He Left Russia with Steinbeck in His Rucksack

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.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 18 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

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.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 25 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

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.

Source: Gregory Kunis, “How fear recruits for war,” The Russia Report 300, 8 May 2026

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’s first 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, Mediazona published 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.

Source: Olga Romashova, “The 225 donor cases. Russian authorities continue to prosecute donors to Navalny’s Anti‑Corruption Foundation across the country,” Mediazona, 21 April 2026. The emphasis is mine. I have also made a few tiny emendations to bring the text into line with common English-language editing standards. ||||| trr

Important Stories

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.

Source: Pavel Nikiforov, “The non-residential building: what the tenant gets along with the flat,” Delovoi Peterburg, 5 May 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

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.”

Source: Maria Zholobov et al., “He Burned Himself Alive to Protest Russia’s War in Ukraine. The State Tried to Erase Him,” Important Stories, 6 May 2026. A disturbing caveat appears above the English-language version of the article: “AI based translation. If you find a mistake, please highlight it and press Ctrl + Enter.” ||||| TRR

The Verdict on Spring: The Vesna Case

The “Vesna” Verdict

A verdict was handed down in the Vesna case in Petersburg today. In 2018, members of this movement, which Russia designated “extremist” and “hostile” (or something along those lines, “undesirable,” etc.), held a protest: a funeral for Russia’s future. It turned out to be a long process: burying the future, imprisoning spring… Today is a bad day. The activists were convicted and sentenced to extremely long prison terms! The only female defendant, Anna Arkhipova, was sentenced to twelve years in prison; Yan Ksenzhepolsky, to eleven years; Vasily Neustroyev, to ten years; Pavel Sinelnikov, to seven and a half years; Yevgeny Zateyev, to six years and two months. Valentin Khoroshenin was also sentenced to six years and two months in prison despite the fact that he had testified against his comrades while in jail. It didn’t do him any good…. Look at his face today. He is the only one who looks lost to me. The other defendants were calm and dignified.

I may be naive, but I still believe that the future isn’t buried, that spring will come, that the gloom and the cold will simply fade away. It will happen naturally because that’s how the world works, and I believe this especially during Holy Week. “Wind and weather [will] change direction,” and spring will arrive.

I hadn’t taken photos in a courtroom for nearly nine months. Today was tough. I can recall only one case which dragged on longer than the Vesna case—the trial of the twenty-four fighters from the Azov Regiment. My sister Lizka has provided a detailed account of the Vesna case and the young people sentenced today. Give it a listen and/or a read! [See the embedded YouTube video and translation of the Mediazona article below—TRR.]

The natural flow of life suffices to make spring come, but to ensure that the earth hasn’t been depopulated by the time it does come—so that there is someone other than the beasties left to welcome that spring—we must remain human beings: we must know what is going on, empathize, and help out.

#FreeAllPoliticalPrisoners

Source: Alexandra Astakhova (Facebook), 8 April 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

A judge in St. Petersburg on Wednesday sentenced six former members of the democratic youth organization Vesna to prison sentences of varying lengths after they were found guilty of charges including extremism and spreading “war fakes.”

The activists, including one woman and five men, were no longer members of Vesna at the time of their arrests in June 2023.

Vesna, which means spring in Russian, was founded in St. Petersburg in 2013. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it staged anti-war rallies in Russian cities, shortly after which it was designated as an “extremist” organization.

The human rights group Memorial recognized the six former members sentenced to jail on Wednesday as political prisoners.

St. Petersburg’s City Court found all six guilty of organizing an extremist group, mass unrest, disseminating “fakes” about the Russian army, calling for actions that undermine national security and rehabilitating [sic] Nazism.

The longest prison sentence of 12 years was handed to Anna Arkhipova, followed by 11 years for Yan Ksenzhepolsky and 10 years for Vasily Neustroyev.

Pavel Sinelnikov was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison, while Yevgeny Zateyev and Valentin Khoroshenin each received six years and two months.

State prosecutors had requested prison sentences between eight years and 13 years.

The former activists initially pleaded not guilty in October 2024, but last July, Khoroshenin provided a “full confession” and testified against his co-defendants.

Arkhipova later said that Khoroshenin had told her after giving his confession that “what really matters isn’t what actually happened, but how the investigator wrote it up.”

Vesna declined a request for comment when contacted by the Moscow Times.

Source: “St. Petersburg Court Jails Former Members of Youth Activist Group Vesna,” Moscow Times, 8 April 2026

“Russia’s Future”: a 2018 protest action by Vesna. Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona

Saint Petersburg City Court has handed down sentences to six former activists in the Vesna movement: Yevgeny Zateyev, Vasily Neustroyev, and Valentin Khoroshenin, of Petersburg; Yan Ksenzhepolsky, of Tver; Anna Arkhipova, of Novosibirsk; and Pavel Sinelnikov, of Barnaul. They were sentenced to stints in prison ranging from six to twelve years. In total, the case involves twenty-one suspects from thirteen regions. One of the defendants unexpectedly testified against his comrades in court. Mediazona offers its readers this brief overview of one of the most wide-ranging and dramatic trials against dissidents in recent years.

The democratic youth movement Vesna came to life with spirited, theatrical street protests in Petersburg over a dozen years ago. It came to an end in 2022 when it was banned, followed by the launching of a criminal case against it, leading to the arrests of some activists, and the exile of others.

“They made up their minds that [Vesna] was something along the lines of [Alexei Navalny’s] Anti-Corruption Foundation, I suppose,” muses one former Vesna member. The young woman asked not to be named, even though she had stepped away from politics before the movement was officially deemed “extremist.” She continues to live in Russia and hopes that the security services will “continue to overlook her.”

The playbooks for dismantling the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Vesna are indeed broadly similar:

The prosecution of Vesna activists began with searches warranted under an obscure criminal law statute concerning the creation of NGOs which infringe on people’s personal and civil rights. Charges of violating this very same statute had also formed the core of the case against the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
As happened with the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the security forces got Vesna designated an “extremist” organization. Following this, any public activity that police investigators deemed as “continuing” the movement’s work, such as posting on its social media, was regarded as a punishable offense.
In both cases, a wave of police searches of activists’ homes swept across various regions of Russia, and this was followed by a series of arrests.
Vesna’s most prominent figures were designated “foreign agents.” Many of them fled Russia and were placed on the wanted list. The security forces then took their revenge on those who remained behind.

The trial of the six Vesna activists in Petersburg had dragged on since the summer of 2024 and been one of the most high-profile political trials in wartime Russia, owing both to the steadfast stance taken by some of the defendants and to the dramatic about-face by others.

Mediazona, “The Vesna Case: Young People vs. ‘National Security,'” 7 April 2026

What is Vesna? What is it famous for?

Vesna was founded in February 2013. The new movement consisted of approximately fifty activists, many of whom hailed from the Petersburg branch of Youth Yabloko, which had dissolved a short time earlier. The goals Vesna voiced at the time were far removed from radicalism: “increasing the level of political engagement among young people” and “participating in Petersburg’s legislature and local government through elections.”

In their hometown, Vesna’s theatricalized processions and pickets quickly became a familiar fixture on the cultural and political scenes.

“Summer of Friendship” campaign, 2015. Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona

In the summer of 2015, Vesna held an anti-war protest on Nevsky Prospekt, [Petersburg’s main thoroughfare]. Five activists stood holding signs that read “Write kind words to Ukraine” and a box where anyone could drop a postcard with words of support for the Ukrainian people.

In May 2016, Vesna marched through the city holding a banner reading “Circus, go away!” Opposition activists had not been permitted to hold May Day marches on Nevsky Prospekt, even though the country’s ruling United Russia party had been granted permission to march down the same route without any issues. In protest, Vesna activists staged an alternative procession in guise of a carnival: a young woman in church vestments with a fake belly demanded a ban on abortions, while another waved a censer by way of blessing a silver “Rogozin 1” rocket. Behind them walked a man with a TV set instead of a head. Someone carried a huge saw with the slogan “I support embezzlement!” Another carried a cello case stuffed with banknotes.

In January 2018, Vesna staged a mock funeral for Russia’s future: people dressed in mourning attire and with sorrowful expressions on their faces carried a coffin through the streets, adorned with children’s drawings that symbolized hopes for life in a free, democratic country.

In the summer of 2018, when Russia was hosting the FIFA World Cup, Vesna activists unfurled a banner reading “This World Cup Is Filled with Blood” on Palace Bridge in Petersburg. Vesna timed another protest against [torture in police custody] to coincide with the World Cup—a young woman, doused in red paint, lay down on a pedestal beneath a replica of the tournament’s official mascot, the wolf Zabivaka.

The movement grew rapidly. Regional chapters emerged, and by 2018 there were already around a dozen of them. By the late 2010s, Vesna was the most prominent youth organization in the Russian opposition’s ecosystem. No major protest took place without its activists being present. And yet, Vesna activists emphasized their commitment to legal methods of campaigning, as stated in their charter: “The movement pursues its work in accordance with the current laws of the Russian Federation.”

Vesna during the war: the first raids and interrogations

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of political dissent in Russia skyrocketed for all opponents of the government, and Vesna activists were no exception. On 3 May 2022, the movement announced the campaign “They Didn’t Fight for This,” calling on dissenters to attend the Immortal Regiment marches on 9 May (WWII Victory Day) but to carry anti-war placards at them.

A few days later, Vesna activists Yevgeny Zateyev and Valentin Khoroshenin, of Petersburg, and Roman Maximov, of Veliky Novgorod, who had already quit the movement, were targeted with searches of their homes. All three men were taken to Moscow for questioning and held in a temporary detention center pending trial.

These were the first steps in the investigation against Vesna activists. It was then that law enforcement authorities launched a criminal case into the setting up of an NGO that infringes on the personal rights of citizens.

The same day, search warrants were executed in Petersburg at the homes of the parents of Bogdan Litvin, Vesna’s federal coordinator, who had already left Russia, and activist Polina Barabash, as well as at the homes of former movement members Alexei Bezrukov and Artem Uimanen. In Moscow, searches were conducted at the homes of Timofei Vaskin, Angelina Roshchupko, Daria Pak, and Ivan Drobotov.

On 10 and 11 May 2022, the court issued restraining orders against Vaskin, Drobotov, Angelina Roshchupko, Maximov, Zateyev, and Khoroshenin, prohibiting them from certain actions. Soon after, Litvin and Drobotov were placed on the wanted list, as they had managed to leave Russia.

This did not stop Vesna, however. In September 2022, the youth activists announced protests against the military mobilization across Russia. Less than a month later, the Justice Ministry added the movement to its list of “foreign agents,” and the Saint Petersburg City Court ruled Vesna an “extremist” organization on 6 December 2022.

The charges and the trial

On 5 June 2023, the Investigative Committee opened a new criminal case, which later came to be known simply as the “big Vesna case.”

Searches were carried out the following day in Barnaul, Novosibirsk, Petersburg, and Tver. Six people were detained and taken to Moscow: Zateyev, Pavel Sinelnikov, Anna Arkhipova, Vasily Neustroyev, Yan Ksenzhepolsky, and Khoroshenin. On 8 June, a Moscow court remanded them to pretrial detention.

During the same pretrial detention hearing, the prosecution listed five charges: organizing and participating in an extremist group, desecrating the memory of defenders of the Fatherland, spreading “fake news” about the army, and calling for actions contrary to national security.

A year later, when the Saint Petersburg City Court began hearing the case against the six activists on its merits, there were seven charges. Incitement to mass unrest and the creation of an NGO infringing on citizens’ rights (the very same charge under which the activists’ homes had initially been searched in 2022) had been added to the bill of particulars.

The investigation assigned the role of leader and ideological instigator to Vesna’s federal coordinator Bogdan Litvin, who had managed to flee the country. According to law enforcement officials, it was Litvin who had driven the movement toward “extremism.”

Most of the charges were related to posts on Vesna’s social media accounts. Entered into the recorded were ninety posts made in Vesna’s name at various times on various platforms. When presenting evidence in court, the prosecution primarily read these posts aloud, listed the names of Telegram channels, cited viewer statistics, and read out the comments.

The indictment placed particular emphasis on a comment posted by a user known as “Kanoki Nagato,” on 1 May 2022. On one of Vesna’s Telegram channels, he suggested that Russians would one day start “killing the pigs, just like the Ukrainians did at Maidan.” According to the prosecution, the appearance of such a comment proved that Vesna was inciting dangerous actions. None of the defendants knows who “Kanoki Nagato” is, and law enforcement officials have not been able to identify this person either.

They did examine the personal accounts of the six defendants, however. Some of their Instagram accounts were found to be private. Speaking in court, the prosecutor called this “an attempt to conceal information from the investigation.”

When the prosecution presented its evidence in court, some of the hearings were held in closed session at the prosecutor’s office’s request, and members of the public and journalists were not allowed in the courtroom. Those involved in the proceedings are not permitted to disclose what they heard behind closed doors, but it is known that during at least some of these sessions, the court examined the results of intelligence operations—a term used in the Code of Criminal Procedure to refer, among other things, to wiretapping, undercover operations, and the interception and vetting of correspondence.

When it was the defense attorneys’ turn to present evidence, Arkhipova’s support group issued a public appeal: “The defense now urgently needs witnesses—people who actually took part in peaceful anti-war protests between February and May 2022 and have already suffered administrative penalties for doing so.”

Witnesses who responded to this post testified in court.

“To my mind, every citizen took to the streets out of a sense of duty and conscience. It was an entirely peaceful demonstration,” said one of them.

Another witness recounted that she was detained at an Immortal Regiment rally while holding up a portrait of her great-grandfather, and an administrative charge was filed against her for “discrediting” the army.

“I came out of my own free will. I’d participated in Immortal Regiment rallies before as well. At the time I made my decision, I hadn’t seen any notices on Telegram channels,” she explained.

A placard hung in the courthouse on the day the verdict in the Vesna trial was read out: “Yes to Vesna,* / No to war*! / And the truth* about them / is not extremism. / *Vesna, war, and truth are words forbidden in Russia in 2026.” Photo: Mediazona

At nearly every hearing in the trial, the defense insisted that the prosecution had no evidence that the accused activists were involved in posting most of the messages mentioned in the case file. Moreover, some of the defendants not only did not know each other prior to their arrest, but were also not members of Vesna at the time it was classified as an “extremist” organization.

Who’s who in the Vesna case

Yevgeny Zateyev, 24 years old

A resident of Petersburg, Zateyev was charged with violating Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”) and Article 282.1.1 (“establishing an extremist community”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Zateyev to ten years in a penal colony. The actual sentence was six years and two months.

Zateyev served as the press secretary for the Vesna movement’s Petersburg branch. In court, he insisted that his duties were limited to local topics: news about life in Petersburg, announcements of lectures, and film screenings.

He viewed the outbreak of the war as a “personal tragedy.”

“Vesna tried to prevent further destruction and loss of life on both sides of the border—among both civilians and military personnel—through peaceful means. I still regard this goal in an entirely positive light,” Zateyev said in court.

He was one of the first Vesna activists to face criminal charges in the spring of 2022. Some of his comrades left Russia, but Zateyev stayed behind and wound up in a pretrial detention center a year later.

In the summer of 2023, Zateyev wrote a letter from jail explaining why he had decided against fleeing the country.

“I made a very difficult and very painful choice. Was it a painful choice? Of course it was. I find it hard to imagine, though, how I could have left everything behind, gone away, and watched as my friends and acquaintances were imprisoned. This choice was easy for some, but I don’t judge them.”

In the same letter, Zateyev asked that his family not be judged for failing to “change [his] mind.”

In November 2023, Zateyev partially admitted his guilt in the hope of having his pretrial detention conditions eased. He was concerned about his family, especially his grandmother, who was seventy-seven years old at the time of his arrest. Zateyev was not released from pretrial detention, and so he withdrew his confession.

In January 2024, Zateyev’s grandmother died. Four months later, his mother also died, from cirrhosis of the liver.

Zateyev’s pretrial detention was extended once again shortly thereafter. Addressing the court, he mentioned the deaths of his loved ones. Judge Irina Furmanova interrupted him.

“Please do not try to pressure the court by bringing up the deaths of your relatives.”

“I am not putting any pressure on the court. I am simply stating the facts of my life.”

“We are familiar with them. You can merely note what you’ve been through. There’s no need to pressure us like that.”

“Your Honor, pressure—”

“Everyone has, or some people no longer have, a mother. There’s no need to pressure us in that regard. I’ll say it again. Let’s continue.”

In his closing statement, Zateyev said that he was forgiving the investigators, prosecutors, and judges.

“I caution against the false belief that forgiveness absolves one of responsibility. It does not. I do believe, however, that through forgiveness, we can understand the reasons behind what is happening—why and for what purpose. By ridding ourselves of an age-old evil, learning to treat one another with understanding, we can finally find love. I believe that this is possible and even inevitable in Russia. Spring [vesna] is inevitable. The season, of course. What did you think I meant?”

Mailing address for letters:

Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino
Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1
Pretrial Detention Center No. 1
Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region
Yevgeny Artemovich Zateyev, born 2001

Bank card number for donations: 2200 7009 1119 8470

Anna Arkhipova, 28 years old

A resident of Novosibirsk, Arkhipova was charged with violating Articles 282.1.1 and 282.1.2 (“organizing an extremist community”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 280.4.3 (“discrediting the Russian armed forces”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that she had violated Article 239.3 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Arkhipova to thirteen years in prison. The judge sentenced her to twelve years in prison instead.

Arkhipova joined Vesna in February 2021 to “take a civic stand, engage in publicly vital work, and meet new people.” She wrote posts for the movement’s social media accounts but quickly grew tired of “conflicts within the group” and left in May 2022.

Once the war in Ukraine had kicked off, Vesna’s work became “random and certainly not organized,” according to Arkhipova.

“Everything happened naturally,” Arkhipova said in court. “I felt the need to protest the war, as I regarded it and continue to regard it as a great catastrophe and tragedy. That is why I took part in a street protest in Novosibirsk on 24 February 2022.”

Of the ninety posts listed in the criminal indictment, she wrote one.

“I was involved in the publication dated 29 April 2022, [as charged] under Article 207.3, but I find it difficult to say exactly what role I played. [The text] was discussed at great length, and I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it at all. Either I acted as the author, after which it was heavily edited, or another person was the author, after which I heavily edited it,” the young woman explained in court.

Arkhipova’s support group runs a Telegram channel where her letters to the outside world are posted sometimes. In the “Cell Librarian” section, she talks about the books she has read in pretrial detention.

She also writes about the health problems typically experienced by prisoners. Due to poor nutrition, all women in the detention center lose their hair, and even a simple cold is dangerous.

“The worst part is that you’re not permitted to make your bed during the day, so you’re freezing and shivering, and all you have to cover yourself with is a towel. Illnesses are illnesses, but we still have to follow the prison rules!”

Arkhipova is a vegan. It is difficult to follow this diet in pretrial detention. She is very dependent on care packages, which arrive with considerable delays. Her support group secured permission to send her plant-based milk substitutes, but the detention center declined to accept them, stating, “We don’t even allow dairy products for mothers with children.”

“My motivation is simple: I oppose the war. I want a better future for Russia. I have tried to act on my conscience all my life, even though I haven’t always succeeded. When the war began, it was my conscience that wouldn’t let me stand idly by. People on both sides of the border deserve peace: soldiers should be with their families, not in foxholes, and those who were killed should have lived. I feel the same pain for everyone, regardless of their uniform,” said Arkhipova in her closing statement.

Mailing address for letters:

Russia 195009 St. Petersburg
11 Arsenalnaya St.
Pretrial Detention Center No. 5
Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region
Anna Nikolayevna Arkhipova, born 1997

Bank account numbers for donations: 2200 7008 6021 1167 (T-Bank) • 2202 2071 9921 3904 (Sberbank)

You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Arkhipova’s support group.

Vasily Neustroyev, 30 years old

A resident of Petersburg, Vasily Neustroyev was charged with violating Article 280.4.3 (“publicly threatening national security”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 282.1.1 (“organizing an extremist community”) and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that Neustroyev had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution asked the court to sentence Neustroyev to twelve years in prison, but the judge sentenced him to ten years instead.

According to the prosecution, Neustroyev was on Vesna’s federal audit commission and was one of its leaders. Neustroyev himself stated in court that he did not make any decisions within the movement. He did not even have access to social media and could not have published any of the posts ascribed to him. He met most of his “accomplices” only after his arrest. Before his arrest, he was acquainted only with Khoroshenin and Maximov, and knew Zateyev only by sight.

When asked about Litvin—whom investigators consider the leader of Vesna and under whose influence the movement allegedly turned into an “extremist organization”—Neustroyev laughed and said that the main topic of their conversations had been cats.

“Since the autumn of 2018, we’ve been the owners of cats—brothers from the same litter, which we got from the same source,” Neustroyev explained. “Since then, Bogdan Gennadyevich has left his cat with me to look after two or three times. You could say that we became something like in-laws through the cats. The cats were the main topic of our conversations in the years leading up to my arrest.”

The Petersburger did not renounce his anti-war views in court.

“I consider the actions of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin not only a crime against both Ukraine and Russia in equal measure, but also a great folly.”

And yet, Neustroyev “remained skeptical of mass street protests.” He was a member of Petersburg Yabloko’s council and was heavily involved in elections work for a long time. He coordinated election monitoring, and since 2020 had been a voting member of one of the city’s Territorial Election Commissions.

In a letter from the detention center, Neustroev voiced deep regret that he had not yet managed to finish his university education. He had just resumed his studies before his arrest, and if not for the criminal case, he might already have a degree.

“Nevertheless, I still plan to eventually obtain a formal tertiary degree and put this source of anxiety behind me.”

He spoke about Russia in his closing statement.

“Russia is strong. Russia will survive all tyrants and dictators, just as it has done before. I know that Russia will be peaceful, Russia will be happy, Russia will be free. And all of us will be peaceful, happy, and free along with her.”

Mailing address for letters:

Bank account numbers for donations: 2202 2063 1466 1708 (Sberbank) • 2200 2460 0202 0868 (VTB) • 2200 7009 3739 5001 (Т-Bank)

You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Neustroyev’s support group.

Pavel Sinelnikov, 24 years old

A resident of Barnaul, Pavel Sinelnikov was charged with violating Articles 282.1.1 and 282.1.2 (“organizing and participating in an extremist community”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The prosecution had asked the court to send him down for ten years, but instead the judge sentenced to him to seven and a half years in prison.

Sinelnikov served as Vesna’s executive secretary for several months but left the movement in 2021, long before it had been designated “extremist.”

“The work isn’t hard: you just sit there and write. But taking all those minutes is time-consuming and quite boring. So I really feel for the court clerk,” Sinelnikov explained in court.

He was baffled how the same person could be accused of both establishing an “extremist community” and participating in it, and he made no secret of the fact that the arrest had come as a shock to him.

“I didn’t expect at all that some police investigators would actually fly all the way from Moscow to Barnaul just to get me. As far as I’m concerned, the police search itself is a form of intense coercion, especially the way it’s done. They force their way into your life while yelling and shouting, don’t even let you get dressed, push you face-down on the floor, and then turn everything upside down while cracking high-school-level jokes,” Sinelnikov recalled.

He confessed immediately after his arrest, but later recanted his testimony.

“You can’t take away people’s opinions, but it’s easy to take away their freedom of speech. That’s what happened to me, even though I’m just a binnocent eyestander.”

In court, Sinelnikov explained that he had been fascinated by science and maths at school. He often traveled to academic competitions, and became interested in politics during one such trip to Moscow. He described himself as an introvert and a loner, and his mother even called her son a “slacker” in court.

“Well, Mom knows best,” Sinelnikov replied.

Sinelnikov began his closing statement by admitting that he didn’t really have much to say. But then he called the charges politically motivated and the trial “abhorrent.”

“There was no criminal extremist group. No one planned any crimes, no socially dangerous actions were committed, and there were no socially dangerous consequences either. No harm was done either to society or the public interest. We didn’t even have any motives for or intentions of doing so. Do I deserve ten years in prison for that?”

Mailing address for letters:

Bank account number for donations: 2200 7019 7373 4749

You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Sinelnikov’s support group.

Yan Ksenzhepolsky, 25 years old

A resident of Tver, Yan Ksenzhepolsky was charged with violating Article 280.4.3 (“discrediting the Russian armed forces”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 282.1.1 (“organizing an extremist community”), and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution had asked the court to send him down for twelve years, but instead the judge sentenced to him to eleven years in prison.

Ksenzhepolsky joined Vesna’s federal coordinating council in August 2021. According to him, by October–November of that year his involvement in the council had become “nominal” due to his work commitments. He was employed as a welding production specialist at the National Welding Control Agency and served as an aide to a deputy in the Tver Regional Legislative Assembly.

“I realized that the Vesna movement made a lot of noise but didn’t accomplish anything tangible,” Ksenzhepolsky said in court. “Meanwhile, I was involved in real institutional politics at the Legislative Assembly and could actually influence things—or at least try to.”

On paper, however, Ksenzhepolsky remained a member of Vesna until the summer of 2022.

Ksenzhepolsky is accused of posting on the movement’s Telegram channels, although, according to him, he had access to only one of them, “Tver Vesna,” which had sixteen subscribers. He handed over the password to the new administrator in November 2021, when he left the organization.

In court, Ksenzepolsky reiterated that he believes street protests in Russia are ineffective.

“I believe these actions are completely pointless and do more harm than good.”

In September 2022, when Russia announced a military mobilization, Ksenzhepolsky, according to his own testimony, was on holiday in Georgia but returned home—after Vesna had been declared an “extremist” organization.

“In any case, I know that we will ultimately be vindicated in the eyes of society, history, and the Last Judgment. After all, everything was forever, until it was no more. This regime will come to an end too, and within our lifetimes, something tells me. If not, then the Kingdom of Heaven is not a bad consolation prize,” said Ksenzhepolsky in his closing statement.

Mailing address for letters:

Bank account number for donations: 2200 2479 5715 1401

You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Ksenzhepolsky’s support group.

Valentin Khoroshenin, 24 years old

A resident of Petersburg, Khoroshenin was charged with violating Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”) and Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 of the Criminal Code was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution asked the court to send Khoroshenin to prison for eight years, but he was sentenced to six years and two months behind bars.

A co-founder of the now-shuttered Fogel lecture bar in Petersburg, Khoroshenin was the sole defendant who not only pleaded guilty to the charges but also testified against the other defendants in the case and many other Vesna activists.

The names mentioned by Valentin Khoroshenin in his testimony: Vladimir Arzhanov, Yekaterina Alexandrova, Makar Andreyev, Nikolai Artemenko, Anna Arkhipova, Yekaterina Bushkova, Alexander Vereshchagin, Yekaterina Goncharova, Timofei Gorodilov, Anastasia Gof, Lev Gyammer, Semyon Yerkin, Yevgeny Zateyev, Semyon Zakhariev, Anastasia Kadetova, Vladimir Kazachenko, Alexander Kashevarov, Gleb Kondratyev, Semyon Kochkin, Yan Ksenzhepolsky, Ilya Kursov, Maria Lakhina, Nikita Levkin, Bogdan Litvin, Andrei Lozitsky, Alexandra Lukyanenko, Yelizaveta Lyubavina (Sofya Manevich), Ilya Lyubimov, Timofei Martynchenko, Daria Mernenko, Anzhelika Mustafina, Anna Nazarova, Vasily Neustroyev, Maxim Potemkin, Konstantin Pokhilchuk, Kira Pushkareva, Lilia Safronova, Pavel Sinelnikov, Yevgenia Fedotova, Anastasia Filippova, Artur Kharitonov, Alexei Shvarts

Khoroshenin’s testimony came as a surprise to everyone in court. He requested that the testimony be heard in closed session and asked that the public and the press be removed from the courtroom, but the judge turned down his request.

Khoroshenin did not merely agree with the charge of “extremism.” He called Vesna “a sort of incubator for Navalny.” His testimony suggested that the movement’s branches were directly linked to the opposition politician’s field offices, where distinguished young activists would then “move up the ranks.” Khoroshenin mentioned the “grant support” that Vesna received, including from “undesirable organizations,” and complained that rank-and-file activists “spent the night in a back room, while Litvin bought himself a new apartment.”

“We systematically violated the law. We held protests and placed ourselves above the law. There were also slogans about undermining the country’s defense capabilities and justifying the use of violence. We organized events that violated existing laws but looked good on the surface,” Khoroshenin said in court.

“I have always believed that everything I am involved in should bring something positive to people. The Vesna movement was perhaps the only exception to this rule,” he argued, adding that he no longer supports any of the points in Vesna’s platform except for the one regarding support for “family and motherhood.”

Toward the end of his court testimony, Khoroshenin urged the other defendants to plead guilty—“to change their stance on the charges against them and set aside ideological pretense.”

“Don’t dig your own graves, colleagues!” he said.

In a letter from the detention center, Anna Arkhipova later quoted the words Khoroshenin had spoken after the hearing: “What really matters isn’t what actually happened, but how the investigator wrote it up.”

In his final statement, Khoroshenin lamented that his former comrades in Vesna had made him look like “some kind of Luntik,” once again acknowledged his guilt, asked for forgiveness “from society and especially from his family,” and voiced his hope that the court would allow him “to return to a normal life for constructive self-realization for the benefit of society.”

Mailing address for letters:

Bank account number for donations: 4476 2461 7307 7443

You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Khoroshenin’s support group.

Source: Yelizaveta Nesterova and Pavel Vasiliev, “’What really matters isn’t what actually happened, but how the investigator wrote it up’: What you need to know about the Vesna movement, whose activists have been sentenced to up to 12 years in prison,” Mediazona, 7 April 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Scary

Shortparis frontman Nikolai Komyagin has died.

The band’s manager, Marina Kosukhina, confirmed the news on their socials, writing, “Nikolai is no longer with us”.

Shortparis was formed in Saint Petersburg in 2012, with Komyagin becoming its vocalist, keyboardist, and ideological engine. Their first album, ‘Docheri’, was released in 2013, followed by ‘Paskha’ in 2017. They opened for The Kooks in 2015 and alt-J in 2017 in Saint Petersburg. Even then, their shows became known for their provocative, performance-art approach.

Despite moderate popularity among intellectuals and music lovers, the band gained mainstream recognition only after the release of the politically charged music video ‘Strashno’ in 2018. After that, Shortparis quickly became one of the most prominent opposition-minded bands in Russia and also started drawing interest abroad. In 2019, they embarked on their first UK tour, performing at Liverpool Sound City and The Great Escape Festival.

Shortparis in a still from their 2018 video “Scary” (see below)

Clash spoke with the band in 2020 at the peak of their popularity, calling them a five-piece that “artfully meld stomping skinhead aggro with Dostoyevskian angry-young-man intellectualism”. In our interview, Komyagin described their approach to making music this way: “Deconstruction of any normal-sounding instrument, or widely-known harmonic movement or chord, allows us to rethink music clichés, update and clean them”.

Komyagin was also known as a highly intelligent lad with a background in art history and experience working as a school teacher. He gave lectures on art and often provoked journalists during interviews, trying to turn them into performances. On top of that, he appeared in two Kirill Serebrennikov films, Leto and Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie, and played the iconic Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the TV series Karamora.

As of 2026, the band continued to remain in Russia, making that decision part of their political stance, even though they were effectively barred from performing there, with all concerts cancelled. Refusing to comply with state policies, they toured outside their homeland in recent years, playing in the UK, Germany, Portugal, Italy, the US, and many other countries, including a 2025 tour of China.

Nikolai Komyagin has died at the age of 39. No cause of death has been given. However, according to a statement from Ksenia Sobchak, an influential yet controversial figure in Russian politics and journalism, Komyagin had heart problems, and “he felt unwell after a boxing training session and his heart gave out”.

Source: Igor Bannikov, “Shortparis Frontman Nikolai Komyagin Has Died,” Clash, 20 February 2026

A great country sleeps
The evening seems eternal
Above the Kremlin cathedral
The wind rises

The fish seek nets
The body seeks events
The bullet has become smarter
In the course of the bloodshed

Like a soldier in the street
Eating a bun, glad of sweets
He is both a son and a brother to you
The apple orchard blooms with honey

Oh, my sorrow
Who will tell me
Where is the limit, the edge?
Who has seen where the snake is crawling?
Who has seen?
And whose are you now, whose?

My native land sleeps
The evening is disfigured
Above the Kremlin cathedral
Ashes rise

Shortparis & F.M. Kozlov Veterans Choir, “Apple Orchard” (2022)

In memory of the brilliant Nikolai Komyagin—[Shortparis’s] music video “Apple Orchard,” filmed immediately after the start of the war and performed in a wintry field with a veterans choir. A requiem for Russia. A requiem, as it transpired, for Nikolai himself: in the finale, apples are thrown into the grave.

He died at the age of thirty-nine from heart failure on a February day as cold as the day in 2015 when Nemtsov was killed, as cold as the day in 2022 when the great war began, as cold as the day in 2024 when Navalny was killed, as cold as today. A perennial Russian February.

Source: Sergei Medvedev (Facebook), 20 February 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Nikolai Komyagin, the singer and keyboardist for Shortparis, has died aged 39.

The musician and actor was best recognised as the frontman for the Russian experimental band, forming the group in 2012 alongside Alexander Ionin and Pavel Lesnikov.

His death was announced today (Friday February 20) by the band’s manager, Marina Kosukhina. Taking to Instagram Stories, she stated: “Nikolai is no longer with us”.

At time of writing, no cause of death has been announced, although a local Russian outlet has speculated that it may be related to “heart problems” that the singer experienced “after boxing training”.

After forming in Saint Petersburg in 2012, the band went on to share their debut album, ‘Docheri’, in 2013, before following it up in 2017 with an album called ‘Paskha’. Shortparis went on to become recognised for the distinctive blend of post-punk, avant-garde rock, pop, folk and electronica.

They also gained traction for their provocative performance art, with tracks like 2018’s ‘Strashno’ (“Scary”) tackling themes of neo-Nazism, fear, and social anxieties in Russia.

Since news of Komyagin’s passing, fans have been taking to social media to pay their respects to “one of the most talented and honest Russian musicians”.

“Their art tore at the fabric of reality, and with its piercing lyrics, it fought the Darkness. Hope you’re in a brighter place, Nikolai,” one fan wrote on X/Twitter.

Another added: “Even though their name may sound new to many, Shortparis have been among the most important protagonists of St. Petersburg’s music scene and Russian alternative culture over the past decade”, while a third explained how they first discovered his music.

“After I moved to Piter, this was the first band I randomly bought tickets for, and for two hours afterward I couldn’t come down from the sound, colour, and energy,” they wrote.

Shortparis went on to land a slot opening for The Kooks in 2015, and also supported Alt-J during the latter’s 2017 tour.

In 2019, the band went out on their first UK tour, which included a slot at The Great Escape Festival, and last year also went on tour in China for the first time.

As well as his time with the band, Komyagin also took on various acting roles, including spots in two Kirill Serebrennikov films: Leto and Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie.

One of his biggest roles was playing Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the 2022 television series Karamora, and he and his Shortparis bandmates also got involved in the filming of another of Serebrennikov’s films, Summer [sic].

Source: Liberty Dunworth, “Shortparis frontman Nikolai Komyagin has died, age 39,” NME, 20 February 2026

Shortparis always honestly, and even recklessly, attempted to reflect what was happening around them and to find an adequate artistic expression for it. To a certain extent, they also sought to aestheticize it—to find a felicitous (and impossible, of course) point inside and outside at the same time. It is no coincidence that Nikolai—a quiet, cultured, handsome man in real life, a Petersburg art historian—possessed such a complex charm on stage, and was a bit like Plumbum. This was not an easy task, and most importantly, it was harmful to his health, like working in a factory. Like practicing synchronized swimming in acid.

Because there was violence everywhere, and there still is. It consumed Nikolai.

Source: Alexey Munipov (Facebook), 20 February 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Shortparis, “Scary” (2018)

Source: Shortparis (YouTube), 19 December 2018

Scary

Honest, honest
Honest, honest
Honest, honest

You can’t handle it
But they don’t like it
Knowing in advance
Who won’t make it
And the women put on makeup
And the children hide
Join the dance
No one lies

You don’t like it
And they don’t like it
The sons are asleep
The family is silent
You stare naively
And plans are being made
I’m responsible for who my wife sleeps with

You can’t handle it
And they can’t handle it
The ice won’t save you
The major is coming
And the women put on makeup
And the children hide
Join the dance
No one lies (yes)

That’s why it’s scary, that’s why it’s scary
That’s why it’s scary, that’s why it’s scary
That’s why it’s scary, that’s why it’s scary
That’s why it’s scary, that’s why it’s scary

Eternal, eternal
Eternal, eternal
Probably faithful
Honest, honest
Honest nation (na-)
Honest, honest

You can’t handle it
And they can’t handle it
The ice won’t save you
Whoever doesn’t make it through
And the women put on makeup
And the children hide
Join the dance
The major is coming (yes)

Ta-ta-ta-ta
Ta-ta-ta
Ta-ta-ta-ta
Ta-ta-ta
Ta-ta-ta-ta
Ta-ta-ta

You can’t handle it
And they can’t handle it
The ice won’t save you
Whoever doesn’t make it through
And women put on makeup
And children hide
Join the dance
The major is coming (yes)

Eternal, eternal
Eternal, eternal
Probably faithful
Honest, honest
Honest nation (na-)
Honest, honest

Source: Genius (original Russian lyrics). Translated by the Russian Reader

Social Parasites

Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko has promised that the Soviet-era law criminalizing “social parasitism” would not be revived.

And yet, the politician argues that certain categories of unemployed people should at least make contributions to the compulsory medical insurance system. The Federation Council speaker spoke about this in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets:

I am talking about those unemployed people who drive Mercedes, have considerable hidden incomes, and yet do not pay taxes or make contributions to the compulsory medical insurance system. Or those, for example, who let their flats in downtown Moscow for 200,000 rubles a month [approx. 2,200 euros], but “on paper” claim that they rent it out for 10,000 rubles a month [approx. 110 euros]…. The tax service should identify such unscrupulous citizens and flush them out of the shadow economy and shadow incomes…. Workers, teachers, and doctors should not have to pay for young, healthy people who are under no obligation to society.

According to Matviyenko, forcing such citizens to be involved in the compulsory medical insurance system is fair because it is impossible to live in society and be free from it. She noted that teachers, doctors, workers, and others should not have to pay for healthy citizens without fixed employment.

This is not the first time Matviyenko has voiced the idea of collecting health insurance contributions from the unemployed: she has said that paying 45,000 rubles a year [approx. 500 euros] is quite affordable.

Surveys show that most Russians oppose a tax on social parasitism.

“Social parasitism” was a criminal offense in the USSR from 1961 to 1991. People who were unemployed without a valid reason could be sentenced to corrective labor, exile, or imprisonment. Citizens engaged in shadow private business were often prosecuted on this charge. The poet Joseph Brodsky was also convicted of “social parasitism.”

Source: Andrei Gorelikov, “Matviyenko: A law on social parasites will not be passed, but social parasites must pay,” Prosto Rabota, 25 November 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

In 1964, when Joseph Brodsky was 24, he was brought to trial for “social parasitism.” In the view of the state, the young poet was a freeloader. His employment history was spotty at best: he was out of work for six months after losing his first factory job, and then for another four months after returning from a geological expedition. (Being a writer didn’t count as a job, and certainly not if you’d hardly published anything.) In response to the charge, Brodsky leveled a straightforward defense: he’d been thinking about stuff, and writing. But there was a new order to build, and if you weren’t actively contributing to society you were screwing it up.

Over the course of the trial he stated his case repeatedly, insistently, with a guilelessness that annoyed the officials:

BRODSKY: I did work during the intervals. I did just what I am doing now. I wrote poems.
JUDGE: That is, you wrote your so-called poems? What was the purpose of your changing your place of work so often?
BRODSKY: I began working when I was fifteen. I found it all interesting. I changed work because I wanted to learn as much as possible about life and about people.
JUDGE: How were you useful to the motherland?
BRODSKY: I wrote poems. That’s my work. I’m convinced … I believe that what I’ve written will be of use to people not only now, but also to future generations.
A VOICE FROM THE PUBLIC: Listen to that! What an imagination!
ANOTHER VOICE: He’s a poet. He has to think like that.
JUDGE: That is, you think that your so-called poems are of use to people?
BRODSKY: Why do you say my poems are “so-called” poems?
JUDGE: We refer to your poems as “so-called” because we have no other impression of them.

Brodsky and the judge were (to put it mildly) talking past one another: Brodsky felt his calling had a value beyond political expediency, while the judge was tasked with reminding him that the state needn’t subsidize his hobby if he wasn’t going to say anything useful. But the incommensurability of these points of view runs much deeper than this one case.

[…]

Source: Rachel Wiseman, “Switching Off: Joseph Brodsky and the moral responsibility to be useless,” The Point, 23 April 2018

Timur Kacharava’s Murder by Neo-Nazis Remembered Twenty Years On

Flowers laid at the site where the antifascist Timur Kacharava was murdered: a photoreportage by Bumaga

Twenty years ago, neo-Nazis assaulted Timur and his friend Maxim Zgibay outside the Bukvoyed bookstore on Vosstaniya Square. Today [13 November 2025] a spontaneous memorial arose there once more.

The murder: On 13 November 2005, Kacharava received six stab wounds to the neck and died on the spot. Zgibay was hospitalized in critical condition. Alexei Shabalin, found guilty of Timur’s murder, was sentenced to twelve years in a penal colony. Four of the assailants were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from two to twelve years, while the other three were given suspended sentences.

The plaque: Nearly every year, the inscription “TIMUR, WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER YOU” appears on the wall of the building next to the murder site. Today, Yabloko party chair Nikolai Rybakov sent an appeal to [St. Petersburg] Governor Alexander Beglov, urging him to install a permanent memorial plaque marking the spot of Kacharava’s violent death.

The film: Leftist organization RevKomsomol – RKSM(b) has released the trailer of an upcoming film with the working title Antifascists by Calling. The film is being produced with the support of the creative association RevKino, RKP(i), and the nonprofit initiative Food Not Bombs.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 13 November 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Yulia Moskovskaya, Terrorist

Twenty-two-year-old Yulia Moskovskaya (née Joban) was detained in Petersburg in mid-June. She is suspected of attempting to carry out a terrorist attack against a drone design company employee. She failed to plant an explosive device [sic], according to the press service of the Petersburg municipal courts.

Moskovskaya was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center. Investigators say that she “espouses a pro-Ukrainian ideology and is hostile to the current Russian government,” and claim that the young woman tried to “impact decision-making” by means of a terrorist attack. Criminal terrorist cases are opened every month, but usually they do not involve harm to specific people. In 2024, seventy-five people, including ten women, were convicted in Russia for carrying out terrorist attacks.

Bumaga has learned that Moskovskaya is not speaking with her family, and that a female friend of her has become her spokesperson. We chatted with this young woman about how the suspect behaved before her arrest, how she got into debt, and when she moved to Petersburg.

The detainee’s family: “Yulia changed her surname: she didn’t want anything to remind her of her kin”

Yulia and I are quite close friends. Her lawyer informed me of her arrest. I was shocked when he contacted me. At first I thought it was some kind of prank. I still can’t believe it has really happened.

I have known Yulia since 2017. We are from different cities and met online in a fan group for our favorite singer. At first, we were pen pals, but then we took our relationship offline and saw each other in person many times.

Yulia wasn’t in touch with many people, so she must have given the lawyer my contact info. She didn’t have many friends. Yulia didn’t speak with her relatives. She has a mother and a younger brother [who live in Moscow], as well as her grandparents, who live in some other city.

Yulia has always had bad relations with her mother. Her mother had a live-in boyfriend who always treated Yulia badly and beat her. Her mother took the boyfriend’s side and didn’t stand up for her daughter.

Yulia’s father died in 2020, and Yulia didn’t have a close relationship with him either. He drank heavily. He regularly brought his drinking buddies home and would get so drunk that he couldn’t stand up. Yulia often escaped to the neighbors when her father, out of his mind, tried to beat her. When we talked on the phone, I could hear her father getting into a fighting mood; he would be saying something to Yulia, and she would scream and run off. The neighbors would even call the police, but they could calm him down only for a while, and only once did take him to the slammer. Yulia essentially had no one to whom she could turn. In difficult situations, she would call the mental health hotline.

As an adult, Yulia changed her surname [from Joban to Moskovskaya]: according to her, she didn’t want anything to remind her of her kin. She sought treatment from psychologists. In the beginning, she had hope that they would help her, but then she just went to them to get things off her chest.

Debts and the move from Moscow to Petersburg: “Creative work was her only stable hobby”

Three times, Yulia enrolled in different [institutions of higher learning]. But she wouldn’t like something about them and would drop out. For a while, she was studying to be a designer. I don’t remember what her other two majors were.

A few years ago, Yulia moved for the first time from Moscow to Petersburg: she had always liked the city. You could say that she flitted between the two capitals.

Yulia originally had her own place to live. After his death, her father left his children an inheritance. Yulia and her brother sold her father’s flat in Moscow and split the money, so she was able to buy her own place in Petersburg. She lived there for a few months, but got bored and bought a flat in another neighborhood. After a while, she went back [to Moscow], buying a flat in the Moscow Region. Soon afterwards she sold her last home and went back to Petersburg, where she lived in a rented flat.

Yulia often changed jobs. The first place she worked was McDonald’s, before it left Russia. She stayed at that job for several years. After that she worked as a courier, then as a consultant in a store. Almost every month she would change jobs if she wasn’t satisfied with something. She didn’t regard any of her jobs as permanent. She said that she would soon leave [Russia] and that she only needed temporary, part-time work.

I know that Yulia had outstanding loans and that she didn’t have enough money to live on. She said that she had been sued by debt collectors. (In May 2025, a Moscow court ruled in favor of debt collectors trying to recover debts from Moskovskaya under a loan agreement — Bumaga.) She had spent the money on surgery [not covered under free public healthcare], and on braces.

Yeah, she’s not a very steady person. She gets bored with things quickly. Creative work was her only stable hobby. (On social media, Moskovskaya followed a lot of literature and Silver Age poetry groups — Bumaga.) She drew and wrote poems. Recently, she had been making her own jewelry and trying to sell it.

Moskovskaya’s views and her abandoned cat: “Before her arrest, she said she wanted to go to the war”

When the war broke out, Yulia immediately supported Ukraine. She said that she didn’t like the regime in Russia. She had a very firm stance. But I wouldn’t say she was always interested in politics. Before the war, I hadn’t noticed that she followed the news. I was surprised when she suddenly became politicized. Moreover, she has no Ukrainian relatives.

Before her arrest — since last summer — she had been saying that she wanted to go to the war. She mentioned that she had visited military enlistment offices and contacted people who could help her get to Ukraine, but everyone, according to her, had turned her down. I tried to warn her about the consequences: what if she died or something? She replied that she didn’t care, that this was her purpose in life and that such a death would be an act of heroism.

All last month, she kept saying that she would be leaving Petersburg for Ukraine and that some people would help her do this.

When Yulia was detained, I was allowed to speak with her for literally several seconds. The only thing she said was that I should go get her cat, which had been temporarily placed in a shelter.

Yulia Moskovskaya’s cat. Source: social media

I had imagined that Yulia would be hysterical, panicked. According to her lawyer, however, she is surprisingly calm.

Source: “‘She attempted to plant explosives under a car’: friend of 22-year-old Yulia, accused of plotting a terrorist attack, speaks of her loneliness and debt,” Bumaga, 30 June 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Cars for Ukraine

The European University at St. Petersburg has purchased and dispatched a UAZ vehicle to the war in Ukraine “for transporting the wounded in the combat zone,” the university’s press service has reported.

It notes that the vehicle was sent to Military Unit No. 11076, which was formed from mobilized residents of St. Petersburg, the Leningrad, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk regions, and the Komi Republic.

The university’s press service posted a commendation to university rector Vadim Volkov from the unit’s commander, who praised Volkov for his “social activism” and support of the military “as it carries out missions in the special military operation zone in Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Zaporizhzhia region, and the Kherson region.”

“Military Unit No. 11076 expresses gratitude to the autonomous noncommercial higher education organization ‘European University at St. Petersburg’ in the person of Vadim Viktorovich Volkov for social activism and support rendered to the soldiers of our unit as they carry out missions in the special military operation zone in Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, Zaporizhzhia Region, and Kherson Region. Victory will be ours! Military Unit No. 11076’s commander, Colonel V. Zyatchin, May 2025.”

The European University is a private university founded in St. Petersburg in 1994. The university was funded by grants from American and European NGOs. In 2016, the university was stripped of its accreditation for a year after an audit undertaken by the Prosecutor’s Office and Rosobrnadzor [the Russian federal education watchdog], after which such audits became routine.

In 2023, the Russian authorities audited the European University “for extremism,” and the university was also fined over books in its library published by “undesirable” organizations. Rector Volkov reported in an interview with RBC on June 24 that the prosecutor’s office had audited ninety-eight programs at the university and twelve master’s theses, after which the university had amended the programs and made changes to its academic advising process based on the recommendations of the authorities.

In March 2024, the European University fired Ivan Kurilla, an Americanist who taught in its political science and sociology departments. Kurilla opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine and was among the signatories of an open letter against the war by Russian academics and science journalists.

Source: “European University at St. Petersburg sends vehicle to war, garnering thank-you from Russian military,” Meduza, 10 June 2025. Photo courtesy of European University at St. Petersburg. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up.

Where are you from? And where are you now? Doing what?

I am from Aarhus, Denmark, and have lived in Kyiv for almost 20 years. I own a software company, Livatek, which works with clients in Northern Europe.

As a foreigner working and living in Ukraine for many years, what is the best and the worst thing about Ukraine?

The worst thing about Ukraine is that nothing is possible. The best about Ukraine is that everything in the end is possible.

How has the war changed your life? Has the war changed you personally?

With the start of the war, my brother Morten and I reactivated a Danish initiative called “Biler til Ukraine” – “Cars for Ukraine”—which had already helped a Ukrainian NGO bring SUVs to the front for medical evacuation during the war in Donbas. Within a week of the full-scale invasion in 2022, we were back in Ukraine with the first three cars.

Since then, we have scaled up tremendously and delivered more than 400 vehicles to the Ukrainian military for logistics and tactical purposes, including 75 buses for personnel transports. These days, we are managing more than one car per day. All in all, as a rough estimate, the value of these cars is somewhere close to $2 million. The money comes from absolutely average, normal Danes and private companies. I am often surprised by people’s generosity. They often donate their car and even drive it with us to Ukraine!

Growing a business has become more difficult with the war. With “Cars for Ukraine,” I have found another outlet for my professional energy to defend Ukraine. It has allowed me to work with some unique people in Denmark and Ukraine. Their strength and dedication inspire me.

What has surprised you most about Ukrainians these past couple of years? Good or bad?

I was not surprised to see the tenacity of the Ukrainians as they resisted Russia’s efforts to eradicate their culture. On the negative side—and here I am probably a bit naïve—I can still be disappointed by corruption. I know it is good news that corruption and the people who commit it are discovered and prosecuted, but I would prefer things to be nipped in the bud instead of cracked down afterward.

What are your plans?

I think I am like most Ukrainians in that “the future” does not exist anymore. We have a war to fight and win—after that, there is a future—and it is bright and open.

How do you see the war ending and Ukraine returning to a normal life?

Forces at play now do not point to a happy-end scenario for Ukraine. The dynamics need to change. Specifically, more political leaders of the West must do “a Macron” — to understand that Ukraine is fighting for every country of the liberal, Western world. (French President Emmanuel Macron underwent a radical change in his view on Russia’s war from dovish to hawkish and insisting on Russia’s defeat.) Because, honestly, for Ukraine to have a normal future, Russia not only needs to be beaten back to within its borders. It needs such an educational wacking that it will give up on its aggressive ways – and never again even consider attacking Ukraine or other states.

Tell us one thing people abroad do not know about Ukraine but they really should.

For too many centuries, Russian culture has defined itself as being unique, and outside rules and measures apply only to other countries. The mere existence of an independent Ukraine is a challenge to that myth. And, when Russia is attacking its neighbor, it is fighting its own demons and inferiority complexes.

You can learn more about the work of “Cars for Ukraine” (in Danish “Biler til Ukraine”) here.

Source: “BLITZ INTERVIEW: Jesper Lindholt, a Danish tech executive bringing hundreds of cars to the Ukrainian army,” Two Grumpy Old Men on Ukraine, 20 May 2024

Living Their Best Lives

Sergei Podgorkov, *A Cafe on Vasillievsky Island (St. Petersburg)*. Source: Facebook

[…]

Living their best life

And here, the reader will stop for a second and most likely ask the question — but what about Russians, don’t they want the war to stop?

And the answer is most likely no.

Recently, I fell into a rabbit hole, watching videos posted by ordinary Russians on Instagram. It all started when on Twitter (X), people began discussing a post by a Russian blogger who wrote that Moscow is beautiful, sprinkling it with hate speech.

The blogger, who clearly was working with the local government to promote Moscow, basically said that the Russian capital is the best city in the world because it’s clean, everyone is happy, and there are no homeless people and “LGBTQ+ propaganda.”

Displaying a rainbow flag is a criminal offense in Russia.

I went to his page and looked at the videos he was posting. And then some more videos from people living in Moscow.

For a person living in Kyiv, bombarded on a nearly daily basis, this was a very interesting dive. Watching those videos, you would never think that their country is at war.

Moscow has experienced a few waves of transformation since 2022.

Before the start of the all-out war, Moscow was thought to be the most liberal Russian city. The Russian capital harbored people with higher education and better income. Opposition activists were living their lives in Moscow cafes. Late opposition leader Alexei Navalny even once ran in the city’s mayoral election and gained a substantial number of votes.

As soon as the all-out war started, there were even some protests in Moscow, and some members of the local art and culture scene, those who traveled abroad and saw the world, were not supportive of their country’s slide into totalitarianism.

Still, Moscow was far away from the war. Cafes were still packed and people’s day to day, if they weren’t in active opposition, only changed insignificantly.

In late 2022, this changed. When Russia faced one military defeat after another, the local government was instructed to make the war felt in Moscow.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, who at first deliberately distanced himself from the war effort, was now traveling to the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, and banners depicting Russian soldiers appeared on the city’s streets.

The 2022 Russian forced mobilization campaign saw police grab people from Moscow’s streets and send them to fight in Ukraine.

Hundreds of thousands of Russians, most of them from major cities such as Moscow, left the country. Some of them for good.

Soon after that, Moscow changed once again. Since late 2023, Russia has been on the offensive. Those who were against the war or actively opposed it are no longer in the country. The Kremlin also has enough troops and hardware to continue the fight indefinitely. It doesn’t need to rely on forced mobilization — instead, it uses high wages to lure volunteers.

It doesn’t need to shove the war in the face of Moscow residents, especially those who do not care. The government is now deliberately shielding the residents of its most important metropolis from the hardships that a war can bring.

Bars, cafes, concerts, new metro stations, international football stars visiting the city, and playing friendlies with the local players who are banned from international competitions. People are living their best lives, while their compatriots, friends or even relatives are murdering civilians in Ukraine.

Watching the videos from 2025 Moscow is a surreal experience. I can’t stop thinking that it must be similar to what life was like in Berlin in 1941 for those who didn’t care about the atrocities their country was committing.

Source: Oleksiy Sorokin, WTF is wrong with Russia? newsletter (Kyiv Independent), 17 July 2025. This post is dedicated to Nan Kim, who has supported this website with a monthly donation for the last two years. I would like to apologize to her for posting so infrequently in the past few months. The work-at-home jobs which over the last eighteen years also afforded me the time and space to produce this website have dried up or disappeared altogether (along with all other donations to this website), so I have had to take work that keeps me away from home most of the day nearly every day. This extreme slowdown in producing this blog is not necessarily a bad thing for me personally. Among other things, it keeps me from asking the question Oleksiy Sorokin asks at the top of this entry: don’t Russians want the war to stop? \\\ TRR