like us will always keep emerging, to pick up the fallen banner of good and reason” . . . and recalled the seven protesters arrested on Red Square in 1968 for opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Noteworthy, too, is the infrastructure of support for political prisoners, comprising established human rights organizations such as Memorial: Support Political Prisoners, OVD-Info, and Mediazona; newly formed groups such as Fires of Freedom and Solidarity Zone, a website featuring “last words” going back to the 1950s; and Telegram groups caring for individual prisoners.
From California to the Caucasus, dozens of informal groups of Russians in exile gather and write letters to prisoners.
All these organizations support lawyers and activists in Russia who visit prisoners, send parcels, and support relatives — themselves now risky activities.
Bohdan Ziza, who features in our film, has family and friends who know where he is. (He is serving fifteen years for throwing blue and yellow paint, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, as well as a petrol bomb that was quickly extinguished by a security guard, at a municipal council’s office in Crimea.) So do many Crimean Tatar activists victimized by Russia’s racist, Islamophobic crackdown in the peninsula in 2017–19.
But hundreds, possibly thousands of Ukrainians are at unknown locations in Russia’s twenty-first-century gulag.
The Ukrainian government today counts ninety thousand people as “missing”: many are soldiers, imprisoned or killed, but at least sixteen thousand are civilians, according to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Many are victims of abductions, widespread in the territories occupied by Russia. Ukrainian lawyers and human rights activists have compiled a register of more than five thousand “enforced disappearances,” in addition to the widely publicized cases of kidnapped children.
Long prison sentences, imposed with little or no pretense of legal procedure, and savage torture — especially of those suspected of sympathizing with Ukrainian resistance — are ubiquitous in the occupied territories. The indefatigable Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group’s website reports a stream of life-destroying sentences for peaceful activities deemed dissident.
Doing all we can to provide practical support for political prisoners and engaging with their compelling articulations of their motives is central to international solidarity.
Try Me For Treason premieres on Sunday, May 17. You can sign up to watch it here.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been a paranoid man. We know, for example, that he has long eschewed the use of a personal cellphone, all too aware of how easily they can be tracked.
Yet a Kremlin document recently leaked to the press by a European intelligence service lays bare a whole new level of suspicion. Visitors can only approach him after they’ve gone through two layers of screening. His bodyguards now exercise full control over his schedule of appearances; they’ve essentially eliminated visits to any location that has to do with the military. And as for mobile phones: No one who works near Putin is now allowed to have one—they can only carry devices that aren’t connected to the internet. Surveillance systems have been placed in the homes of the cooks, drivers, and cleaners who work for him; they are prohibited from using public transportation. Most revealingly, he and his family members no longer live in their customary residences. Instead, they are sticking to secret locations with extra layers of protection. The document claims that Putin now works only in bunkers dispersed around southern Russia.
It is possible, of course, that the spies who passed this document along to the media are playing a game of their own—perhaps using disinformation to sow dissension and mistrust within the Kremlin. But the details revealed by the leak make perfect sense given the constraints that Putin suddenly finds himself facing.
In January, U.S. forces succeeded in snatching Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of his compound without suffering a single fatality. At the end of February, the Israelis killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war against Iran—and a host of other top Iranian leaders as well. Nor was it the first time that they were able to finger individual targets in Tehran. The Americans and Israelis have pulled off these operations through a combination of carefully cultivated human sources and signals intelligence, tracking the cellphone calls and internet use not just of the people targeted but also of their aides, guards, and support staffs. All this means that dictators can no longer sleep as easily as they used to.
The former head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov—now chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky—is known to be a student of Israeli targeted killings. His studies have paid off: The Ukrainians have assassinated a string of Russian military officers, politicians, and propagandists—some of them in the heart of Moscow.
In December, a car bomb in the capital took out Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov. That particular hit seems to have sent a collective shiver through Russia’s power elite, allegedly—according to that leaked document—prompting a meeting of top security officials that had them blaming each other for lapses real and imagined. Given that Russia has repeatedly attempted to assassinate Zelensky, Putin has every reason to believe that he, too, has a target on his back.
Putin may well fear internal enemies as much as he does the Ukrainians; rumors of coup plots are rampant in Moscow. But the Russian president’s problems are actually bigger than that. He’s managed to stay in power for 26 years by always keeping a few steps ahead of his enemies. Now he may be running out of room to maneuver.
A Russian offensive planned for this spring has been derailed before it’s gotten off the ground. The Ukrainians claim to have inflicted 35,000 casualties on the Russians in March alone—the fifth straight month, according to Kyiv, that the number of Russians killed and seriously wounded has exceeded the Kremlin’s rate of recruiting fresh soldiers. Perhaps more importantly, the sacrifices of those soldiers were entirely in vain; no major objectives were achieved. “Ukraine is not just doing better than expected,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Time is not on Russia’s side in this war.”
Indeed, the Ukrainians have now actually pushed the Russians back along several stretches of the front. Putin’s military leaders appear to have no new ideas on how to alter the fundamental dynamic on the battlefield. Unless they can change that, throwing fresh manpower into the fight will prove equally fruitless.
The Ukrainians, by contrast, seem to have an endless supply of new ideas. Every day brings the unveiling of some startling new piece of technology or creative use of an old one. Every day also brings news of another audacious strike deep in the Russian heartland. On April 25, for example, Ukrainian drones hit a Russian airfield in the southern Urals city of Chelyabinsk—a little more than 1,100 miles away from Ukraine.
Kyiv’s forces have devoted considerable resources to eliminating Russian air defenses, which now simply aren’t sufficient to protect every strategic target. At one point a few weeks ago, the threat of Ukrainian attacks closed all four of Moscow’s international airports at the same time. Indeed, the growing range of Ukrainian strikes appears to have influenced the Kremlin’s decision to exclude military equipment from taking part in Victory Day celebrations on May 9. Humiliatingly, Putin even felt compelled to ask U.S. President Donald Trump to dissuade the Ukrainians from attacking during the parade. The Russians are clearly rattled.
Yet Kyiv is not staging such strikes for the sake of psychological impact. The evidence suggests that Ukrainian planners are thinking harder than ever about how to maximize the impact of their attacks. At the end of April, a Ukrainian long-range drone attack on an oil refinery in Perm, more than 900 miles away from the border, targeted distillation columns—the systems that enable the separation of crude oil into gasoline and other petroleum products. Hitting storage tanks provides spectacular footage of fires, but they are relatively easy to repair; core infrastructure like these columns is a different matter altogether. “The Ukrainians have developed a theory of victory which involves the destruction of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure,” said Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “Without that, it becomes very difficult for Russia to sustain what they’re doing.”
At the end of March, a Reuters analysis concluded that the strike campaign had succeeded in cutting Russia’s oil export capacity by 40 percent. Admittedly, this may not be enough to fully offset the windfall that Moscow has gained from the sharp rise in global oil prices unleashed by the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Even so, in the first quarter of this year, Russia’s budget deficit already exceeded its full-year target. Financial officials cited a 45 percent drop in oil and gas revenues.
This pattern of smart targeting repeats itself across industries. In their attacks on chemical plants, semiconductor fabrication facilities, and steel factories, the Ukrainians keep hitting core components of the industrial processes that feed Russia’s military machine. Strikingly, the Russians seem incapable of paying back Ukraine in the same coin.
The decentralization of Ukraine’s military production—scattered across myriad small factories in inconspicuous locations—is making it extremely hard for the Russians to find effective targets. So they keep attacking power plants and civilians, cruel tactics that may actually serve to stiffen Ukrainian spines.
That the momentum has shifted in Ukraine’s favor is also demonstrated by Zelensky’s increasingly confident tone toward the United States. “In my view, Russia played the Americans again—played the president of the United States,” he said recently, commenting on Trump’s policy of allowing Russia to skirt sanctions on oil sales. The days of flattery and appeasement are over.
Even so, Kyiv is enjoying a boost in its international standing even as Moscow faces new headwinds. The war in Iran has given new diplomatic openings to the Ukrainians, who have been leveraging their anti-drone expertise to find new friends among the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Trump seems so sufficiently preoccupied with his own war that he is finding fewer opportunities to pressure Kyiv into unfavorable peace deals.
And the recent electoral defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has robbed Putin of his most trustworthy friend in the European Union. Orban’s exit has finally enabled the EU to break the deadlock over a long-anticipated $106 billion assistance package to Kyiv. That’s enough to keep the Ukrainians in weaponry for a long time to come—entirely apart from the variety of joint ventures for arms production that they have created with partners across the world.
Just to add insult to injury, Moscow is also in the process of losing one of its vaunted new allies in Africa: The Moscow-supported military government in Mali is losing its fight against Islamist rebels.
Losing Mali won’t be enough to cost Putin his throne. But losing the war in Ukraine certainly could—especially when combined with a stagnant economy, restless oligarchs, and a population riled by the Kremlin’s recent crackdown on the internet. Even Russia’s military bloggers, long the most enthusiastic supporters of the war, are starting to lose faith. “Little by little, the advantage is going to our enemies,” one of them recently wrote. “[T]he enemy is counterattacking, and he is succeeding.” Other Russians may well be coming to the same conclusion.
Members of a military band stand next to a screen broadcasting Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s address during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2026. Photo: Igor Ivanko/AFP via Getty Images
Just days after Vladimir Putin secured a ceasefire from U.S. President Donald Trump to hold his Victory Day parade, Russia launched a massive air assault on Ukraine, killing at least 16 people in Kyiv and injuring dozens more.
Hi, my name is Oleksiy Sorokin, deputy chief editor at the Kyiv Independent, and this is the latest issue of our newsletter about Russia.
Today, let’s once again talk about why attempting to reach a peace settlement with Putin is a waste of everyone’s time.
Russian President Putin held his parade. Normally, the event is designed as a grand demonstration of military strength and imperial confidence.
This year, it lasted just 45 minutes.
There were no tanks. No heavy equipment. The atmosphere felt restrained, almost uneasy — less a celebration of victory than an attempt to preserve the illusion of power.
After securing Trump’s support for a ceasefire that would effectively ensure Ukraine would not exploit Russia’s weakened air defenses on a day of deep symbolic importance, Putin adopted a different tone regarding the war in Ukraine.
“I think (the war in Ukraine) is coming to an end,” Putin said on May 9. He steered clear of many of the triumphalist themes that have long dominated his public rhetoric. In a somewhat amusing shift, Putin referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “Mr. Zelensky” for what may have been the first time in years.
Putin had typically resorted to labeling Ukrainian leadership “Nazi sympathizers” or “drug addicts.”
Yet, the three-day-long ceasefire ended, and Russia once again pummeled Ukraine with missiles and drones. The partly collapsed residential building in one of Kyiv’s neighborhoods, with bodies being pulled from under the rubble, became the glaring illustration of Russia’s intent for peace.
What this episode demonstrated, once again, is that Putin treats negotiations not as a path to peace, but as a weapon of war.
Every pause is used to regroup. Every phone call with Western leaders is presented domestically as proof that Russia cannot be isolated. Every public discussion about concessions reinforces the Kremlin’s core belief that time remains on its side.
This is why attempts to “bring Russia to the table” under current conditions do not bring the war closer to an end — rather, they prolong it.
The logic in the White House still seems to be that if Russia is offered enough diplomatic offramps, enough recognition, enough patience, it may eventually choose compromise over continued aggression. But the past four years have shown the opposite. Russia escalates when it senses hesitation. It hardens its demands when it sees fear of escalation on the other side. And it interprets calls for immediate negotiations not as signs of strength or pragmatism, but as exhaustion.
For Putin, the war has never been only about territory. It is about restoring Russian dominance over Ukraine. Russian demands have remained maximalist. Despite mounting military and economic strain, Putin hasn’t moved one inch.
Negotiations, when offered before Russia faces undeniable military, economic, or political pressure, only invite the Russian leader to repeat his maximalist wants.
Ukraine did secure something in return for agreeing to a three-day ceasefire: If everything goes according to plan, a 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia will take place on May 15.
That alone justifies allowing Putin to hold his parade. If the price of letting Putin stage a carefully choreographed 45-minute parade was bringing 1,000 Ukrainian prisoners home, that is a trade most Ukrainians would take every time.
But it would be a mistake to confuse this with progress toward peace, or a hint that Russia’s attitude toward Ukraine or the West has changed.
Putin’s comments about the war’s nearing end are domestic messaging to assure the public that everything is going according to plan. It does not, but Putin won’t budge.
At this point, negotiations with the Kremlin often resemble a very specific genre of political theater.
And yet, much of the international discussion continues to revolve around finding the right formula, the right incentive, the right “off-ramp” that will finally persuade Putin to stop the war he chose to start.
There is no indication that the Kremlin is currently prepared to accept a settlement that falls short of its broader wartime objectives. Until Russia faces costs that outweigh those ambitions, negotiations are more likely to drag out the war than bring it to an end.
Russia launched one of the longest and most massive air attacks since the start of its full-scale invasion just days after the recent ceasefire expired.
Over the course of 30 hours, Russia launched more than 1,500 drones at Ukrainian cities, along with over 50 ballistic and cruise missiles, Zelenskyy said.
An approximate map of the May 13–14 Russian strikes on Ukraine, from the Telegram monitoring channel @StrategicaviationT.
After a drone strike on the capital, part of a high-rise apartment building collapsed in Kyiv, and rescuers recovered the body of a 12-year-old girl from the rubble.
“We live in a building across the road,” said Olesia Holub-Korba, a Kyiv resident who was just meters from the high-rise last night.
Olesia typically does not go to the shelter during air raids because she [has] to keep running up and down from the 20th floor at night with her young son.
“I always go and lie down in bed with my child so that if there are any falling fragments, I can cover them with my body, and if it’s a missile, then either we survive together, or we…[die],” she told The Counteroffensive.
Olesia and her family had just gone to bed, not yet asleep, when a very loud explosion sounded. Lying on the floor, she literally felt the building shaking.
“Fuck,” she said to her husband, “it’s a direct hit on us.” Olesia’s husband reassured her that it nothing had hit their building, at least not yet.
Fortunately, her family is safe.
However, twenty people from the damaged residential building are still considered missing from the building, which has a completely destroyed entrance, which prevents survivors inside from escaping. Emergency services continue search operations under the debris, which will apparently last into the night.
On the first day of last week’s ceasefire, Putin told reporters that he thinks the war is “coming to an end.”
Zelenskyy responded: “These are certainly not the actions of those who believe the war is coming to an end.”
Government-funded Ukrainian news organization United24 reported that this was the longest and largest aerial attack since the start of the full-scale invasion, though that superlative could not be independently verified by The Counteroffensive. The assault ended on the morning of May 14.
97 percent of the drones launched toward Ukraine were neutralized, according to a report from the Ukrainian Air Force, as were 73 percent of missiles.
Although the vast majority of air targets were successfully downed, Russia damaged around 180 buildings, including 50 residential buildings across Ukraine. In Kyiv, at least five people were killed and dozens more injured. Over 100 people have been injured across the country.
Russia has changed its tactics and is now deliberately trying to stretch out attacks in order to exhaust Ukraine’s air defenses. During the day, Russia sent hundreds of attack drones mainly to the west of Ukraine to exhaust the air defense. In the late evening, there was a second wave of strikes, followed by missiles, targeting the capital.
Russia’s Defense Ministry described the strike as a “massive retaliatory attack” for recent Ukrainian long-range strikes inside Russia.
Zelenskyy stated that there will be a “fair” response to that.
The massive attacks come just days after a decree from Zelenskyy effectively ‘allowed’ Putin to host his WWII Victory Day Parade in Moscow’s Red Square, though the celebration was scaled down, likely due to fear of Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities. Putin’s anxiety over the annual event signaled a shift in Moscow’s projection of power.
On May 8, Trump announced the 3-day ceasefire, and both Putin and Zelenskyy agreed to its terms, which included a 1,000 for 1,000 prisoner swap.
That ceasefire, though fragile as ever on the front lines with both sides alleging a breach, technically expired on Tuesday, May 12, marked by a mutual exchange of fire.
Over the course of the past week, Putin and Trump — the latter of whom campaigned on a promise to end this war in 24 hours — both said they think the war will end soon during the days leading up to last night’s attacks.
Also, for the first time ever, Putin said he is prepared to meet with Zelenskyy in a third country, outside of Moscow, but only in pursuit of a final agreement that ends the war.
In this newsletter we will share how much support of political prisoners really matters.Darya Kozyreva, a 20-year-old activist from St. Petersburg (and a former defendant of OVD-Info), was set free from prison this spring. Her story became an example of how publicity can bring attention and support from all around the world.
Darya Kozyreva in court 18 April 2025. Photo: Andrey Bok for OVD-Info
Darya’s troubles with Russian repressive laws began when she was just 18. She was kicked out of medical school because she spoke out against the war. Then, she was arrested for putting a poem by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko on his monument in St. Petersburg. This, along with an interview where she criticized the war, led to her being sent[enced] to a penal colony for over two and a half years.
Her case got a lot of attention in Russia – and surprisingly, outside of it too. A popular group called A Mighty Girl shared Darya’s story, showing her courage and giving a link to our Vestochka service so people could write to her. The post got over 38,000 reactions, proving that one act of sharing can bring many people together to help.
Because of this media attention and the kind people who helped, Darya received more than 600 letters from abroad. For someone in prison for political reasons, a letter is more than just a message from a stranger – it’s a connection to the outside world. For people who lost their freedom for their beliefs, it shows them that people remember them, that their fight matters, and they are definitely not alone.
Darya’s release was also made possible by the financial support of people like you. OVD-Info organized three major fundraising campaigns to pay for her legal defense, including her lawyer’s work in the appeals court and visits to the detention center. Together, we raised over 500,000 rubles (over €5,000) to ensure she had the best possible protection.
Right now, our Vestochka list has 1,098 people who are still in prison. Many of them don’t get the same media attention that Darya did. These people are in prison because of their political beliefs or anti-war views. They deserve human connection and support just as much. For them, a letter can be the only source of comfort and hope.
> 2100 people in Russia are behind bars because of their political views. We believe that no one should face this kind of injustice alone.
You can bring that comfort. You don’t need to know their whole story to help. You can write to a random person, or find someone with similar interests to be a pen-pal. This can give someone in prison a bit of warmth and attention.
You don’t need to speak Russian to help! Our volunteers translate your messages. This makes sure your letters can get past prison censors and reach the people who need them most.
Write a Letter: Go tovestochka.ioand pick someone to write to. You can write to a random person or find someone with similar interests.
Support Vestochka: Running a service that translates and sends thousands of letters for free (for both the sender and the recipient) costs money. Your donation helps us keep this important service going.
Remember: everything OVD-Info does from legal help to sending letters is only possible because of you. Since we can no longer take donations in rubles, support from other countriesis more important than ever.
Thank you for being with us and for believing that no one should face the system alone.
Gregory Kunis. Photo: Bumaga via Mr. Kunis’s Facebook page
Gregory Kunis, cofounder of iGooods and former owner of the newspaper Moy Rayon (“My District”), has left Russia following the prosecution’s appeal against the verdict in the Anti-Corruption Foundation donations case, he announced on his Facebook page last night.
Kunis writes that on 12 December, the prosecution lodged an appeal against his sentence on the grounds that the punishment was “excessively lenient.” On 8 December, the Petrograd District Court fined him 350,000 rubles in connection with the donations case, our correspondent reported. Kunis was released from custody in the courtroom. The prosecution had sought a six-year prison sentence in a medium security facility.
The court’s website states that, on 15 December, the prosecution’s appeal was taken under consideration. Kunis decided “not to tempt fate” and fled Russia.
“My motherland let me go carrying a small rucksack, which contained a laptop, a change of clothes, a book (Steinbeck), and toiletries. I’m not angry with her. After all, she did let me go.”
The businessman was arrested on 24 July and charged with “financing an extremist group” for making monthly donations of 500 rubles to [the late Alexei Navalny’s] Anti-Corruption Foundation, donations which continued for some time after the Foundation had been designated an “extremist organization.” Kunis pleaded guilty.
Kunes owned the newspaper Moy Rayon from 2003 to 2014. In 2015, he founded the grocery delivery service iGooods. He was among the first organizers of the Immortal Regiment march in Petersburg. The businessman was arrested on 24 July and later remanded in custody.
Are the rumors true that the company iGooods was “stolen” from its founder, Gregory Kunis, while he was in pretrial detention facing political charges? We spoke with the business’s new beneficiary to get both sides of the story.
One of the first grocery delivery services in Russia, iGooods (which has been around since 2015) came under the control of entrepreneur Roman Yarovsky while its founder, Gregory Kunis, was under arrest in connection with the Anti-Corruption Foundation donations case, Bumaga reported earlier. The two sides disagree about how honestly the deal came off and whether politics was a factor.
Kunis’s story is that iGooods urgently needed infusions of cash in 2025. In July of that year, Gregory and his brother Dmitry transferred 50% of the company to a new investor, Roman Yarovsky, who was obliged to preserve the business and the agreed-upon stakes in it of all its shareholders, including Kunis. Subsequently, Gregory was arrested, and the company’s new director, Alexander Bolotnikov, who had replaced Kunis under Yarovsky’s watch, was among the people who testified against him. The new owner “took advantage of the situation” and transferred 100% of the company’s shares to a new legal entity in which none of the previous owners had a stake.
These details (except for Bolotnikov’s incriminating testimony) were corroborated by Yarovsky, but he interprets them differently.
Yavorsky’s story is that, in July 2025, iGooods was in debt to its employees and business partners. Roman took over management of the business. The ownership transfer process took 45 days, but, according to Yavorsky, he began investing money immediately.
“My partner Roman Chubey and I spent about 17 million rubles [approx. 198,000 euros—TRR]. It took about three days: we had just changed ownership and submitted the paperwork when the ‘mask show’ [police carrying out a raid] arrived. They turned the whole office upside down and confiscated all the servers. Do you know what Federal Law No. 115 [the Law on Combating Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing] is? We were told that our former director had apparently been sponsoring an extremist organization, so the business would be shut down. […] I asked [the law enforcement officers] to give us at least a couple of weeks. They agreed. We managed to transfer our business operations to another company [“Global iGoods”],” Yavorsky claims.
According to Yarovsky, none of the old shareholders got a stake in the new company because Kunis was under investigation and thus a danger to the new company, while the other owners allegedly failed to show up for a shareholders’ meeting which, interestingly, had been held only about a month earlier.
“What else could I do in such a situation? I had to save the capital I had invested,” Yarovsky concludes.
Kunis argues that this claim is far-fetched: at the time the criminal case was opened, he no longer had any formal connection to the legal entity and could not have posed a threat to it. Yarovsky claims that the business transfer paperwork was still being processed by the tax inspectorate when the company’s offices were raided and Kunis was detained. Yarovsky was unable to provide us with documents corroborating that a search had taken place and that he had received threats from law enforcement.
What is at stake? According to public records, the company that owns iGooods was profitable but financially unstable in 2024. According to RBC Petersburg, by 2025, employee salaries began to be delayed due to a shortage of cash flow. According to Kunis, one of the key causes of the downturn was a competitive market and the shift of some customers to large companies that subsidized their services.
The new legal entity, Global iGoods, is currently continuing the operations of the iGooods service, which delivers groceries from four stores in Petersburg, including the upscale Super Babylon.
Who is Yavorsky? He is known as one of the shareholders of the Deti group of companies, which operated the large Deti (“Children”) Zdorovy Malysh (“Healthy Baby”) sore chains. The group was declared bankrupt due to its debts, so Yavorsky himself cannot own the new business. His daughter Pelageya was formally named the holder of the initial 50% stake in iGooods.
Elena Chubey (who shares the same last name as Roman Yavorsky’s partner) currently owns 100% of the shares in the new LLC.
I am Gregory Kunis. Until recently I lived in St. Petersburg, where I built my career in media and business. I built projects such as the St. Petersburg Times and Moj Rajon, and later worked in technology, including the grocery delivery service iGoods. I was not a political activist. I lived an ordinary professional life and assumed I was beneath the radar of the Russian state.
That illusion ended when I was arrested in July last year for donating the equivalent of 35 euros to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. I spent five months in pretrial detention. After my release I still faced an appeal by prosecutors — who thought my fine of 350,000 roubles ($4,500) was too lenient — and the possibility of a six-year sentence. On the day I was freed I left Russia. I now live in Israel, separated from my family for the time being, trying to rebuild a life from almost nothing.
I am writing this diary because I want to describe Russia from the inside, not through slogans or geopolitics, but through lived experience. Many people abroad see only the surface and conclude that repression works mainly through open terror, or that support for the war is simple and voluntary. But fear is only part of the story. Uncertainty is just as important. When the state keeps shifting the boundaries of punishment, people begin to censor themselves before anyone has to order them to. That is the mechanism I want to describe: how a system reshapes people inwardly, and how apparently bureaucratic institutions are used to break resistance.
One of the clearest examples is the Russian pretrial detention system, the SIZO. If you want to understand how recruitment to the war works, you have to begin there.
The first day in detention is designed to strip you of time, dignity and control. The prison transport is cramped and airless. There are no windows, almost no ventilation, and long periods of waiting in heat and foul air. You are moved like cargo. Then come the holding cells, where eight or 12 people may be packed together in a tiny space, with bad water, almost no food, cigarette smoke, and no explanation of what is happening. There are no clocks. No one tells you what will happen next or when. You are taken to one short procedure, then sent back to wait again. The language around you is reduced to orders. By the end of the day, after interrogation, dry rations, and hurried processing in the middle of the night, you are physically and mentally emptied out. Long after midnight you are placed in a dark cell not knowing where you are, who is with you, what the rules are, or what will become of you.
Then comes quarantine, the first stage of detention, which is far worse than what follows. The conditions are harsher than in the later stages of custody: crowded cells, barred windows, almost no fresh air, no walks, no shower, no books, no news, and no contact with the outside world. You are allowed one letter, with no certainty that it will arrive. The deepest burden is not only physical discomfort, but isolation. You don’t know what is happening to your loved ones, and they don’t know what is happening to you.
In such conditions, time itself starts to dissolve. Without clocks, without movement, without normal daily markers, the day loses structure. Prisoners improvise ways to follow the sun just to recover some minimal sense of reality. This uncertainty is not an accidental by-product of the system. It is one of its main instruments. A person deprived of information, rhythm, privacy, and contact becomes easier to control.
It is precisely during these first days, when people have been stripped of strength, information, and emotional stability, that recruitment for the war takes place.
This is one of the most important things I want to record. The offer is presented as an escape: sign the contract, go to war, and leave prison behind. In that moment, the choice is not experienced as a political decision. It is experienced as a way out of unbearable confinement. By my reckoning about 30 percent agree immediately, and another 10 percent say they may agree later, once they better understand their likely sentence and future prospects. That is a striking figure, but it should not be misunderstood. It does not prove that these people are ideologically committed to the war. It shows how the state exploits exhaustion, fear and disorientation.
In such a condition, almost any exit begins to look reasonable. Moral judgment is pushed aside by something more primitive: the need to escape. The dangers of combat, the meaning of the war, and even basic ethical questions become secondary to the immediate desire to get out. The person is no longer choosing freely between prison and military service. He is making a decision after being systematically reduced to a state of weakness and despair.
That is why recruitment in detention cannot be understood through propaganda alone. Posters, patriotic rhetoric and official television are only part of the story. The deeper mechanism is institutional. It lies in the sleepless nights, the sealed windows, the bad air, the missing clock, the silence from home, and the unending uncertainty about what comes next. That is where many decisions are actually made. The state takes people at their weakest moment and converts brokenness into manpower.
This is also why I believe it is important to write. Systems like this do not survive by violence alone. They survive by learning how far a person can be bent before he gives way. They survive by turning despair into compliance. If I want readers outside Russia to understand how the war is sustained, I have to show not only the battlefield or the speeches from Moscow, but also the prison cell and the mechanisms operating inside it.
As for me, I do not believe I will return to Russia. I am listed there as a terrorist, my bank accounts are blocked, and I cannot imagine building a normal life under those conditions even if I were physically free. But I can still write. My hope is simple: to leave an honest record of how this system works from the inside, and to help others see more clearly how fear, uncertainty and war are connected. If I do that, I will have succeeded.
By April 2026, according to Mediazona’s count, at least 225 criminal cases had been opened across Russia over donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) made after it was banned as “extremist” in August 2021. The true figure is almost certainly higher: the courts, our main source, do not always publish enough information to distinguish ACF transfers from funding of other “extremist organisations.”
2025 was a record year for the number of ACF donor cases reaching the courts, and the pace of prosecutions has not slowed this year. Here is what we know about the state of the crackdown as of today.
By the spring of 2026, at least 225 criminal cases had been opened in Russia on charges of “financing extremism” (Article 282.3 of the Russian Criminal Code) over donations made to the ACF after the foundation was banned in the summer of 2021. Mediazona established this figure from press releases issued by law enforcement agencies, court records and statements from the defendants themselves.
We have documented such cases in 64 Russian regions, from Kaliningrad in the West to Sakhalin in the Far East. The highest number is in Moscow (25 cases), followed by Sverdlovsk Region (17) and Kaliningrad Region (13).
Of the 225 cases known to us, 187 have been filed in court. There are a total of 190 court cases related to ACF donations, but three of them do not involve ordinary donors: the prosecutions of Leonid Volkov, Alexei Navalny, “Navalny Live” staff member Daniel Kholodny, and the foundation’s investigator Sergei Ezhov. We include these in the chart of cases filed in court, but not in the overall statistics.
Last year set a record for the number of ACF donor cases in the courts. In 2022 there were only two such cases; four in 2023; and 27 in 2024. In 2025 we recorded 131 criminal cases. In the first months of 2026 we have found a further 23, and it is already clear the total by year’s end will be considerably higher.
Our tally includes only those cases in which we could reliably confirm that the defendant was being tried for transfers to the ACF rather than to another “extremist organisation”—religious groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the vaguely-defined gang-culture movement A.U.E., and others.
It is often only possible to determine exactly where a defendant sent money several months after the verdict. This means 225 cases is a conservative estimate, since the courts are reluctant to share information about ongoing trials.
For this reason, in the majority of “financing of extremism” case filed in courts in 2026, it is not yet possible to establish to whom the defendant transferred money. The rise in the number of unidentified Article 282.3 cases in the courts coincides with the rise in ACF cases, suggesting that a significant share of them do in fact concern the ACF, even if we cannot yet confirm this.
To date, we are aware of 167 convictions linked to the ACF’s fundraising. As before, judges typically impose non-custodial sentences: more than 85% of defendants have avoided prison.
Fines are the most common punishment, handed down to 114 people. By Mediazona’s calculations, the total value of those fines has reached nearly 40 million roubles (about $527,000), while the donations that triggered the prosecutions amount to roughly 400,000 roubles (about $5,270).
One of the cases that ended in a fine is particularly notable because, for the first time, the text of the verdict revealed how law enforcement and Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial intelligence watchdog, track down ACF donors.
In December 2025, the Petrogradsky District Court of St. Petersburg fined businessman Gregory Kunis 350,000 roubles ($4,640) for donations to the ACF. The agencies involved in the case were the FSB and Rosfinmonitoring, which has access to all bank transactions in Russia. A deputy head of the financial investigations department of Rosfinmonitoring’s Northwest Federal District office testified for the trial. He first mentioned an FSB request regarding Kunis personally, then explained that after the ACF was designated an “extremist organisation”, Rosfinmonitoring and law enforcement had jointly carried out a financial investigation into the merchant account with the identifier V2NI29SJROMGYKY in order to identify those who had transferred money to it.
The account with merchant ID V2NI29SJROMGYKY is cited in almost every donor case apart from the earliest ones: it is through this identifier that investigators prove the defendant sent money to Navalny’s foundation.
This witness testimony proves that search for ACF donors is being run centrally, with Rosfinmonitoring working alongside the security services. You can read more about the investigation into the donation cases in Mediazona’sfirst article on the topic.
Of the cases Mediazona has been able to review, 24 defendants received suspended sentences. A further five were sentenced to compulsory labour.
Another 24 defendants received prison sentences (four of them in absentia). The charge of “financing extremism” carries a maximum of eight years’ imprisonment, but the courts have yet to reach the upper limit where that was the sole charge.
Half of the custodial sentences have been handed down in Moscow. ACF donors in the capital have until now been punished significantly more harshly than those in the regions—but in recent months, Moscow judges have started behaving less predictably.
On a single day, March 2, the Timiryazevsky Court fined an IT entrepreneur for donating to the ACF while the Meshchansky Court sentenced Alexei Buchnev, a former Central Bank employee, to three years in prison. The following day, the Butyrsky Court sentenced one of Buchnev’s colleagues to compulsory labour. Two weeks later, on March 16, the Savelovsky Court fined Dmitry Nyudlchiev, an employee of a Rosatom subsidiary. The next day, the IT specialist Alexei Yekaterinin was sentenced to four years in prison by the Perovsky Court.
Why the courts hand down such wildly different punishments is unclear. It does not depend on the size of the donations: for transfers of the same 2,100 roubles (about $28) in total, one Moscow resident received a fine and another a prison sentence. Some defendants donate to Russia’s Ukraine war effort in the hope that it will be treated as a mitigating factor—but this is no guarantee of freedom. Yekaterinin, who was sent to prison, had transferred more than 10,000 roubles (around $130) to the “People’s Front. All for Victory” fund. The same goes for renouncing one’s previous views. Yekaterinin pleaded guilty, and his lawyer argued in court that the ACF had “set him up” by “playing on” citizens’ patriotic sentiments.
A lawyer who handles ACF donor cases told Mediazona that, in his experience, sentencing is shaped by a host of factors, including “the personal impression the defendant and the defence make on a particular judge”.
Outside Moscow, custodial sentences have become more common in Kaliningrad Region, though punishments there remain lighter than in the capital. In October 2025, defendants named Feshchenkov and Kovalenko were each sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. In December, a local resident named Kazanovsky received four months. In February 2026, another Kaliningrad resident was sentenced to three years. In total, at least five people in the region have been given custodial sentences, including Pavel Natsarenus, who was jailed for eight months in 2024.
Besides Moscow and Kaliningrad Region, custodial sentences for ACF donations have also recently been handed down in Kirov Region and Stavropol [Territory]. In November, a court in Kirov sentenced an IT entrepreneur, who had left Russia back in September 2022, to three years in absentia. Konstantin Bernatov, a resident of Stavropol, received the same sentence in January, this time in person. The details of his case are not known.
The folklorist Valery Ledkov from Khanty-Mansiysk, whom we mentioned in our previous update, has since been released. In February, the Seventh Court of Cassation commuted his custodial sentence to a suspended one.
We deal separately with cases in which the defendant is charged with something else in addition to ACF donations—an additional charge can substantially affect the sentence. Lawyers warn that once the security services have taken an interest in someone because of their support for the foundation, they may well find other grounds for prosecution.
Igor Meshalnikov, a resident of Kostroma Region, was first fined 40,000 roubles (around $530) for donating to the ACF and then, several months later, detained on a fresh charge of financing Artpodgotovka. He was ultimately sentenced to 10 years.
Alexander Germizin, secretary of the Vladimir branch of the liberal opposition party Rassvet, was first convicted of “[condoning] terrorism”. A second case was then opened against him over cryptocurrency transfers to the ACF and the Armed Forces of Ukraine made after the start of the war (“financing extremism” and “treason”). The security services had likely gained access to Germizin’s devices during the first case and found the prohibited payments there. He was sentenced to 15 years.
A similar sentence—14 years—was imposed on a resident of [the Maritime Territory] in the Far East who had made transfers to the ACF and the AFU “totalling more than 13,000 roubles” (around $170). Exactly how he moved the money is unclear.
There are also the opposite cases, in which someone is first detained on charges unrelated to supporting the opposition. This is what happened to Viktor Mezhuiev from Sakhalin Region. In 2025 he and his friends were first convicted of illegal fishing, and a few months later he was sentenced on charges of “financing extremism”. He was fined 300,000 roubles (around $4,000).
The Moscow City Court designated the ACF an extremist organisation in June 2021; the ruling came into force on August 4. The next day, the foundation launched a new donation drive through the American payments service Stripe.
The ACF’s team believed that because Stripe would not cooperate with the Russian security services, investigators would be unable to identify its donors. But on the very first day of the new drive, a critical error occurred: the payment description that appeared on some donors’ bank statements contained part of the foundation’s website address: WORLD.FBK.IN (ACF’s Russian-language abbreviation is FBK).
The first criminal cases were opened in August 2022. While analysing bank statements, security forces noticed other matching identifiers in the ACF transfers, specifically the merchant ID. This significantly expanded the pool of suspects, and merchant IDs and other technical identifiers have now become the primary evidence in donation cases.
In early August 2025, Mediazonapublished a detailed study on how criminal cases against donors are structured; at the time, 76 cases were known. The study concluded with instructions on how to check if you are at risk and what to do if you sent money to the ACF via Stripe.
The ACF issued a statement emphasizing that Vladimir Putin bears responsibility for the repressions and that the evidence in such cases is inconsistent. The foundation added that it had warned “a significant number of potential defendants in criminal cases” of the danger, and “several people were successfully evacuated.”
In early September, the ACF’s director, Ivan Zhdanov, announced that he was stepping down from the foundation. In an interview after his departure, he described the decision to launch a donation drive after the organisation’s ban as “ill-advised”.
“Risky decisions were taken, which Putin’s regime ultimately exploited,” he said.
The following two stories turned up next to each other in my inbox several mornings ago. The first story (about the hidden costs of common areas in Petersburg’s new estates) was promoted as its “Article of the Week” by the business daily Delovoi Peterburg, whose chronicles of post-Soviet capitalism on the march in my favorite city I have been reading and sharing here for two decades, usually against the grain. The second story (about how the authorities in Kaliningrad hushed up the recent death by self-immolation of an antiwar protester at the city’s main WWII memorial) was published by the exiled investigative journalism website Important Stories aka IStories, which is celebrating its sixth birthday. Seemingly written on different planets in different languages, they give an accurate sounding of the bewildered, muted condition of the “Russian soul” (i.e., Russian society) after four-plus years of a vicious, genocidal war unleashed by a thoroughly corrupt “post-fascist” dictatorship. ||||| TRR
Photo: Sergei Yermokhin/Delovoi Peterburg
When she buys a flat—a fifty-square-meter flat, for example—a tenant also gets into the bargain several hundred square meters of lobbies, corridors, and stairways, for whose upkeep she will pay monthly. Those same square meters determine whether she will be able to squeeze past her neighbor in the lift lobby, whether it is easy to push a pram into the building , and whether coming home is a pleasurable experience.
The common areas are the only part of the apartment block the buyer does not choose although she passses through them every day.
How many square meters are not allocated to flats
The proportion of sellable space in apartment blocks depends primarily on their category.
“In the comfort class, the average is sixty-five to seventy percent; in the business segment, sixty to sixty-five; in the premium class, sixty; and it’s fifty to sixty for the elite class,” explains Olga Ryankel, head of residential property research at Nikoliers.
ELEMENT product director Alexander Matyushkin cites a target figure of up to seventy percent in his firm’s projects, with the actual average standing at around sixty-five percent
Lenstroytrest reports a ratio of seventy-five to eighty-two percent, and considers this to be balanced. According to Maxim Zhabin, development director at the Edino Group, the range for market heavy hitters hovers between sixty-five and eighty-five percent.
“If a developer artificially ‘squeezes’ common areas for the sake of the ratio, this is usually interpreted in practice as cutting corners on the facilities,” he says.
What constitutes non-residential space
An increase in total floor area is determined not by a single factor, but by a combination of factors, and the contribution of each depends on the project category and architectural designs.
In the mass-market segment, the primary contributors to floor area are landings, corridors, and stairwells. And yet, an increase in the number of lifts expands the non-sellable area by fifteen to twenty percent, smoke-free stairwells add a further eight to ten percent, and complexly designed building exteriors also increase the non-sellable perimeter, notes Matyushkin.
Zhabin also cites lift lobbies and stairwells as primary factors, adding to them the utility areas and entrance lobbies.
Optional spaces the developer includes over and above the standard requirements comprise a separate category.
Natalia Kukushkina, head of product and analytics at the CDS Group, differentiates between two categories of common spaces.
“The total floor area includes both essential elements, such as stairwells, basements, entrance lobbies, and communal facilities on each floor, spaces without which a building cannot be constructed, as well as spaces added at the developer’s discretion. These may include non-essential spaces such as spacious lobbies, coworking spaces, pram storage rooms, gyms, swimming pools, communal terraces on top floors, and so on.”
Where comfort ends and excess begins
Ultimately, each developer decides for themself how much common space to include in their project. Yekaterina Zaporozhchenko, chief executive officer at PRO Aparty, suggests a specific indicator: arrears on maintenance fees exceeding ten percent are a sign that residents do not feel the spaces they are paying for are value for their money.
“There should be just enough common spaces for them to be used, and the maintenance budget should not exceed the average figures for the segment,” she explains.
Yudita Grigaite, marketing director at Lenstroytrest, is convinced that excessive common space increases costs and operational burdens without adding any value.
Matyushkin highlights the reverse risk: excessive optimization is also dangerous. A shortage of lifts or narrow corridors diminish the quality of the built environment more than is apparent when a tenant is purchasing an apartment.
“A well-designed common space sets down a clear daily route from courtyard to flat without imposing unnecessary obstacles, and it provides practical arrangements for dealing with prams and deliveries, adequate ventilation and lighting, and clearly defined areas of liability,” says Zhabin in describing the working model.
Inefficiency arises when maintenance costs are high yet residents are unclear about what exactly they are paying for.
How square meters of common space are converted into a line item on the bill
The ratio of sellable space to total floor area translates into two figures residents encounter on a regular basis: the price per square meter at the time of purchase and the maintenace charges they pay after they move into their flat.
The math is straightforward: the higher the percentage of common space, the more expensive each square meter of living space. Developers figure the cost of building and finishing common space into the price of flats.
“The ratio between living space and total floor area directly impacts both the cost of a square meter and future operating expenses, all of which are reflected in the maintenance rates. Therefore, a building’s economic model should be balanced. The comfort of the common areas should be in line with the project’s class and the buyer’s expectations, while maintenance costs should be reasonable,” says Anzhelika Alshayeva, commercial director at the KVS Group, when asked to describe the process.
The difference in maintenance bills among segments is tenfold.
According to PRO Aparty, the difference ranges from sixty to six hundred rubles per square meter. Kukushkina warns of the scenario that this gap generates in practice.
“All additional expenses in a maintenance bill are regarded as too high, and some residents absolutely refuse to pay them. Ultimately, a building might end up with a swimming pool which is closed, a common terrace which is not cleaned, and facade lighting which is turned off.”
The third factor is density which, as Zhabin reminds us, is manifested in “queues to the lift, acoustics, and the amount of traffic in the courtyard,” that is, in factors which are not visible when potential buyers look at flats but which are felt daily.
What buyers don’t see
Ryankel notes a systemic problem in the mass-market segment: prams.
“Unfortunately, the spaces for storing prams and bikes are not separated n the majority of new apartment blocks, ultimately giving rise to a conflict of interests and the impossibility of organizing the space comfortably. And yet, developers often mention a pram storage area without specifying its size. As a result, a space of just seven square meters ends up trying to accommodate prams, bicycles, and tires.”
“Up to eighty percent of the user experience is shaped not inside their flat, but on the way there: from the building’s entrance to their front door. This includes logistics, how the lift works, acoustics, traffic flow, and the convenience of the infrastructure,” says Matyushkin.
There is also a time-related factor that is not taken into account at all when purchasing a flat.
Zaporozhchenko points out the costs of renovating furniture in common areas and maintaining the building’s utility systems after five to seven years, as well as keeping the building’s exterior clean—expenses that no buyer factors into their budget when signing the contract.
Zhabin adds that without a cleaning schedule and proper ventilation even the most luxurious finishes in a building’s entrance lobby will cease to feel “upscale” after a few years.
According to the market players surveyed, pressure on profit margins in the mass-market and comfort-class segments will soon compel developers to increase the share of floor space sold while maintaining visible indicators of quality, such as high ceilings in lobbies and high-quality finishes in entrance areas.
Club-style venues—coworking spaces, community centers, and gyms—will remain a key marketing tool, but some of them will be switched to a fee-based model or be leased out to external management companies on a commercial basis to ease the burden on utility bills.
The gap between rates in the mass-market and premium segments will continue to grow, along with the number of conflicts over maintenance bills in buildings whose infrastructure is at odds with the financial solvency of its residents.
Information about the self-immolation of a resident of Kaliningrad born in 1988 in protest against the war was first published in an open report of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service. The authors of the report did not disclose the name of the deceased. We managed to find out the details of the incident together with Delfi Estonia and Lithuanian broadcaster LRT. We reconstructed what happened based on Russian Investigative Committee documents, conversations with Okunev’s relatives and colleagues, and European security sources.
Five CCTV cameras are installed in front of the 1200 Guardsmen Memorial in Kaliningrad, the USSR’s first monument to soldiers killed in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945. In the center of the memorial is the Eternal Flame. From time to time, various incidents occur near the memorial, which are then widely reported in the local news, and their perpetrators become the subjects of criminal cases. Since last year, for the “desecration of war memorials,” a sentence of up to five years in prison has been [stipulated].
Thus, in February this year, a drunken Kaliningrad resident wanted to light a cigarette from the fire and warmed his feet over the flames. In January 2026, a couple of residents stole a basket of flowers from the monument. In September 2025, another couple had sex at the memorial.
Six months before that, around 5 am on February 24, 2025, 37-year-old Kaliningrad resident Alexander Okunev burned himself alive at the memorial to 1200 Guardsmen in protest against the war — and no one found out about it.
“He was sitting in a corner, not where all the people were”
In the 2010s, Kaliningrad earned the title of the protest capital of Russia, and a series of large-scale rallies even led to the replacement of Governor Georgy Boos.
However, since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the city has not exhibited any notable protest activity. In the first days of the invasion, a wave of anti-war actions swept through Kaliningrad. At one point, the city became a leader in the number of protocols issued for “discrediting” the army. But almost immediately, protests died down as they did throughout the country. Igor Luzin, a Kaliningrad activist and former employee of Navalny’s local headquarters, explains that the “political field” in Kaliningrad has been cleaned up just like the rest of Russia.
Alexander Okunev was not an activist. He avoided talking politics at work (he was a sysadmin at a firm selling retail equipment), did not argue about the full-scale war with his family, and apparently was not active on social media. Okunev had almost no friends, had no girlfriend, and lived alone.
He practically did not talk to his colleagues, could ignore even his superiors: he could keep silent in response to a greeting or not answer the questions. At corporate parties, New Year’s Eve, for example, he tried not to leave his office.
“Was sitting there in a corner, not where all the people … Somehow always in himself, lived his own life,” recalls his former colleague. “Closed. Strange.” However, there were no complaints about his work: “His programmer’s brains were cool”. His colleague believes that Alexander could have made a good career, “but it feels like he didn’t care much about money”. When Okunev decided to quit (about six months before the incident), everyone was upset.
“We asked him, have you found another job? No. Are you going somewhere? Maybe. No one had any idea what or why he left,” says his former colleague. Acquaintances call Okunev “kind, responsive, fair”: “He always helped everyone”. He was fond of origami, and when one of his colleagues had a birthday, he could secretly put “some flowers” on their table. Regarding his hobbies, people close to him say that he liked to watch movies and ride a bicycle.
After the dismissal, Okunev really did not find another job. “Sat at home, practically did not communicate with anyone,” heard his ex-colleague.
Cleanup
Having decided on such a desperate protest act as self-immolation, Alexander Okunev did not seem to be trying to attract attention. Maybe he was afraid that someone could stop him. But he obviously chose the date (the anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine) and the place (the main war memorial in the city) for a reason. Perhaps the time too: the Russian missile struck Kyiv on February 24, 2022, began just about five in the morning.
Okunev’s charred corpse, despite the numerous cameras at the memorial, was discovered by a random passerby only at around 6:40 a.m. The snow appears to have been spray-painted with the words “No to War”. Employees of the investigative department for the Leninsky district of Kaliningrad went to the scene. In the report of the events of the night, Okunev’s self-immolation is mentioned along with reports of two other corpses and a ninth-grade girl who had left home.
The incident was reported to the head of the city administration, Elena Dyatlova. She immediately took everything under her control, the European intelligence officer knows. She was assisted by Evgeny Maslov, head of the local service for the protection of cultural heritage. The main thing for them was to quickly get rid of the body and the words on the snow — the officials were worried mostly that journalists would know what happened. The Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Kaliningrad Oblast, Andrey Yermak, was especially worried that the self-immolation took place near the monument of the Great Patriotic War — too symbolic.
Everything was settled by 9:15 am. Traces of the incident were removed, and authorities were relieved to report to the local governor and other local officials that no one had seen anything, the source of IStories Media said.
Information about the self-immolation of an unnamed Kaliningrad resident first went public only along with a report by Estonian intelligence in the winter of 2026: “On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war, at five o’clock in the morning on February 24, 2025, a man born in 1988 wrote ‘No to War’ in the snow near the monument to a Russian soldier in Kaliningrad and set himself on fire in protest.”
None of the Kaliningrad media ever reported the news. There were no local or propaganda Telegram channels or other social media posts about Okunev. [Alexander’s] family did not spread the word about the incident either. “What’s the point of somehow publicizing and telling all this? What for?” one of them told reporters.
“There is another way”
An acquaintance of Okunev says that on the eve of his suicide, he behaved “absolutely normally.” There was no hint of what he was going to do, and “what happened came as a shock to everyone.” Okunev’s relatives speak of some “expert examinations” conducted as part of the investigation, which found that “there was no outside influence” on A[l]exander. The family was questioned by the local Investigative Committee; the police came to Okunev’s former colleagues for a “character [profile]” but came away with “Worked well, did not communicate with anyone.”
A close friend of Okunev recounted to IStories Media the content of his suicide note.
“He wrote that there is another way. Apparently, he meant a world with peace. And he didn’t want to live in the world we have, so he made this decision… But we are all aware that world peace is a utopia.”
The note also shows that Okunev understood that “most likely, it will not be in the news anywhere, it will not be widely covered anywhere,” the source tells IStories Media.
Elena Maslova, head of the Kaliningrad administration, and Evgeny Maslov, head of the cultural heritage protection service, have not responded to journalists’ requests.
Culture Minister Andrei Yermak replied that he was not familiar with the results of the investigation of this “accident”, so he would not comment on anything. He expressed confidence that law enforcement agencies “will comment on the situation as soon as the investigation is finalized.”
“These people are afraid not of the people, but of their superiors”
In January 1969, the self-immolation of Jan Palach, a philosophy student at Charles University, brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets and became a symbol of resistance to the Soviet occupation in Czechoslovakia. The self-immolation of street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi provoked mass protests in Tunisia, which eventually led to the resignation of the country’s president.
In Russia, the self-immolations of journalist Irina Slavina and Udmurt scientist Albert Razin did not lead to any notable collective action. Could Okunev’s suicide have provoked some protest if people had learned about it?
Sociologist Margarita Zavadskaya thinks not.
“Self-immolation is a powerful symbolic act,” she says, “but public outrage alone is not enough to trigger large-scale collective action under conditions of severe repression and limited access to information.”
So why did the Russian authorities try so hard to conceal information about what happened? To prevent “protest contagion” and imitation, she explains. Moreover, such an anti-war suicide contradicts the government’s theory of a universal public consensus on war. And local officials would look incapable of maintaining control in the eyes of their superiors.
Political scientist Ekaterina Shulman also does not believe that fear of further protests was behind the Kaliningrad authorities’ actions.
“Local authorities are not afraid of the people, not of protests. They are afraid of their superiors,” she says, “they were afraid to hear: ‘You oversaw, allowed a scandal, there are media publications, what do you eat your bread for?'”
“Authoritarian regimes are afraid of symbolic sparks. They understand that a single act of protest may not cause an immediate mass movement, but can become a moral symbol around which scattered anxiety and discontent begin to crystallize,” says Lithuanian political scientist Nerijus Malukiavicius. “That is why such regimes seek to ‘clean up’ the scene, silence history, and discredit the victim.”
Russia is readying for Victory Day — a major state holiday that the Kremlin has elevated into something of a sacred ritual — in far-from-perfect condition. For several weeks, Ukraine has been systematically and successfully attacking oil infrastructure across the country, with ecological consequences that local authorities are struggling to contain. The aftermath of the strikes, largely unreported in national media, is even visible from space. The attacks have only added to public discontent with Putin’s policies — but it is unlikely to have any serious consequences for the Kremlin.
Throughout the second half of April, Ukraine made the Black Sea resort of Tuapse its primary target. Tuapse is a sprawling oil city — home to a Rosneft oil refinery, one of Russia’s oldest, which operates alongside an export terminal that ships petroleum products overseas. From April 16 to May 1, Ukraine hit the town four times, damaging both the terminal and the refinery.
The drone strikes led to a genuine ecological catastrophe. Fires at the refinery caused plumes of smoke visible from orbit. Burning petroleum poured down one of the city’s streets. What became known as “oil rain” — thick black toxic precipitation — fell across the city, leaving stains on plants and animals. In several districts, air quality data showed an unsafe concentration of dangerous chemicals, specifically carcinogenic benzene and xylene, as well as choking soot. Residents living close to the terminal reported vomiting and nausea.
Some of the spilled oil entered the Tuapse River and, after heavy rain, flowed into the Black Sea. Ecologists from the Transparent World project studied satellite images from April 25 and concluded that the size of the spillage covered up to 3.8 square kilometers. The spill near the resort’s central beach was more than half a kilometer long. There is a shortage of workers and equipment to clear up the mess, an operation which has been complicated because the oil soaks deep into the pebble beaches, and the sea continually washes new pollutants ashore. In addition, residents keep finding dead dolphins on the beaches.
Local authorities declared a state of emergency — a special legal status allowing the immediate deployment of resources and a coordinated disaster relief effort. They recommended locals avoid going outside for long periods, keep windows closed, wear masks, and rinse their eyes, noses and throats. However, there was no official stay-at-home order. For many days, Tuapse’s schools did not cancel classes (before eventually being ordered to close only after one of the last attacks), even as air pollution significantly exceeded safe norms. Employers were similarly reluctant to allow staff to work remotely. “At the same time, you have to stay home but also go to work as usual. Choose for yourself which rule to break,” said one Tuapse resident who first had to take her children to school through a town blanketed in acrid smoke, before driving to work.
Vladimir Putin’s response has been muted. “Drone strikes on civilian infrastructure are becoming more frequent. The latest example is the attacks on energy facilities in Tuapse, which could have serious environmental consequences,” he said almost two weeks after the first attack. He then added: “However, the governor merely reported that there don’t seem to be any serious threats and people are coping with the challenges they face.” Residents were not impressed, judging by one report from the Black Sea resort. “People are coping. But where’s the government? They seem to be on some other planet. You can feel the anger: some people are doing something, while others are scratching their asses,” a local resident told the Ostorozhno Novosti publication.
National TV channels did not devote much time to the ecological catastrophe: the weekly news review, Vesti Nedeli, presented by leading propagandist Dmitry Kiselev, ran a five-minute segment on Tuapse in the second half of the show. In it, Governor Venyamin Kondratyev said that he would do everything “to ensure the resort season goes ahead.” Ecologists consider this unrealistic.
Tuapse is not the only place that has been hit by Ukrainian drones. On April 29 and 30, Ukraine attacked a refinery and pumping station in Perm, a city of one million people in the Urals, about 1,500 km from the front line. Ecologists told Agentstvo that an environmental catastrophe could unfold along similar lines there. The skies over Perm were shrouded by smoke, oil fell like rain and carcinogens entered the air. Meanwhile, the local authorities did nothing: the mayor’s page on vKontakte (the Russian version of Facebook) posted nothing about the attacks on the refinery.
Overnight into May 3, Ukraine attacked Primorsk, Russia’s biggest oil terminal on the Baltic Sea — the latest time in a string of long-range strikes on the site. The port typically handles about 40% of oil Russia’s maritime oil exports. The Leningrad Region’s governor reported a fire had broken out, but no oil leak. The next night, a Ukrainian drone attacked an elite residential complex in the western part of central Moscow — a protected area, home to foreign embassies and where ex-president Dmitry Medvedev owns expensive real estate.
Amid the ongoing Ukrainian attacks, the Kremlin has taken a previously unthinkable step and scaled back the full-scale military parade to celebrate May 9 (for more on how this sacred day in Russia’s calendar became a way to glorify the current war, read here). Military hardware has trundled through Red Square every year since 2008, although following the invasion of Ukraine the parade has gotten smaller and smaller. This year, there will be no display of military equipment. Only infantry soldiers will march in the parade. “Amid … terrorist threats, of course, we are taking all measures to minimize risk,” said Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov, explaining the decision. In addition, Muscovites living in one of the most digital cities on Earth, again face a mobile internet shutdown from May 5-9. Operators are blocking access to the network “for security reasons.”
Increased taxes for business, rising prices for customers, regular mobile internet outages, the blocking of Telegram (Russia’s most popular online messenger) and general war fatigue among the population have seen Putin’s approval rating continue to fall for a second month. According to the latest survey by state pollster VTsIOM, 71% of Russians back the president — the lowest level since the invasion of Ukraine. FOM, another pollster that works with the presidential administration, recorded a drop in support to 73% — also its lowest reading since the opening days of the invasion in 2022. The decline in approval will not lead to any protests in Russia, an expert studying Russian public opinion told The Bell.
Why the world should care
Ukraine’s systematic and increasingly successful drone strikes against Russian cities clearly cast a shadow over Putin’s plans for May 9, arguably the most important day of the year for the Russian leader. The Kremlin uses the event not only to celebrate Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, but increasingly to justify the current war and lionize the Russians fighting at the front. In previous years, Kyiv has refrained from attacks on this date. Regardless of whether that remains the case this time, the key point remains: Russian society is not just tired of the war, but is starting to feel its full impact: constant restrictions, lockdowns, and dim economic prospects. In the fifth year of fighting, growth rates that were once trumpeted by Kremlin economists are already out of reach.
This is the 7×7 newsletter, which tells the tale of two journalists, Alisa and Yelisei, who have set out on a voyage around Russia’s cities and towns to find out what life is like in the country’s regions. Care to join them?
The Ulysses have arrived in Tuapse. On the night of 1 May, the local marine terminal here caught fire once again following a drone attack. As a result of the incident, petroleum byproducts spilled into the river and the sea, polluting approximately sixty kilometers of coastline. Volunteers immediately rushed to the scene. Many of them already have experience in combating fuel oil pollution on the coast: they worked on the 2025 oil spill in Anapa.
The volunteers have been sadly convinced that the authorities had not learned from the previous disaster, and that they were once again left to deal with the oil alone. Officials, meanwhile, did nothing but issue directives on how not to tackle the spill’s aftermath. For instance, they proposed barring women from being involved in the cleanup efforts. You can find out how they justified this stance—and how the female volunteers responded—in the newsletter below.
“There is only one solution: once there are enough men available for this work, there will no longer be any need for women to do it,” the female volunteers in Tuapse remarked wryly as they head back to the beach. They had a busy May Day holiday digging up oil-contaminated pebbles on beaches, washing oil off dogs, cats, and birds, and recording videos appealing for help. They also could not help but notice that there were more women than men out on the beach.
Meanwhile, a correspondent for Kommersant reported that Tuapse city hall and the regional department of the Emergency Situations Ministry had not permitted female volunteers to clean up the oil due to “concerns” for their reproductive health. The conversation took place during a meeting with volunteers. Several women present at the meeting said that they would take care of their own reproductive choices themselves.
City hall issued no formal legal ban on women’s involvement in the cleanup effort, limiting itself instead to a verbal recommendation. Yet even these suggestions sparked considerable controversy.
Ecologist Roman Pukalov urged women to refrain from working directly on the beaches. According to him, after spending forty years studying the effects of petroleum products on humans, he has concluded that “the fairer sex constitutes the primary risk group.” He asked female volunteers to focus on other forms of assistance (aside from beach cleanup) such as organizing meals, overseeing the delivery of humanitarian aid, and coordinating targeted fundraising efforts.
“We members of the fairer sex make up the majority,” Anastasia, a volunteer from the Anapa-based volunteer squad Ghosts, reminded Pukalov in the comments section. She herself requires medical attention after being involved in the cleanup of fuel oil in Veselovka. She urged her fellow female volunteers to take care of themselves and undergo all necessary medical checkups following their time in the field.
Other volunteers noted in the comments that fuel oil is not only dangerous to reproductive health. It can also lead to anemia, to which women are more susceptible than men. The women should therefore undergo a medical checkup before the cleanup begins so they are aware of the risks involved, and volunteer coordinators should explain the potential harm of petroleum byproducts and discourage those at high risk of harm to their health from taking part in the cleanup.
What has upset the female volunteers most was that no one has been carrying out medical checks or providing any information at all about the dangers of fuel oil. The officials simply impose bans, and do so under the guise of concern for reproductive health. Yet the women working to clean the beaches may not even want to have children.
Alisa: “If officials were so worried about the women’s health, they should pay to have them tested and treated, if necessary.”*
Petroleum products can in fact cause a range of health problems in women: disturbances in the menstrual cycle, complications during pregnancy and fetal abnormalities, and the onset of anemia.
Women are more vulnerable to the effects of petroleum products: their dangerous components accumulate in fatty tissue, which women have more of, and affect the endocrine system. In some cases, these components are eliminated more slowly than in men, due to the effect of sex hormones on the liver.
Alisa (right): “And yet no one has been calling on the women of Tuapse to evacuate the city!” Yelisei (left): “For that to happen, the authorities would have to admit that the disaster is real and that it has consequences.”
The volunteers themselves complain that they are short of hands. The authorities, meanwhile, have promised to have the beaches completely cleared of oil by 1 June. But environmentalists doubt that the clean-up crews will manage to meet the deadline: the area affected by the spill is simply too vast.
What is more, the city is experiencing “oil rain”: petroleum byproducts are released into the air and settling on the ground in the guise black droplets along with the rainfall. They then seep into the soil, poisoning plants, animals, and the drinking water.
The oil rain poses a particular risk to pregnant women living in the city, rather than those directly involved in the cleanup.
“In this sense, now is the worst possible time to try to have children. There is a high probability that these children will suffer from developmental abnormalities. Pregnant women need to keep their windows closed, wash the floors at home twice a day, wear a mask (even indoors), change their clothes daily, and take every possible precaution to avoid exposure to this filth. And the same goes for those who aren’t pregnant, too,” ecologist Igor Shkradyuk told 7×7.
The authorities did in fact evacuate residents from one district—not due to the risk of oil poisoning, however, but rather due to the aftermath of the drone strikes. Residents of private homes destroyed by fire were among those who left. Yet the authorities have been making strenuous efforts to conceal the true magnitude of the pollution. For instance, Sergei Boyko, head of the Krasnodar Territory’s Tuapse Municipal District, said on Solovyov Livethat Tuapse would be ready to welcome tourists during the resort season, arguing that “what happened on one beach will in no way affect the other beaches.”
The Emergency Situations Ministry’s Tuapse office eventually explained to Kommersant that volunteers are barred only from the most heavily polluted (and, therefore, most dangerous) beaches. Nevertheless, the women have been going on with their work despite these “recommendations”: they have not only being cleaning the beaches but also washing animals, removing polluted sand, coordinating volunteers, sending out appeals for assistance, and recording videos documenting the situation.
Yelisei (right): “I think they would like it if they were called environmental superheroines, or just superheroines, like earlier.” Alisa (left): “I think they’d like it more if more rescuers came to Tuapse, whatever their sex, and if the rescuers who are already here stopped being pestered.”
If you have read about the risks of poisoning and are still willing to help, check out the volunteers’ channels on Telegram and VKontakte. Volunteers are urgently needed right now to catch birds, wash animals, and clean up the fuel oil. Before setting out, be sure to contact the coordinators, as particular jobs, locations, and needs for supplies may change during the course of the day. A bot set up by the volunteers provides their contact details. You can also help remotely: fundraising efforts support washing operations, the bird-catching team, and the equipment warehouse are ongoing.
* AI tools were used to produce the images in this article.
Source: 7 x 7 weekly email newsletter, 5 May 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader
No sooner had local officials declared that they had finally brought under control a fire that raged for days at an oil refinery in Tuapse, a port town on Russia’s Black Sea coast, than it flared up again.
The blaze is visible from as far away as Sochi — and even from space. Satellite images show vast oil slicks spreading across the sea. Online, volunteers are posting videos of dead marine life, including dolphins, their bodies coated in crude.
How much oil has already been spilled: hundreds of tons, or thousands? No one seems to know.
President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that there were “no serious threats in Tuapse, and people are managing to cope with the challenges they face on the ground.” Governor Venyamin Kondratyev told him so, he said.
Putin is no stranger to calamity, or to minimizing it. But it is worth taking a look at what is actually happening.
The inferno first erupted last week. Storage tanks filled with petroleum products burned, sending columns of black smoke visible more than 100 kilometers away.
The volume of combustion byproducts released into the air was so large that Tuapse experienced what residents called “oil rain,” because it felt like the city had been doused with oil. A film resembling an oil slick settled on streets, plants, people and any pets or stray animals that happened to be outside at the wrong time.
That film contains a toxic mix of pollutants, including carcinogens such as benzene. Because the fire is still burning, dangerous concentrations of these substances persist in the air. Black rain may well continue.
Officials say levels of harmful substances are two to three times above what is considered safe.
To paraphrase a Russian proverb, lying is nothing compared to lifting sacks. Talk is cheap.
There is no reliable independent data, but it is hard to imagine that concentrations near the fire are merely double or triple permissible limits. More likely, they are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times higher.
Last week, roughly 60% of the facility’s storage capacity was on fire. Now the rest is burning.
The resulting clouds of soot and carcinogens are especially dangerous for children, the elderly and those with cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. People with fragile health are already feeling the effects. The rise in cancer rates will come later; that is how such exposures work.
And when the fire finally burns out, the disaster will not end. Toxic residues left behind by the fires and the oily rains will remain in the environment, re-entering human bodies again and again.
Nor is the damage confined to the air. At least several hundred tons of petroleum products have spilled into the Tuapse River and the Black Sea. Satellite imagery showed large slicks as early as last week; the leakage continued this week. The impact on marine ecosystems and the coastline will be severe. Drinking water contamination is a real risk.
To understand what may come next, one need only recall the spill in the Black Sea at the end of 2024, which saw thousands of tons of oil products released. Fish, mollusks, dolphins and birds died in large numbers.
As then, volunteers are now desperately scrambling to respond while Putin and Governor Kondratyev tell the country that there are no serious problems.
Remember those videos where they’re cleaning oil off the birds? Well, most of them die anyway. I don’t mean to say that washing the birds is pointless — some of them will survive. Just not many.
Even if the visible oil is removed from beaches, the problem will linger for years. Each storm will dredge buried petroleum products back up to the surface. Effective, repeated cleanup requires sustained resources and political will, both of which are in short supply given the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the global oil market.
In my more than 35 years of environmental work, I cannot recall a single instance in which the Russian authorities were prepared for an emergency. They always take a long time to decide what to do at the outset of a crisis, when time is of the essence.
A proper response to a major refinery fire would begin with clear public guidance: stay indoors, close windows, limit exposure. It would include the distribution of effective protective equipment — not surgical masks, but respirators capable of filtering fine particles — and, crucially, early evacuation to areas with clean air.
Reports of evacuations suddenly appeared on Tuesday. In reality, residents of a few streets were moved to a nearby school, still within the zone of contamination, rather than taken somewhere where the air isn’t polluted with carcinogens.
This catastrophe is part of the broader consequences of the senseless and bloody war Putin unleashed more than four years ago. He isn’t bothered by the hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian military deaths for which he bears direct responsibility, so it’s naive to expect him to care about burning oil tanks and poisoned seas.
And things will only get worse.
Vladimir Slivyak is co-chairman of Russian environmental group Ecodefense and laureate of the Right Livelihood Award 2021.
An angry Louisianan, known only as Marshawn [sic], gave an impassioned speech in a state Senate hearing this week in the lead-up to the vote to eliminate a majority Black district that — until last week — was protected by the VRA.
