“I don’t want to get used to the war” was the message painted on a fence outside the former Stables Department building in Petersburg in February 2025. Photo: Bumaga
Author of graffiti “I don’t want to get used to the war” released after sentencing
The Petrograd District Court sentenced activist Alexander Arseniev to twenty months in prison on criminal charges of vandalism and “discrediting” the [Russian] army, his lawyer, Alexei Pryanishnikov, reported on his Telegram channel.
Arseniev was released in the courtroom after his stay in a pretrial detention center was counted as time served. According to Arseniev’s case file on the court’s website, the final hearing in the case took place today. As this article went to press, the court’s decision had not yet been entered into the file.
Arseniev wrote “I don’t want to get used to the war” on a fence near the Stables Department and at Gazprom Arena in February 2025. The graffiti outside the stadium was repainted overnight.
Last March, Arseniev was detained in Moscow and extradited to Petersburg, where he was remanded in the pretrial detention center. Spray paint cans and an acrylic marker were found police searched his flat.
Repression in today’s Russia is not on par with the mass repression of the country’s past. Nevertheless, it fulfills the same function by intimidating society and changing the behavior of millions.
Many people also feel that this repression is intensifying. But human rights data show the opposite: for a year now, the number of new politically motivated cases has remained at the same level — around 500 per quarter.
In the “Repression Barometer” report for the first three months of 2026, researchers from Memorial’s project in support of political prisoners made clear that Russian authorities appear to regard the current level of politically motivated arrests — which plateaued at 500 per quarter — as optimal.
Out of a population of around 140 million, that is not very many cases. By comparison, around four times as many murder cases are opened over the same time frame. Repression does not affect the majority. In 1937–1938, for example, more than 1.37 million people out of the U.S.S.R.’s population of 162 million were arrested in cases involving “counter-revolutionary crimes” and around half of them were shot.
But modern repression performs the same role as the mass repressions of the 1930s by creating a sense of an all-powerful, punitive hand of the state that effectively changes the behavior of millions.
But why is it so powerful when only a small number of people are punished? Political cases become a weapon for intimidating the population not through scale, but through unpredictability.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people make online comments that could be classified as “fake news,” “discrediting” the Armed Forces or “justifying terrorism.”
But criminal cases are opened against only a few — and it is precisely this selectiveness that makes the system so effective. It is impossible to predict where the boundaries of permissibility lie and at what point the state will decide to impose a punishment.
The same logic applies in cases involving “extremist” symbols, a category that today includes many things from the logos associated with Alexei Navalny’s activities to pentagrams and rainbow flags. In reality, such images can be found on many social media pages, but criminal cases are opened only in isolated instances.
Each such case sends a signal. Formally, rules exist. But in practice, they are applied selectively — and no one can be certain they will not be next.
The state cannot currently imprison millions. But it does not need to. Imprisoning hundreds unpredictably is more than enough to create the impression that anyone could end up behind bars.
The wording of the relevant laws also plays into this. They are extremely vague and even lawyers cannot always calculate the risk of simple actions. For most people, doing nothing is the best way to make sure they remain on the right side of the law.
A good example is cases involving “foreign agents,” where the law does not forbid private users from reposting or quoting their content without a disclaimer. But because of the chilling effect of a growing number of restrictive laws, people are afraid to quote or repost material from such branded outlets. The problem is compounded by the existence of other statuses like “undesirable” and “extremist,” for which legal consequences for sharing their material do exist. But many people, fearful of crossing the line, prefer to keep away.
Fear takes hold first and foremost among the most informed and engaged people who read independent news and follow human rights organizations. Aware of the risks, they begin to express themselves more vaguely, participate less often in public discussions and withdraw from active involvement.
The victims of unpredictable repression, meanwhile, are increasingly ordinary people who write comments or publish posts on VKontakte without realizing the risks they are taking.
Despite covering barely a quarter of the total number of incidents, the media — both pro-government and independent — plays a major role in creating the impression of widespread repression. Absurd and plainly unjust cases receive such wide coverage — like the story of the hookah on an Easter kulich — that their very absurdity intensifies the fear of the unpredictability of repression.
Within this logic, criminal cases against public figures who have left the country — writers, actors, bloggers, politicians and television presenters — look like a separate area of work for the security services. There is no practical point to these repressions: hardly any of these people will be extradited from Europe, where they have settled. But such cases receive widespread public attention, which further helps create an atmosphere of fear. Celebrities are not spared, so what can ordinary mortals expect?
Thus, contemporary Russian repression does not need to become mass repression at all. Its effectiveness rests on a combination of unpredictability and public signaling: most cases remain almost invisible, but individual stories become a signal to everyone else.
If human rights defenders are right and the authorities really do regard the current level of repression as “optimal,” then perhaps they believe nothing more is required. There is no need to imprison millions to frighten millions more. It is enough to maintain a constant stream of cases and, from time to time, show society that anyone could be next.
Azat Miftakhov is being transferred to the colony where Alexei Navalny was murdered
Anarchist, mathematician, and political prisoner Azat Miftakhov was sentenced on March 28, 2024, to 4 additional years in prison. On September 4, 2023, he was detained upon leaving IK-17 [Correctional Colony No. 17] in Omutninsk, Kirov region, where he had already served his first sentence—allegedly for breaking a window at a United Russia office in Moscow’s Khovrino district. The basis for the new prosecution for “justifying terrorism” was (allegedly) comments Azat made while watching a TV program with other inmates about anarchist Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who carried out an explosion at the FSB office in Arkhangelsk. Testimony against Azat was given by fellow prisoners and a prison employee.
Recently, the political prisoner was transferred from a prison in Dimitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk region. In a letter dated April 19, Azat reported on his transfer from Kirov to Vorkuta:
“I’m writing to you from Vorkuta. And as you understand, I’m heading to Kharp. I think no further comments are needed.
“Two days on the train have worn me out quite a bit. The toilet—once every 4 hours, hot water—three times a day, there’s no room to turn around in the compartments, my bones ache from constantly lying on a hard bunk and the shaking of the train. So the stop in Vorkuta is very welcome. Tomorrow morning we depart, and we’ll arrive in Kharp the same day. It seems I’ll go straight from the train to the camp without intermediate stops (apparently there are no detention centers there).”
The prisoner’s support group comment[ed] on this news:
“It is quite obvious that transferring Azat to Kharp is nothing other than a desire to take revenge on him for his firm stance. It is both a threat that his life depends on the will of the security apparatus and the creation of significant hardship for the remaining 1.5 years of his sentence.
“Kharp is one of the northernmost places of detention in Russia; it is located beyond the Arctic Circle, in permafrost conditions. It was established in 1961 on the basis of preserved buildings of a former camp unit of the Gulag’s Construction Site No. 501.
“In addition to Alexei Navalny, who was unable to leave the colony alive, well-known political prisoners held in Kharp include Platon Lebedev (2005–2006) and Oleg Sentsov (2017–2019).”
“As his lawyer, I visited Azat monthly in the Ulyanovsk region, spending under 10,000 rubles (circa 110 euros) on travel (or not much more, depending on circumstances). Now I understand that a trip to the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug will cost closer to 40,000 (circa 440 euros): 5000 for two nights in a hostel, 12000 and 20000 for flights… (12000 is with a middle-of-the-night layover and worst possible service).
“I’ll also have to cross the Ob River to and from the airport. And I hope I won’t have to open and close the swimming season immediately… since, according to a hostel worker, ice crossing is still operational.
“Maybe later I’ll figure out how to make these trips cheaper, but it’s unlikely I’ll manage without expensive flights… after all, two days by train one way, especially when trains don’t run daily, is not something you can do regularly.
“Oh, and if Azat ends up specifically in the colony in the village of Kharp, and not in Labytnangi (the nearest city), then it seems there’s no electronic mail there. That already borders on torture.”
On [5 August 2025] Russia’s Supreme Court rejected the final appeal for Azat Miftakhov, a mathematician and anarchist serving his second politically motivated prison sentence. His latest conviction, for “justifying terrorism,” rests entirely on the testimony of a fellow inmate who claimed Miftakhov had praised an attack on the security services. For over six years, Miftakhov has navigated two coexisting identities in Russia’s brutal penal system: that of a political prisoner and a member of the “obizhennye”, or the “degraded”—the untouchable caste at the bottom of the prison hierarchy. In letters from behind bars, he tells Mediazona how he survives.
Azat Miftakhov, 31, was a graduate student in mathematics at Moscow State University when he was first arrested in February 2019.
Initially accused of making explosives, he was beaten and tortured by security service agents who threatened to rape him with an electric screwdriver. Another detainee was tortured with an electric shocker by security forces who demanded he incriminate the mathematician. After his detention, Miftakhov attempted to slit his wrists but gave no confession.
Bespectacled, short and soft-spoken, the anarchist has not yielded to this day, despite pressure from the FSB and a second fabricated terrorism case.
Back in February 2019, when the security forces failed to find evidence that the young man had been making explosives, Miftakhov was accused in a case concerning a window broken a year earlier at a ruling United Russia party office in Moscow’s Khovrino district.
The pressure campaign continued inside the prison. Officers from the FSB informed other inmates of Miftakhov’s bisexuality. The move was a calculated effort to have him ostracised and forced into the “degraded” caste, a group subject to constant humiliation, violence, and forced labour. Miftakhov did not deny the officers’ words; back in 2019, intimate photos of him were published by Telegram channels linked to security services and later by the state-run TV channel Rossiya-1.
A vigorous public campaign in support of Miftakhov began from the first days of his arrest, so he could not hide his status as a political prisoner from other detainees, though he did not deliberately advertise it.
“During mail call, the whole prison section is standing in formation,” he explains. “An activist comes up with a stack of letters. The first is for me, the second for me, the third, the fourth… In the end, only two or three letters go to other inmates. The rest are mine.” He often received letters and postcards from France, Germany, and Sweden, something extraordinary for other prisoners. “They’re writing even from America!” they would marvel. The camp’s population changed, but newcomers would often approach me and ask: “Is it true that Oxxxymiron wrote a song about you?”
—
In the winter of 2021, Azat Miftakhov was sentenced to six years in a penal colony. A secret witness, interrogated a year after the case was opened, claimed to have identified Miftakhov among the group that broke the United Russia office window and threw a smoke bomb inside, recognising him by his “expressive eyebrows.” The anarchist himself denied any involvement in the action.
After his time in Moscow’s pre-trial detention centres, Miftakhov was transferred in August 2021 to serve his sentence at Penal Colony No. 17 (IK-17) in Omutninsk, Kirov region. The prison was “red”, or tightly controlled by the administration through “activists” from among the prisoners.
Although severe physical violence had become a rarity there in recent decades, the colony’s reputation for torture dated back to the late 1980s, especially as punishment for refusing to prepare for official holidays. For many years, the most important of these was Victory Day, and all prisoners without exception were required to participate in preparations for a “parade” featuring models of military equipment.
“It was considered an absolutely mandatory thing, and to refuse meant condemning yourself to unimaginable torment: torture with shockers, bleach, and the punishment cell,” recalls Timur Isayev, who was incarcerated in IK-17 at the same time as Miftakhov. He was serving a sentence for organising an escort agency. After his release, Isayev left Russia.
Miftakhov impressed Isayev immediately upon his arrival at the colony. The inmates learned that during quarantine, security officers had offered the mathematician the chance to “hide” his “degraded” status in exchange for cooperation, but he refused.
“He told them: ‘Chief, you protect laws and rights, yet you speak to me in some kind of criminal jargon that you yourself are supposed to fight against. I don’t recognise your stinking ponyatiya. I don’t recognise this division of people either. Do what you think is necessary.’ The cops were just stunned by such audacity and directness,” Isayev recalls.
Thus, from the perspective of the other prisoners, Miftakhov had essentially “defined” himself as “degraded”, since he had the opportunity to hide his status, explains the source to Mediazona. Therefore, each of [the] muzhiki, or “the men”, regular prisoners, had to decide for himself whether it was appropriate to communicate with him. Isayev says he spoke with him without regard for others: “He had a normal social life in the zone, he was treated very well—not like the others in that caste, with whom he could still interact. He had a completely special position.”
From Azat Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona (abridged)
You can’t get “infected”’ by talking to someone who is “degraded”, but it’s considered improper for one of “the men” to hang around a “degraded” person for too long. You won’t be “called to account” for it, but you might catch ridicule and taunts from others, even provocations. They might suggest that a “man” “share” living quarters with the “degraded” since he gets along with them so well.
The life of a “degraded” person consists of many prohibitions. Many of them are so fundamental that they cannot be ignored without getting into a conflict with “the men”. Take, for example, the obligation for the “degraded” to be last in every queue: for the canteen, the shop, the medical unit. It happened more than once, for instance, that I’d stand in line for the shop all day. The queue is long, and as always, they’ve brought in an insufficient amount of goods. Every now and then, you hear that this or that has already run out. And then, just as the queue reaches the “degraded” inmates, a dozen more of “the men” suddenly appear from around the corner, having only just decided to join the line. You have to let them go first. It’s frustrating, of course, but what can you do? If you don’t like it, you can get locked in a punishment cell or a cell-type unit. But then you can forget about parcels and visits.
There is only one prohibition that I refuse to accept—the ban on fighting one of “the men”. If someone tries to humiliate my human dignity with an insult or by forcing me to do something, I consider it my sacred right to respond with force. The only thing I have to be wary of when exercising this right is punishment from the activists or the criminal elites. They can beat you severely for it, causing serious injury. However, I value my human dignity too highly to allow it to be debased, even under the threat of injury. Prison is a place where you’d better not “swallow” humiliation. If you “swallow” it once, you convince those around you that you can “swallow” it again and again. It’s better to nip it in the bud. That’s my philosophy on the matter.
I have had to fight “the men” several times, and each time it was over my status. It didn’t always lead to a scandal. Sometimes we managed to make peace with my opponent afterwards. A couple of times, a “case” was brought against me. The “trial” took place in a storeroom. Activists and various influential people as “judges” would cram in there, along with both sides of the conflict, meaning me and my “victim”. Witnesses were also called. Some “judges” seemed eager to pass a harsh sentence, which could have been carried out on the spot. I had to be prepared for such a turn of events and at the same time maintain my composure while justifying my position. Although according to the “prison” law, I was already in the wrong from the start, so my universal human arguments were unlikely to work there.
Fragment of Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona
—
Miftakhov’s principles faced a major test in the spring of 2022, as the colony prepared for its annual Victory Day parade.
When Miftakhov saw other prisoners painting the “Z” and “V” symbols of the Ukraine invasion onto military props, he informed his detachment chief he would not participate. He expected to be sent to a punishment cell, but the administration, wary of his high profile, opted for a different strategy.
The day before the parade, Miftakhov was summoned; he expected to be tortured there, but instead, an inspector led him to a windowless room hidden deep within the medical unit, furnished only with a bed, a bedside table, and a toilet. Soon, the head of the operational department arrived. He explained that the room would temporarily become a “safe place” for the political prisoner.
From Azat Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona (abridged)
“We’ve received information that some convicts are unhappy with your position,” the officer told me. “They want to teach you a lesson.”
“Therefore,” he continued, “it was decided to provide you with a safe place. Due to the threat to your health.”
“And how long will I be in this safe place?” I asked.
“Well,” the officer seemed to ponder, “I don’t know. Maybe a month, maybe a year. Or maybe until the last convict who wants to beat your ass is released.”
After talking with me a little more, he left, and I remained in that room. That’s how I began to learn what a “safe place” was. And I must say, it was the best gift the IK-17 administration could have possibly given me.
From then on, I didn’t have to go to work. I could spend all day on self-development, solving math problems and reading books. But most importantly, I could rest from the constant hustle and bustle of the common area. I wished it could last until my release. However, my happiness was not destined to last long. A week later, some random people were asked to sign off that the threat against me was gone. I had to return.
—
It was in IK-17 that Miftakhov formed a friendship with Evgeny Trushkov, another “degraded” prisoner serving a long sentence for charges including group rape. This friendship would prove to be his undoing. As Miftakhov’s release date in September 2023 approached, the FSB scrambled to build a new case against him. Trushkov became their star witness.
He testified that Miftakhov had “justified terrorism” in conversations with him, allegedly praising Mikhail Zhlobitsky, a teenager who bombed an FSB office in 2018. “I admire the actions of Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who was not afraid to lay down his life in the fight against Putin’s regime,” Trushkov claimed Miftakhov had said.
From Azat Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona (abridged)
In the two years we knew each other, I received nothing but support from him. Sometimes he would tell me how he wanted to help me evade the FSB’s attention, that he was even willing to postpone his own freedom for it. Some of his suggestions were naive, which only convinced me of their sincerity. So when I found out that Trushkov had testified against me, I didn’t believe it at first. Only gradually, as I got acquainted with my new criminal case, did I begin to understand that he had betrayed me.
I do not think Trushkov initiated the criminal case, as he claimed in court. I am sure his story about how he, out of patriotic feelings, went to report the alleged crime to the detachment chief was fabricated to make the prosecution’s evidence seem coherent.
I believe this is what happened. On July 20, he was presented with a choice: either you give us the testimony we need against Azat, or you get “spun up” with him on a terrorism charge, but a more severe one. And they probably made it clear that the necessary witnesses for such a charge would be found. From there, I see two possible scenarios. First: he got scared for himself. Second: he made a deal with the FSB for my own good. I do not rule out either of these options, nor do I justify them.
Making deals with the FSB is a losing game from the start. One should not think that you can outsmart them this way, gaining more than you lose. Such underestimation of the enemy is extremely dangerous. Once you make one concession to them, they will force you to make a second, a third, and so on, until you give them your soul. In my conversations with him, I noticed this naive underestimation of the special services.
—
On the day he was due to be freed, Miftakhov was met at the prison gates by FSB agents who immediately re-arrested him. In a new trial based on his friend’s testimony, he was sentenced to another four years for “justifying terrorism.”
He is now held in a high-security prison in Dimitrovgrad, mostly in solitary confinement. His mental health has declined sharply. Trushkov, meanwhile, was released from the colony to fight for [the Wagner Group] in Ukraine. In a phone call to Miftakhov’s wife from the front, he slurred, “Get the kid out of there,” knowing Dimitrovgrad prison’s reputation.
Miftakhov is not scheduled for release until September 2027.
From Azat Miftakhov’s letter to Mediazona (abridged)
“There are no friends in prison,” as the inmates say. I don’t like such generalisations, but there is a certain amount of truth in it. Inmates are inherently placed in a vulnerable position. One wants to be released as soon as possible, another hopes for an unscheduled visit with his wife, and all of this depends on the goodwill of the administration. The administration knows the value of these benefits and sells them for special services. Snitching and betrayal are among them. And yes, prison status has no meaning here: “snitches” are found among both the “degraded” and “the men”. And you can’t say that the proportion among the former is noticeably different from the proportion among the latter.
Nevertheless, I managed to get burned by my friendship with Trushkov. Well, I have to admit that I am apparently a poor judge of character. This incident has significantly affected my perception of people in places of detention. When I meet a new person, I can’t help but start to assess whether he is capable of refusing the chekists if they try to force him to testify against me with threats and promises.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
“Russia’s Future”: a 2018 protest action by Vesna. Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
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.
Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
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.
Photo: David Frenkel/Mediazona
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. Photo: Mediazona
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. Photo: Mediazona
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. Photo: Mediazona
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:
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 Vasily Petrovich Neustroyev, born 1995
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Neustroyev’s support group.
Pavel Sinelnikov. Photo: Mediazona
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:
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 Pavel Nikolayevich Sinelnikov, born 2001
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. Photo: Mediazona
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:
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 Yan Alexandrovich Ksenzhepolsky, born 2000
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. Photo: Mediazona
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:
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 Valentin Alexeyevich Khoroshenin, born 2001
Bank account number for donations: 4476 2461 7307 7443
You can follow the latest news on the Telegram channel of Khoroshenin’s support group.
Russian films don’t win Oscars every time out, so I finally made up my mind to watch the movie Mr. Nobody Against Putin. It turned out that the film wasn’t about a school, the war, Russia, or Putin—it’s Pavel Talankin’s film about himself. The film begins with him and ends with him. He’s in almost every scene in between. And it goes on like that for ninety minutes.
I don’t know if you can call a film a documentary when the vast majority of its scenes are staged. I suppose you can, but the Academy’s members know best. I’m not a film critic, and my opinions are purely those of an amateur. I’m a mere viewer.
I was amazed by how tacky the self-promotion was. I mean, it is just off the charts. Here comes the protagonist, taking what he calls a “super risk”: he tapes the letter X on the school’s windows over the letter Z. He claims that the X is a symbol of protection for Ukrainian refugees. (?) And here he is, secretly but on camera, ripping the Russian flag from the school’s roof, as witnessed by a cameraman* and Talankin himself. And there he is getting a haircut—a charming, intimate detail, certainly vital for understanding the current state of affairs Russia’s regions. When the toilets in the school’s bathroom flashed on screen, I feared that Talankin would be in the starring role there too, but that didn’t happen, thank God.
It’s funny that Talankin has arranged the books in his home by the color of their spines, and it’s even funnier that, while looking every bit the diehard undergrounder and following the orders of a mysterious overseas handler, he messes around with hard drives that must be smuggled out of the country. We’re living in the twenty-first century, so what prevents Talankin from uploading at least a few gigabytes of video footage to the cloud or transferring it via FTP, instead of lugging the hardware through customs? But I get it: that would not be cinematic, and the documentary would have suffered.
Whether the documentary suffered because Talankin filmed children and adults without informing them of his objective is a question for the Academy’s members. Perhaps this is acceptable in the American cinema, but journalists are obliged to honestly tell interviewees on whose behalf they are interviewing them and to what end.
I’m not arguing with the fact that Talankin’s film won an Oscar. If Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for the color of his skin, and Bob Dylan got a Nobel Prize in Literature for his songs, then why shouldn’t Pavel Talankin get an Oscar for a docudrama about Pavel Talankin? It’s all good.
Something else makes my blood boil. It’s not even the profanity that is liberally sprinkled throughout the film. That’s just how the characters express their folksiness. I get that. What makes my blood boil is the extraordinary ease with which Talankin switches from serving the regime as a propagandist to a new job on a new project. Before he was hired to make the film, he faithfully played the despicable role of a Putin propagandist, organizing and filming pseudo-patriotic productions on orders from his superiors. He sends reports to the Ministry of Education. He reshoots when the first take doesn’t turn out. He corrects the teacher who repeatedly fails to pronounce the word “denazification”—and again, he does take after take. Everything has to look perfect. That’s the job. He gets paid for it.
It would be fine if Talakin didn’t get it, like the moronic history teacher who garners so much screen time in the film. But no, Talankin gets it all. He films what he himself calls “show lessons.” He admits that he works in propaganda: “It wears me out.” While filming a pro-war car rally he laments, “I have to play by their rules.” Why does he have to play by their rules? Is there no other way for him to make a living? He cannot fail to realize that he’s just as much an obedient cog in the propaganda machine as the history teacher. Only Talankin’s caliber is smaller, and his threads are thinner. He doesn’t explain why he has to play by their rules. But it’s obvious anyway, and there’s a universal explanation for it: honest work pays less and demands a heavier workload. The entire propaganda machine in an authoritarian regime is based on this. There’s always a way out if you want out.
But then something clicked, Talankin’s fortunes changed, and now all the video footage he had painstakingly compiled was put to a new use. Up until that point, he had worked in the field of pro-government propaganda; now he would work to expose it. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Everything must be put to use, not a single frame should be wasted.
People sometimes do suddenly acknowledge the harmfulness of their work and make a complete U-turn. Such things do happen, thank God. But if they do it sincerely, and not for opportunistic reasons, their conscience torments them over their past deeds; they suffer, and they seek to atone for the past through their new endeavors. They don’t gloss over the mistakes they have made in life. Such people are instantly recognizable: they do not flaunt their rewards, they take no delight in newfound fame, and they often pay a heavy price for the new path they have gone down. Talankin’s is a different case entirely. His is merely an elegant segue from one cushy job to another. In that sense, we can certainly congratulate Mr. Nobody on his success.
* Podrabinek’s is the only review of Mr. Nobody Against Putin which I’ve read that mentions the mysterious second cameraman (who is clearly a consummate professional), although they were apparently on location in Karabash for months on end. In the film’s credits, they are identified only as “Anonymous,” but their palpable presence is not otherwise mentioned or explained, not even in the film itself. ||||| TRR
Many years ago, as a graduate student at UMICH in Ann Arbor, I took two semesters on Nabokov with the late Omri Ronen – one of the most extraordinary intellectual experiences I had there, and that’s saying something.
We spent a great deal of time on Lolita, especially its dialogue with Dostoevsky’s “cult of feelings,” and on Humbert Humbert as a “romantic” yet profoundly unreliable narrator. Ronen often emphasized that while it is natural to sympathize with a narrator who claims to be in love, Nabokov refuses to do the reader’s ethical work for them. Humbert Humbert is a criminal who destroys Lolita’s life – something she herself makes clear by the end (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”) The reader’s task is not to be disarmed by his rhetoric, but to remain morally alert and to imagine the experience of his victim.
Watching Mr. Nobody Against Putin and reading its reception, I could not help but think just how thoroughly this lesson seems to be missed by those celebrating the film and its narrator, who is every bit part and parcel of the phenomenon he set out to document.
The film centers overwhelmingly on Pavel Talankin’s feeeeeelings, granting them disproportionate narrative space, something not uncommon in Russian films about Russia. His attachment to Karabash and its people, to the textures of Russian life (the ugly Soviet prefab panel blocks that have gained a somewhat romantic vibe among the younger Russians, the harsh winters, etc.) is rendered with great sympathy. So too is the school environment. But Talankin’s commitment to “loving” the bleak, the outwardly ugly, and the brutal is not just an aesthetic quirk — it’s a moral stance. What is strikingly absent in all of it is Ukraine and its people, which is only briefly mentioned as a destination, not a society under attack. Russian children are not just being indoctrinated to volunteer, to be mobilized, and to die, they are being prepared to kill and that is what they do in Ukraine — something, which is not even once mentioned.
There is also an obvious schism between the reality Talankin documents and the way he interprets it. In his account, he appears to be the only figure with agency — the only one capable of making meaningful choices — while everyone else is stripped of agency and reduced to a passive recipient of propaganda. Even the sinister history teacher, the school’s most zealous and vicious propagandist, is described as “brainwashed.” But if that is the case, who, exactly, is doing the brainwashing? These are the very people who inculcate cynicism, cowardice, and doublethink in their students, they are actors in this process, not victims, and they do have moral choices, just like everybody else. (It is also worth noting that the community is neither visibly poor nor destitute — undercutting the familiar explanation that people volunteer to kill because poverty leaves them no choice.)
Again, this is not just an aesthetic imbalance, but also a moral one, with the focus remaining on “our” suffering, “our” losses, “our” children, not what we and these children have done to others. As a result — just as Omri Ronen warned his sophomore Nabokov students — the aggressor is sentimentalized, and his perspective eclipses that of his victims.
P.S. I also watched Ksenia Sobchak’s documentary about so-called “black widows” — women who marry Russian soldiers, often under dubious circumstances (with grooms heavily intoxicated), and later claim substantial compensation after their deaths. In contrast to Pavel Talankin’s film, it’s really hard to sympathize with any of the people on the screen. Sobchak’s role within the Kremlin’s propaganda ecosystem is well documented; what is worth briefly noting here is how thoroughly this story (and Russian “society” at large) is framed as a story about women: as caregivers, opportunists, con-artists, bereaved wives, or negligent, alcoholic mothers and grandmothers who affect the fates of men, entirely at their disposal.
Men, by contrast, are consistently infantilized, cast as troublemakers, drifters, habitual drinkers, and absent fathers with no clear purpose in life. But invariably “nice”: women say (posthumously) that they are sorry for them (again, barely a reference to what these men did to Ukrainians). In this framing, war supplies these men what their civilian lives lack: purpose, agency, a “heroic”, manly identity, a sense of belonging, and a handsome income – leaving behind, in the end, something for the women to remember them by.
Hello! This week we cover how Oscar-winning documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, went down inside Russia, and why it’s caused a stir among both the Kremlin’s backers and its critics.
Russians fight over Mr. Nobody
Earlier this month, Russia won the Best Documentary Oscar for the first time in more than 80 years. Well, sort of. The statuette went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a Danish-Czech production directed by Pavel Talankin, a young teacher from a small town in the Urals, who documented pro-war propaganda inside Russia’s school system. Western critics were enthusiastic about its take on the militarization of schools amid the invasion of Ukraine. Russian officials and propaganda outlets were, unsurprisingly, not so keen on the film. But interestingly, even some anti-war campaigners have criticized the movie, accusing Talankin of making a shallow diatribe that did not advance our understanding of Russia’s wartime propaganda machine.
The documentary tells the story of educator and school videographer Talankin and his school in Karabash, a small industrial town of about 10,000 people in the Urals region of Chelyabinsk. Talankin, now 35, was a highly respected teacher in his hometown. In 2018, he won the regional “Leader of the 21st Century” competition, his students won an award at a local festival for a movie shot under his direction, and in 2021 the town’s mayor praised a virtual model of Karabash that Talankin’s students had created in Minecraft.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Talankin was assigned to film propaganda lessons in which children were taught Kremlin talking points about the war’s supposedly noble aims, and the unfairness of the West towards Russia. Talankin and US documentary filmmaker David Borenstein got in touch via an online advert in Russia seeking people whose lives had been changed by the invasion. The videographer offered to use the footage he was obtaining as part of a joint documentary. Talankin carried on working and then eventually smuggled hard drives containing two-and-a-half years of footage out of Russia.
The clips from the propaganda lessons — called “Conversations about Important Things” in Russia — were the centerpiece of the film. In one scene, a teacher, reading a propaganda script, struggles to pronounce the words “denazification” and “demilitarization”, two of the official reasons the Kremlin gave for its war. In another, a history teacher (the film’s main antagonist) tells children how in the near future France and Britain will soon face economic collapse as people there are already starving due to sanctions on Russia. Another scene shows mercenaries from the now defunct private Wagner militia advising children how to throw grenades.
What Talankin showed from one school in a provincial town is the same as what’s happening in thousands throughout Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the state embraced mass propaganda in education. Lessons with war veterans were already commonplace, as were issuing Kremlin-approved justifications for the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the seizure of Ukrainian territory. Watching the film, it’s easy to imagine how the exact same “Conversations about Important Things” are happening right across Russia on a daily basis from Moscow to Vladivostok.
The award was [a] surprise, with US film The Perfect Neighbor going into the Oscars as the favourite. According to renowned Ukrainian producer Alexander Rodnyansky, Mr. Nobody Against Putin won out for its portrayal of a “dumbing down mechanism” that could be applied in multiple countries.
However, despite winning the most prestigious documentary prize on offer, there are many who are openly critical of the film — and they are by no means limited to supporters of the war and Putin’s regime. Several recurring complaints crop up. They include that Borenstein compiled the movie “for export” — targeting foreign audiences and festival juries — and that its success closed the door for any chance of a more powerful study of what is happening in Russian schools. In Russia, everybody knows about propaganda in educational institutions (for example, we wrote about it here) and, to them, this film does not offer anything new or go deeper than what has been widely reported. Doubters also say the film suffers from artificiality — especially in Talankin’s monologues. Some scenes, such as the tearing down of a Russian flag or the posting of the “Z” symbol backing the invasion in school windows — seemed staged to many critics.
Respected fact-checker Ilya Ber published a detailed analysis with several complaints that was widely shared on Russian-language Facebook groups. The claim that UNESCO described heavily polluted Karabash as the “dirtiest town on Earth” is not backed up by any documents and is simply an urban myth circulated in the Russian press. The film portrays children being checked with metal detectors as a symbol of a military dictatorship when, in fact, it’s standard procedure in Russian schools ahead of final exams and has nothing to do with the war. Finally, Ber questioned the underlying narrative that Talankin was in danger. He worked in a school where everyone knew his views, nobody denounced him and after the Oscars, pirated copies of the movie are widely available on VK, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook that is closely watched and de facto controlled by the authorities.
The filming of children without parental consent for use in the documentary is another sore point — and the one that Russia has officially latched on to. From an ethical point of view, all subjects should provide documented consent to take part in filming, and minors cannot be filmed without the permission of their parents or guardians. This is precisely the argument the Russian authorities are using and the Presidential Human Rights Council filed a complaint with the Oscars organizers alleging violation of children’s rights.
On the other hand, Talankin was not filming secretly. Children and parents knew they were being filmed for both the local education ministry and for his own projects. “It’s funny that all these years he would come around, film us, and say we would be on the BBC. We laughed at him like he was an idiot. And now he’s going to the Oscars. I don’t think he really believed it himself,” said one graduate of the school, speaking before the awards ceremony. “I knew they were filming me because we often had conversations on camera and it was some kind of lifestyle thing. I didn’t see anything wrong with it,” said another.
Of course, the film has many fans. Movie critic Ekaterina Barabash (who fled Russia while under house arrest for criticism of the authorities) noted that it was well made and gave a unique view inside the regime. Fellow critic Anton Dolin wrote that nobody had ever depicted the workings of propaganda with such chilling clarity. Political analyst Alexander Baunov felt that the fact Talankin filmed in the town where he was born, raised and had been living and working made his testimony especially valuable.
In Karabash, they prefer not to mention the film. According to Talankin himself, “a year ago, when the film came out, FSB officers came to the school and said: ‘This man wasn’t here, this film never existed. You don’t comment on the film, you don’t talk to this man,’”. He said that he’s considered a traitor in the town — a view shared by some propaganda outfits (1,2).
Most national pro-government media outlets have simply ignored the film, which was Russia’s first documentary Oscar for more than 80 years (in 1943 the award went to Moscow Strikes Back). Russian online movie service Kinopoisk, operated by IT giant Yandex, chose not to translate the film’s title into Russian in its live coverage of the Oscars ceremony.
Why the world should care
Despite all the criticism, Talankin managed to show Western audiences something that they had not seen before: exactly how brainwashing works in Russian schools. To Russian viewers, this was no surprise. Reports of propaganda lessons still frequently appear on school social media pages and in news roundups.
Source: Denis Kasyanchuk, “Everybody Against Mr Nobody,” The Bell, 24 March 2026. Translated by Andy Potts.The Bell‘s always informative and sometimes thought-provoking biweekly newsletters used to be free and were delivered to my inbox in whole. Last year, though, they went behind an extravagantly expensive paywall ($189 for a yearly subscription), and I have ignored them. But I was already prepping this omnibus post when a sneak preview of this week’s first newsletter popped into my email, and I couldn’t resist spending one dollar on a one-month trial subscription (which will revert to $18.90 monthly at trial’s end).
The Russian Reader will never be paywalled over, although it does bleed money like a sieve and is in need of your financial support. I have exactly one active donor, NK, who has faithfully and encouragingly sent me twenty dollars every month for the last three years. Why should they keep doing all the heavy lifting on their own? ||||| TRR
Polina Yevtushenko with daughter Alisa in court, August 2024
Polina Yevtushenko had deleted the social media posts for which she was tried prior to criminal charges being brought against her, she did not commit high treason, and her so-called crimes were victimless. And yet, she has been in a pretrial detention center for almost three years, and the prosecution asked the court to sentence her to eighteen years in prison. According to her lawyers, this would have been the longest sentence ever handed down to a woman in post-Soviet Russian history for a nonviolent crime that was not even committed. Today, the Central District Military Court found Yevtushenko guilty as charged and sentenced her to fourteen years in prison.
“This case is totally fabricated and unfounded. It’s completely unfounded, and the recordings that do exist and were submitted to the court speak to Polina’s innocence. In them, she repeatedly tries to dissuade her acquaintance Komarov from joining the Free Russia Legion. He made her acquaintance specifically so that this vile criminal case would be brought against her. This is a provocation,” say Polina’s acquaintances who attended the trials. (We are not naming them for their own safety.) “Polina is a courageous person. She’s a fine woman and never loses heart. It’s simply monstrous that she has been given such a long sentence for no reason.”
“I thought they were taking me to be killed”
Polina Yevtushenko, who is from the city of Togliatti, in the Samara Region, is twenty-seven. In July 2023, she was arrested for allegedly “inciting a Samara [city] resident to commit treason by defecting to the enemy, namely by joining the armed group the Free Russia Legion in order to take part in hostilities against the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on Ukrainian soil” (per Article 30.1 and Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: “preparation of terrorism”).
On that day, she took her daughter Alisa to kindergarten, and when she left, more than a dozen plainclothes security forces officers were waiting for her.
“They put cable ties on my hands and threw me into the car as if I were a sack of potatoes. Then these men got into the car and placed their feet on me. They didn’t explain anything. I thought that they were gangsters and that they were taking me to be killed. I screamed and called for help,” Yevtushenko later recounted.
After Yevtushenko was arrested, she was charged with five more crimes: publicly calling for terrorism on the internet (a violation per Article 205.2.2 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code), publicly calling for extremism, also on the internet (Article 280.2), disseminating knowingly false information about the deployment of the Russian Armed Forces, motivated by political hatred (Article 207.3.2.e), and condoning Nazism (Article 354.1.4). According to the FSB’s Samara office, she persuaded an acquaintance to go and fight in the Free Russia Legion, carried out “propaganda work,” and “posted instructions for Russian military personnel on how to surrender.”
Seven dates and “high treason”
Polina Yevtushenko
In this photo, Yevtushenko is a slender young woman with blue hair like Malvina’s, wearing a t-shirt and pink jeans. She raised her young daughter alone and painted pictures, which she posted on her Instagram and VKontakte accounts. She also publicized her anti-war views on these social media accounts, republishing a petition demanding Putin’s resignation over the war he unleashed in Ukraine, posts from the Free Russia Legion (at the time, it had not yet been deemed a “terrorist organization” by the Russian Supreme Court and was not yet banned), and instructions on how to surrender in order to survive the war. She was always quite sociable and interested in all kinds of people, easily meeting new people and making friends, according to her acquaintances.
Nikolai Komarov wrote to Yevtushenko on VKontakte. He said she was very pretty and drew beautifully, and that he really wanted to meet her and date her. What is more, her page said that she used to work at a Yota store, and he had a question he couldn’t figure out himself, so maybe she could help? He lived in Samara, she lived in Togliatti, an hour away by bus, but that was not a problem—he would come to Togliatti.
“They had a total of seven dates,” says a [male] friend of Yevtushenko’s. “He always told her how much he liked her. He invited her out to eat. They went for bike rides, went bowling, and sang karaoke together. He asked her about her pictures and her daughter. That is, he made it patently clear that he was interested in her as a woman and that he was courting her.”
It later transpired that the only dates with Yevtushenko which Komarov didn’t record on a dictaphone were the first two.
“He would constantly tell her that he was afraid of getting drafted and wanted to leave Russia, and asked her to advise him where to go, what to do, and how to make a living,” Polina’s friend continues.” She would reply that if he was so afraid, he should go to China or Kazakhstan, open a Wildberries or Ozon outlet there, and not worry. But he kept bringing up the subject again and again, asking her about the Free Russia Legion, whose posts she shared on social media. Polina told him that they were fighting Putin and that was why she supported them, that she had Ukrainian blood and opposed the war. At the trial, recordings were played of Polina telling Komarov many times that he should not go there and get involved, of her trying to talk him out of it. But Komarov kept at her: ‘I want to join the Legion, let’s choose a “street name” for me.’ (That was his term for ‘call sign.’) She communicated with him in a friendly manner and did not want to get closer because the conversations were always the same.”
Yevtushenko was later asked why she had not immediately pegged Komarov as a provocateur. She replied that she had believed “the FSB would not employ such dimwits.”
In court, Komarov testified that he had independently recorded Yevtushenko’s conversations on a dictaphone, but then became frightened by what she was saying and decided to hand the recordings over to the FSB because he thought she could get him into trouble. The recordings show signs of editing, with conversations cut short, Yevtushenko said in court. During the investigation and the trial, her defense demanded access to the complete recordings, but they allegedly do not exist. Komarov claimed that he had long since sold both the dictaphone and the laptop from which he transferred the recordings to discs for the FSB at a flea market. The court took him at his word.
Center “E” operative, FSB agent, or just a criminal on the hook?
In 2009, Nikolai Komarov was sentenced to two years’ probation for stealing a Sony Ericsson mobile phone, Kholod has discovered. While his probation was still in force, Komarov was caught again and charged with seventeen counts of theft of cable and internet equipment. In May 2011, he was convicted and sent to prison for two years and one month, but in April 2012, he was released on parole, after only eleven months in prison.
“He can actually be sweet, handsome, and charming. He knows how to get under your skin, and girls usually like him. He’s a bit of a con artist,” says a friend of Komarov’s.
You would thus never suspect that Komarov had had run-ins with the law. On the contrary, he maintained a Twitter account on which he demanded that the Samara municipal authorities fill in a pothole and finally resolve the issue of an open manhole cover, and he came across as a caring person and even a grassroots activist. This was before the war in Ukraine, however.
In 2017, Komarov showed up at the Navalny organization’s field office in Samara and introduced himself as a lawyer.
“He was a very active member [sic] of the field office. He wanted to be friends with everyone. He would invite people to barbecues, suggest that we drink vodka, hang out at the office all the time, and willingly do whatever needed doing—if we needed to buy water, he would go buy it without question. He took part in our campaigns and protest rallies,” says Marina Yevdokimova, who was a staffer at Navalny’s Samara field office at the time. In 2021, after the organization’s field offices were shut down across the country, she fled Russia.
In 2019, during the COVID pandemic, Yevdokimova was the field office’s social media manager.
“We had just reached the peak of the outbreak, which we wrote about in a post on Telegram. We also wrote that doctors had no PPE. An administrative case was brought against me. The police were staked out near my home. They would knock on my door, but I wouldn’t open it, so then they would go to my neighbors and question them,” Yevdokimova continues. “There was a court hearing in May, and Kolya Komarov was a witness for the prosecution, to my surprise. He hadn’t been at the Navalny field office for a long time. He was upset with us because we hadn’t gone along with his strange proposals. He had then become friends with the Communists and NOD (National Liberation Movement) members, posted photos of himself with them, and participated in their rallies.”
Denis Shepelsky (left), NOD’s “chief of staff” in Samara, and Nikolai Komarov. Source: Komarov’s VK page
At Yevdokimova’s trial, Komarov testified that he had seen her walking through the market in Microdistrict 15 and had allegedly heard her discussing on the phone that she would post this particular message on Telegram.
“I heard about her criminal intentions and could not fail to report them to law enforcement,” he told the court.
“Strangely enough, I was acquitted,” says Yevdokimova. “The lawyer asked [Komarov] simple questions that [he] couldn’t answer properly: ‘Where do you live? How did you end up in the market at that time?’ This was during the pandemic and no one could move freely around town. Besides, many people had access to our Telegram channel, so it was impossible to prove that I was the one who had posted it.”
Yegor Alasheyev, another former staffer at Navalny’s Samara field office, also emigrated from Russia.
“In March 2017, we held a rally called ‘Dimon Will Be Held to Account,’ at which twenty-three of our supporters were detained,” Alasheyev recalls. “We appealed all the fines [imposed on them as punishment] and they were later overturned. Komarov was also detained, but he turned down our assistance, saying that he was a lawyer himself and ‘knew what he was doing.’ It later transpired that he had pleaded guilty and been sentenced to pay a fine. At first, he kept quiet about the situation, then he telephoned our office and asked us to pay the fine. (At that point, he had already stopped hanging out with us.) I told him that we needed to talk to the lawyers and come up with a plan. But he refused to talk to them, and two weeks later, a video was released on TV featuring a ‘disenchanted Navalny volunteer.’ Soon after, he started attending NOD rallies. We looked into Komarov and learned that he had been convicted of stealing cable, but we had suspected that he was here for a reason even prior to that. He always hung around the office and listened carefully to what we were saying. But we didn’t pay much attention to it—he had seemed harmless. We understood of course that someone would inevitably be planted in our midst and that we were being watched.”
In 2022, Protocol Samara discovered that Alexander Melikhov, whom Komarov had befriended, had been planted in the local Navalny field office. Melikhov was a lieutenant colonel in the police, and his surname and passport had been changed for the sake of this operation. Yevtushenko’s acquaintances do not rule out the possibility that both men infiltrated the organization at the same time.
During Yevtushenko’s trial, it transpired that another criminal case had been opened against Komarov. He had been charged with thirty-seven crimes under Article 173.1.2.b of the Russian Criminal Code (“illegal creation of legal entities or provision of documents”). He was sentenced to 330 hours of compulsory community service.
“It seems that he has long been firmly ‘on the hook’ of Center ‘E’ (the Russian Interior Ministry’s office for combating ‘extremism’ and ‘dissidents’—Sever.Realii) and the FSB, but they cover for him. He created thirty-seven fake companies and only got community service,” says a lawyer working in Russia.
A new method of recruiting?
In July, it will have been three years since Yevtushenko was jailed in a pretrial detention center. In June 2025, she was found guilty of “violating” the center’s rules for passing store-bought cookies to a neighboring cell. In July of the same year, she was sent to solitary confinement for ten days because she had described her court hearings in her letters. All this time, she has only been able to see her daughter through glass; the judge has allowed them one-hour visits. Yevtushenko’s parents have been raising Alisa.
“Visits take place through glass over a telephone and last one hour. During this hour, I talk alternately with my mother and with Alisa. During the last visit, I brought a sketchbook with me in which I draw pictures for Alice. She really liked it,” wrote Yevtushenko from the detention center. “Before that, I showed Alice some old photos of us from the time before my arrest, but she started crying, so I decided not to do that again… Of course, conversations through glass can hardly be called visits, but we are grateful for what we have. I really miss hugs. I want to hug and kiss Alisa, but I can’t.”
“Polina gets plenty of letters at the detention center. Many people support her because they understand the injustice of what has been happening to her. She doesn’t get discouraged, she rejoices in every little thing, and she has been learning English by mail,” says a friend of Yevtushenko’s who has attended all the court hearings in her case. “How do we usually imagine sting operations carried out by the special services? They involve persuasion, bribery, blackmail—the classics of the genre. But a new method has supposedly emerged in Polina’s case, which we learned of when FSB expert Tatyana Naumova was cross-examined at the trial. According to her, in a new manual developed by FSB criminologists, which has not been made available to the public, a new method of recruitment is [defined]: it is deemed ‘propaganda’ and ‘recruitment’ when someone praises something—for example, when someone claims that the Free Russia Legion has good equipment. Polina’s defense asked to review this secret manual, but the judge turned down their request. The defense lawyer then asked the judge to examine them himself and confirm that everything was indeed written that way there. But the judge refused to do so. Naumova also said that Komarov was ‘a person conducting covert operations.’ In other words, she effectively admitted in court that the special services had organized a sting. From the point of view of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), this is a gross violation of the right to a fair trial (per Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights). Evidence obtained in this way is considered inadmissible by the ECHR. And Russia, until it ceased to be a party to the Convention due to the war it unleashed in Ukraine, had been repeatedly punished for this” (e.g., in Vanyan v. Russia, 2005, and Lagutin and Others v. Russia, 2014—Sever.Realii).
An excerpt from Polina Yevtushenko’s closing statement at trial
“Your Honor, you have known me for almost two years. I am confident that during these two years you have been persuaded that I pose no danger to the community and that I can be released.
“For two years, I have only been able to see my daughter through glass and cannot even hug her. I did not see her at all during the first year [in police custody]. Last year, Alisa started first grade, and this year, on March first, she will turn eight years old. She needs her mother’s love, care, and help, and I need even more to be with her, to see her grow up, to raise her, to take care of her. I need to make sure she becomes a decent person—well-mannered, smart, well-read, and fond of our Motherland.
“Your Honor, I ask you to release me so that I can raise my daughter. Be a conduit of happiness for two loving hearts—those of a mother and her child. I have never committed treason. I love my Motherland, Russia, and would never do anything to harm her. If I have made any mistakes or committed violations, then being in prison for almost three years is more than enough punishment for me.
“I have come to grips with everything [I have done] and promise you that from now on I will behave in such a way that you shall never be ashamed of me. I ask you to make a just decision and release me to be with my daughter.”
According to a study by the human rights project First Department, between February 2022 and mid-December 2024, 792 people in Russia were charged with treason (per Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code), espionage (Article 276), and secret cooperation with a foreign state (Article 275.1). In 2024, 359 people were found guilty and sentenced to actual prison terms on these charges, and four more were sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment. Of these 359 people, 224 were found guilty under Article 275, 38 under Article 275.1, and 101 under Article 276. A total of 536 people have been convicted of violating these criminal code articles since the start of the war; Russian courts have not handed down a single acquittal. According to First Department, a significant number of these cases were based on sting operations carried out by FSB officers or persons associated with them.
In September 2024, Alexander Krichevsky, a 58-year-old resident of Izhevsk, posted a lengthy comment on a Chechen opposition blogger’s Telegram channel. In the comment, Krichevsky compared Putin and the “FSB clique” to a “darkness” which must be destroyed. The security forces deemed this statement incitement to murder the president and FSB officers. They monitored the man and intercepted his internet traffic. Last December, Krichevsky was detained and remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center despite his ailments and the fact that he is confined to a wheelchair. His ailing mother was placed in a care home, where she died a month later. Today, at the Central District Military Court in Yekaterinburg, where Krichevsky’s case is being heard, the prosecutor requested that he be given the maximum sentence of six years in prison.
“That is why we listen to him, because he is not afraid—he’s a ray of freedom in a kingdom of darkness! And only together will we destroy this darkness, only when we understand that we have only one enemy—Putin and his FSB clique. . . . Both you and we must destroy this enemy to continue living as peaceful neighbors,” 58-year-old Izhevsk resident Alexander Krichevsky wrote in a chat on the channel of opposition Chechen blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov aka Abu Saddam Shishani, on 11 September 2024.
This was Krichevsky’s response to a user who had asked Abdurakhmanov himself in a chat: “Tumso, aren’t you afraid that Kadyrov’s people might find you?”
When questioned in court, Krichevsky said that he was sure he was responding to the user personally, not writing in a public chat. He repeated many times that he had only figurative “destruction” in mind and had been trying to “reconcile” Abdurakhmanov’s readership by pointing out that they had only one enemy.
“Of course, I wasn’t even thinking about physically destroying such a large number of people and didn’t understand how [what I wrote] would even look. Apparently, my love for pretty words—all those rays of light and other nonsense—let me down. I was thinking in terms of games: when a person plays checkers or chess, they destroy their opponent’s pieces. Roughly speaking, that was the image I had in my head,” Krichevsky said in court.
The FSB operative who discovered Krichevsky’s comment saw it not as criticism alone, but also as a “public call to murder the president of the Russian Federation and officers of the Federal Security Service.”
The same conclusion was reached by Polina Komova, a philologist and expert at the Ministry of Internal Affairs Forensic Center in Udmurtia. She acknowledged in court that the word “destroy” could have other meanings “depending on the context,” but in her opinion it could be understood only in its literal meaning—that is, “to end [someone’s] existence, to exterminate”—in Krichevsky’s comment.
“He was planning a terrorist attack involving self-detonation”: wiretapping and arrest
The security forces began monitoring Krichevsky in early December 2024. It emerged in court that the FSB had requested data on his calls and connections from Rostelecom and learned that on 11 September, when he wrote the comment, he had accessed Telegram from home. Megafon provided the security forces with information about the base stations in the area where Krichevsky’s phone number pinged that day.
On 5 December 2024, the Supreme Court of Udmurtia gave the FSB permission to tap Krichevsky’s phones, and a few days later it approved “gathering information from technical communication channels and acquiring computer information.” A few days before Krichevsky’s arrest, operatives monitored his apartment to “document illegal activities.” The report states that Krichevsky did not leave his home.
On 19 December 2024, Krichevsky was detained and sent to a pretrial detention center. He described his arrest to journalists.
“There was a knock on the door at seven in the morning, and seven people came into [our] small flat: five FSB officers and two eyewitnesses. I opened the door myself. They immediately sat me down on a chair in the hallway. My ailing mother was lying there, barely alive. They said, ‘Can you hand over [your phone]?’ They tried to intimidate me once: ‘If you refuse, we’ll take you away and charge you with additional offenses.’ I realized that resistance was futile. I gave them the phone, and they looked at it and took what they needed.”
The social media comment charges against Krichevsky were accompanied by an FSB report containing much more serious, but in effect unproven, allegations. The document states that, according to “intelligence,” Krichevsky, who opposes the “state’s political course” and the conduct of the “special military operation,” supported radical Islamists fighting for Ukraine and was planning to convert to Islam and carry out a terrorist attack in Udmurtia “by blowing himself up with cooking gas.” The court never did hear what this report was based on.
Photo: Mediazona
“None of my comments or my own thoughts bear this out. When I heard this business about blowing myself up . . . In this case, everything that the prosecutor has just read aloud is pure speculation on the part of the investigators. None of my quotes corroborates it,” Krichevsky said in court.
Judge Alexander Raitsky simply reminded Krichevsky that the case centered on a single [social media] comment, which the defendant himself did not disput, and that the court would evaluate the evidence in the deliberation room.
The case file also contains another comment by Krichevsky from the same written exchange: “Many empires have collapsed in this world. I myself foresee the end of the Russkies [rusnya]. I don’t feel sorry for them: let them collapse with a bang. That’s where they belong. I myself hate these FSBniks, pigs [cops], and other scum who suck the blood of our homeland and shit on our neighbors.”
The security forces deemed this “a statement containing a negative assessment of the group of persons sharing the profession of Federal Security Service officers and police officers,” but it was not included in the indictment.
Responding to the judge’s question about this comment, Krichevsky said that he sometimes tried to “adapt” to the rude tone of the conversation [on the Telegram channel’s chat].
“My mother died four weeks after my arrest”: wheelchair-bound in a detention center
Krichevsky had worked as a systems administrator in Izhevsk before his arrest.
As a child, Krichevsky had moved with his family from Udmurtia to Rostov-on-Don. After high school, he enrolled in medical school, but in 1989 he broke his spine and had to drop out because his left leg was paralyzed and he had lost feeling in his right leg. After a long period of rehabilitation, he was able to walk again, but was unable to recover fully: he had a severe limp and had difficulty going up stairs.
Krichevsky said in court that his father had committed suicide on 11 September 2008.
“He had terminal cancer. He was in serious pain and turned to me because I was in medical school. He wanted me to tell him what poison he could use to commit suicide. I refused to do it. Then, two days before his death, I noticed he was sharpening a knife in an odd way. He died in a rather original way, if that word is appropriate in this situation—he stabbed himself in the heart with a knife,” Krichevsky told the court.
In early 2010, during a trip to Thailand, Krichevsky broke his left leg, which had been paralyzed since his [accident in 1989]. He underwent surgery at a local hospital, but he could not stay in hospital for long because his visa had expired. Krichevsky returned to his hometown of Izhevsk, where he underwent a second operation, but his condition only worsened.
“My knee wouldn’t straighten. They tried to do something about it, but because I had spinal injuries, my knee spasmed, and it remained crooked and they couldn’t do anything about it. And my hip didn’t recover either; I also had a fractured hip,” Krichevsky told the court.
Since then, Krichevsky has been confined to a wheelchair. Other ailments have also emerged: kidney problems, emphysema, and head tremors.
“I don’t know whether it’s early Parkinson’s combined with Alzheimer’s, or something else,” Krichevsky said.
Krichevsky had been living with his elderly mother and caring for her since 2016. Last year, she was hospitalized with a complex fracture. After she was discharged, she was unable to walk, and Krichevsky would help her to sit up and do breathing exercises in order to prevent pulmonary edema and bedsores. After Krichevsky was arrested, the woman was sent to a care home. She died of a pulmonary edema a month later.
“They apparently left her lying in bed at the care home. When a person lies in a horizontal position for a long time, they develop a pulmonary edema. That’s what my mother died of,” he said in court.
Photo: Mediazona
While in pretrial detention, Krichevsky formally lost his Group I disability status, which he had prior to his arrest, and so he was unable to obtain a medical examination.
According to Krichevsky, a neurologist at the Izhevsk detention center promised to send him to a hospital, but instead Krichevsky was transferred to another pretrial detention center. “I thought they were taking me to a hospital, but they took me first to Perm and then to Yekaterinburg. They basically lied to me when they said they were taking me to a hospital,” he said on the stand.
Krichevskny never did get any medical attention: “We’ll only help you if you’re dying, [they said.] Otherwise, just sit there and suffer.”
“Radical views and hostility toward the current government”: trial and pleadings
Krichevsky’s trial was postponed five times in a row: it took a long time to bring him in his wheelchair, first to Detention Center No. 1 in Yekaterinburg, and then to the court. He was brought to the hearings late, and had to spend four to five hours in the police van, where, according to Krichevsky, the temperature was the same as outside.
At the beginning of the trial, Krichevsky filed a motion requesting that he be assigned an inpatient forensic examination and treatment. He said that he had never been examined by a neurologist at the Yekaterinburg detention center, only by a GP. He was taken for examination to the local medical unit, which was not equipped for people with disabilities: there was a “big step” in front of the toilet and sink which he could not get over. As a result, the doctors only checked his reflexes and sent him back.
In their medical report, the doctors at the detention center stated that Krichevsky had no disability and that his overall health was satisfactory, meaning that he was able to take part in the court hearings.
Before the proceedings, Krichevsky again requested to be sent for treatment, “in accordance with the neurologist’s recommendation” in Izhevsk, but Judge Raitsky denied the request, seeing no need for it. Prosecutor Artem Terentyev also asked that the request be denied, as it went “beyond the scope of the criminal case under consideration.”
During the trial, the prosecutor asked that Krichevsky be imprisoned for six years in a medium-security penal colony. The prosecutor stressed that the defendant had “radical views” and was “hostile toward the current government of the Russian Federation and its officials,” and that he had written the offending comment at a time when the mobilization had not yet been completed. The prosecutor considered these to be aggravating circumstances.
The prosecutor cited Krichevsky’s “poor health” as a mitigating circumstance.
You can support Alexander by writing him a letter.
Address: Russian Federation 620019 FKU SIZO-1, GUFSIN of Russia for the Sverdlovsk Region • Sverdlovsk Region, Yekaterinburg, Repin Street, 4 • Alexander Anatolyevich Krichevsky, born 1967
You can also send letters through the online service Zonatelecom.
I reach out to you in anger and pain concerning the arrest of my sister and colleague Daria Egereva and the new, large-scale crackdown against representatives of Russia’s Indigenous Peoples. Phrases like “isolated incident” or “local overreach” do not describe what is happening today. This is a deliberate, targeted state policy of intimidating, suppressing, and criminalizing Indigenous leaders, of destroying the will of our peoples.
I speak about this not only as a member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues but also as someone who has fallen victim to this crackdown myself. On 17 December 2025, my home in the village of Lovozero was searched. Security forces broke into my personal space and confiscated computer equipment, communication devices, and documents. Similar searches and interrogations took place in the homes of other Indigenous minority activists throughout Russia. It was a planned, well-coordinated campaign of intimidation.
This is not a new reality for us. Back in 2014, I and other representatives of Indigenous Peoples were persecuted by the security forces for trying to convey the truth about the circumstances of Indigenous Peoples in Russia to the international community when we were prevented from leaving the country to attend a UN conference. Today, this practice continues in a much more brutal form, and it has been happening across the country. Crackdowns against the people involved in the events in Baymak, criminal cases against Erzya activists, and the detention of social movement activists in the Altai Republic are just recent examples of how the state has been trying to destroy the independent voice of the peoples of Russia.
Indigenous human rights activists have been labeled “extremists” and “terrorists” simply because they have used peaceful means to defend their peoples’ rights to their traditional lifestyles, cultures, languages, and basic human dignity. This is punishment for those who are not afraid to speak the truth openly, including outside their country, at the UN and other human rights forums.
Particularly outrageous is the fact that the Russian authorities accuse activists of terrorism, a crime for which Russia today imposes monstrous sentences of fifteen to twenty years in prison on people who have not committed violent acts and have never called for violence. These sentences are not intended to “combat terrorism” but to intimidate. The Russian authorities have laid their hands on those who have led a traditional way of life for centuries, herding reindeer, fishing, hunting, and foraging for wild plants on their own land, thus preserving their knowledge of Nature bit by bit.
We must not mince words: this is not a fight against terrorism, it is political vengeance. It is direct punishment by the state for the fact that representatives of Indigenous Peoples dare to appeal to the UN, speak out about violations of their rights, take part in the work of international bodies, and tell the truth about what is happening in Russia. The Russian authorities are deliberately criminalizing the very idea of cooperating with the United Nations.
There is virtually no room left in today’s Russia for free and independent opinion. Any criticism, any dissent, any independent social activism is harshly squashed. It is particularly cynical that the blow is being dealt to the most vulnerable—to the Indigenous Peoples of Siberia and the Arctic, who are socially disadvantaged, dwell in remote settlements amid harsh natural conditions, have no political clout, and are invisible to “mainstream society.” Our peoples cannot defend their rights except through international law, and nd that is precisely why we are being punished today.
I would particularly like to emphasize the Russian state’s profound hypocrisy. While formally declaring its commitment to protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples, it has been systematically destroying independent Indigenous Peoples’ organizations for many years by persecuting their leaders and using state-controlled structures such as RAIPON and councils attached to regional governments as puppets on the international stage. These puppets do not represent the real interests of Indigenous Peoples, serving only as a front for repressive policies and a means of propagandizing the “happy lives” of our peoples in Russia.
What is particularly cynical about the current developments is that just recently, in November 2025, Vladimir Putin decreed April thirtieth “Russia’s Indigenous Minorities Day” and September eighth “Languages of the Peoples of Russia Day,” and declared 2026 “Peoples of Russia Unity Year.” While the Kremlin announces celebrations and talks about “supporting” our peoples, the searches, interrogations, and arrests of their leaders continue at the local level.
I appeal to states, UN bodies, special procedures, international human rights mechanisms, international Indigenous peoples’ networks, and civil society organizations. A clear, principled, and public position is what is needed today. We must demand the immediate release of Daria Yegereva and the other activists who have been detained, as well as the immediate cessation of all forms of repression, criminal prosecution, and pressure against representatives of the Indigenous Peoples in Russia. We must demand an end to criminal prosecution for engaging in peaceful human rights work and cooperating with the United Nations.
For my part, I intend to raise this issue at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and other UN bodies. I will seek international condemnation of what is happening, protection for those who have been illegally persecuted, and attention to the gross and systematic violations of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Russia.
In conclusion, I would like to address Daria personally.
Dasha, sister, you are not alone. Your courage and your voice have struck fear in those who are used to acting in silence and with impunity. We are with you, and we speak out and demand justice! The solidarity of Indigenous Peoples is stronger than prisons and political crackdowns. We are in this together!
—Valentina Sovkina, member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII)
The International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC) condemns the wrongful arrest of IIPFCC Co-Chair, Daria Egereva, and demands her immediate release.
Daria Egereva speaking into a conference microphone. Photo courtesy of L&DC
Daria Egereva is a Selkup Indigenous person of Russia and a long-time member of the Centre for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North (CSIPN). After many years of valued involvement in the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus at the UNFCCC, she was elected Co-Chair of the IIPFCC in 2023.
On December 17th, Russian authorities searched Ms. Egereva’s home, confiscated her digital devices, and arrested her under accusation of participating in a ‘terrorist organisation’ in direct retaliation for her Indigenous rights advocacy, including her leadership of accredited Indigenous Peoples at last month’s COP30 United Nations Climate Conference in Belém, Brazil.
A court hearing held on December 18th determined that Ms. Egereva will continue to be detained for two months, pending a further investigation into her case. The accusation carries a potential prison sentence of 10 to 20 years.
“For the last three COPs, Daria has been foundational to the effectiveness of the IIPFCC. Not only a principled leader, she is warm and generous to friends and colleagues alike. Her arrest is completely unfounded and our whole caucus is very concerned for her,” says Dr Graeme Reed, former IIPFCC Co-Chair
Ms. Egereva’s arrest was part of a coordinated operation by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), which targeted at least seventeen Indigenous leaders across Russia whose homes were raided, electronic devices confiscated, and who were accused under spurious terrorism-related charges.
This targeted attack on Indigenous leaders represents direct retaliation for their participation in United Nations processes, and sets a dangerous precedent for the treatment of Indigenous Peoples who participate in global human rights and climate change meetings.
“These reprisals are part of a broader pattern of repression affecting Indigenous Peoples across the globe, and are an unacceptable attack on the right of Indigenous Peoples to engage in the global human rights and climate change processes,” says Sineia Do Vale, Ms. Egereva’s fellow Co-Chair, IIPFCC
The IIPFCC is deeply concerned for Ms. Egereva, and calls upon all state parties to the UNFCCC, and all allies of Indigenous Peoples to mobilise in solidarity to:
1. Publicly and privately call for Ms. Daria Egereva’s immediate release and the dropping of all charges against her, which constitute an illegal retaliation for her legitimate and peaceful participation in COP30 and other UN processes.
2. Acknowledge and register this complaint as a case of intimidation and reprisal connected to participation in UNFCCC processes under the Code of Conduct for UNFCCC Events, and keep the IIPFCC informed of steps taken.
3. Raise this case without delay with the Government of the Russian Federation through appropriate diplomatic channels, stressing that criminalizing a UNFCCC Indigenous Co-Chair as a ‘terrorist’ is incompatible with the UNFCCC Code of Conduct and with Human Rights Council resolutions/determinations.
“This is not a prosecution of terrorism. It is a defiance of the Human Rights Council’s findings and an attempt to use domestic courts to override international human rights determinations and silence Indigenous Peoples.”
– Joan Carling, Executive Director of International Peoples Rights International
“Around the world, Indigenous leaders face criminalization, persecution, and judicial harassment mechanisms designed to silence our voices, dismantle our institutions, and weaken our collective efforts to defend our rights and territories. These targeted practices constitute serious violations of human rights and international law.”
– Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Vice Chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and former Co-Chair of the IIPFCC
The IIPFCC firmly rejects this unjust intimidation and detention. We stand with Daria, the other Indigenous leaders who have been detained, their families, and all Indigenous defenders whose safety, dignity, and freedom are under threat.
About the IIPFCC: The International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC) was established in 2008 as the caucus for Indigenous Peoples participating in the UNFCCC processes. It represents the collective positions of Indigenous Peoples from all seven socio-cultural regions.
Mikhail Loshchinin and his mother, Olga. Courtesy of RFE/RL
More and more Russians face trumped-up charges of “high treason.” Anything whatsoever—from commenting on a banned organization’s social media post to wiring a paltry sum of money to a relative or acquaintance in Ukraine—can occasion these charges. Foreign nationals who have retained their Russian citizenship have also faced prosecution. It has become ever more dangerous for them to travel to Russia to visit loved ones.
This past summer, Mikhail Loshchinin, a 48-year-old dual Belgian-Russian national, decided to visit his father, who had suffered a heart attack, and headed to Petersburg.
In recent years, Loshchinin had been living in Germany while working as a database manager in Luxembourg. On 1 July 2025, he crossed the Latvian border on a motorcycle with a German license plate and stopped at the Ubylinka border-crossing station, in the Pytalovo District of Russia’s Pskov Region. He was carrying a Russian federal passport, which he presented to the Russian border guards.
“They staged a provocation at the border”
“Sometime around 2020, before the war, Misha traveled to Russia by motorcycle. He made it there and back just fine. He had good memories [of the trip], and so he decided to repeat his ‘feat,'” says Loshchinin’s mother Olga, who now liveas in Poland. “The goal was to visit his father, who had undergone heart surgeries and had been feeling quite poorly after a heart attack; there was a risk the visit would be their last. [Mikhail] decided to travel with his Russian passport so as not to have bother getting a visa. (As a Russian national, Loshchinin does not need a visa to enter Russia—Sever.Realii.) He’d spent the last twenty-five years in Europe: his mindset had changed, he’d been Europeanized. He’d come to rely on the system’s accountability, on the fact that laws were obeyed.”
According to Olga, the border guards asked to check Mikhail’s telephone, on which they apparently found numerous Ukrainian contacts. Before his trip, Mikhail had not deleted anything from his WhatsApp account, as he did not consider corresponding with friends in Ukraine to be a crime.
“There were no grounds to detain him, so they staged a provocation at the border,” says Olga. “He had been waiting there for a long time for the inspection to end when he asked where he could buy some water. They told him to follow them on his motorcycle to the local store, that they would show him the way. He followed them, but they suddenly made a funny turn and detained him for crossing the border. In other words, they had deliberately lured him there to have a legal reason to detain him.”
Mikhail grew up in a large family: the four Loschinin children were born in the Soviet Union but later moved away. Mikhail had been living in Europe since 1999. His sister became a citizen of Ukraine, and he often visited her. He had many friends and acquaintances in Ukraine. Their contact details were stored in his phone, naturally.
Mikhail had always been apolitical, and his arrest has no connection with his work, says Olga.
“It is, rather, a matter of his being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the police investigator admitted as much to him. . . . Misha has always had an excellent reputation, and his employers have valued him. He’s also a well-rounded fellow: he’s a biker, plays the guitar, and sings and does the lighting for productions by small Russian-language theaters. He bought the [lighting] equipment with his own money and promotes Russian culture among his western friends and acquaintances any way he can: he hasn’t lost his connections with his roots. . . . He falls in love easily, and has had several marriages, but now he’s a bachelor. He has a daughter from his second marriage.”
After Mikhail set off for Russia, he constantly telephoned with his sister and mother, who now live in Poland, but they lost touch with him on July first. Three days later, he called from someone else’s phone and told them he had been detained.
“At 10:27 a.m. on July fourth, there was a call from an unknown Russian number. It was our Misha. He said that Dmitry, an FSB officer, had given him a phone to make the call, that he was under guard at the Hotel Dubrava in the border town of Pytalovo, that they’d confiscated his papers and the keys to his motorcycle, and that the motorcycle itself was parked outside the hotel,” Olga recalls.
Mikhail told his loved ones that he had been given a choice: either he would be sent to a basement somewhere, where he would sit and wait until they decided what to do with him and his papers, or he could go to a hotel and wait there, at his own expense.
“No one wants to sit in a basement, naturally,” Olga continues. “He had some money, and since the rooms were inexpensive, he chose the hotel. They confiscated his telephone, his passport, and the papers for his motorcycle, and they posted guards without whom he wasn’t allowed to leave his room. They had to get the go-ahead for every trip outside the hotel. They escorted him when he would go out to the store and the post office.”
Mikhail spent nearly a month at the Dubrava Hotel.
“Misha’s money was running out. We were by then terribly anxious and contacted a lawyer, who arrived at the hotel on the evening of August first and was able to see Misha and speak with him. On August second, a group of persons unknown took him to an undisclosed location. Those were the roughest days for us. As later transpired, he had been transported from Pytalovo to Stary Oskol, in Belgorod Region, and the journey had taken several days. Misha later told us that along the way they had passed through Smolensk; he had managed to catch sight of that. It turns out that, in his correspondence for 2022, an ex-girlfriend of Mikhail’s had asked him for financial help. Her profile picture now has a Ukrainian symbol on it, but it wasn’t there in 2022.”
The lawyer traveled to Stary Oskol, Olga recounts, but at the local pretrial detention center he was told that they had “no such person” in custody. The lawyer then filed a formal appeal with the prosecutor’s office, the FSB, and the Investigative Committee, asking them to figure out what had become of Mikhail. On 21 August 2025, Mikhail telephoned Olga himself—from Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 in Pskov. The call was again made from an unknown number.
“Judging by how his voice sounded, he wasn’t himself. He was clearly under duress and kept asking whether it was alright to talk now, meaning that the call was made in someone else’s presence,” says Olga. “He said that he had been accused of ‘high treason’ per Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code: ‘financing representatives of a foreign state hostile to the Russian Federation.’ We got a call from someone named Denis, who introduced himself as Misha’s attorney. He called us again and warned us not to hire anyone else, claiming our own attorney wouldn’t even be admitted to the remand hearing. We recorded the call but of course we didn’t do what he asked; he had no right to say that to us, and our own attorney did attend the hearing. Since then, Misha has been in custody at the Pskov detention center. He’s under investigation.”
Later, Mikhail said that, in Stary Oskol, he had been placed in a specialized facility for Ukrainian prisoners of war.
“He was tortured and abused, both mentally and physically, there” says Olga. “First of all, they took away his glasses. He has terribly poor eyesight, minus eight, and he practically lost his sight. He could only walk with his head down, bent over. They stripped him naked and beat him. He told his lawyer about all of it. He was completely crushed, and of course this was done deliberately to squash any hope that he might be released and to make him agree to sign whatever papers they put in front of him. They forced him to sign a paper stating that he had been gallivanting freely around Russia until August twenty-first. He told us this recently. But we have a document stating that he was in Stary Oskol, and it is unlikely that he could have traveled freely around Russia without papers or a means of transport and without informing his relatives. There are many inconsistencies in their ‘body of evidence.'”
“I am horrified by what has happened to my son”
On 10 November, Mikhail Loshchinin celebrated his forty-eighth birthday in the Pskov detention center.
“I am horrified by what has happened to my son,” says Mikhail’s mother. “I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching, since I didn’t expect the authorities to behave as they have behaved. And yet I didn’t have full faith in Russian law enforcement. My grandfather was in prison in 1937. He had been an officer in the White Army. The family was then living in Grozny, and my mom was small. Several former [White] officers lived in the vicinity. They would get together for readings and go on picnics; they were cultured folk. The entire group was arrested. Grandfather was the only one of them to survive because he didn’t sign anything [i.e., a confession]; the rest of them were shot. He never told anyone what price he had paid for this. My mom, still a kid then, brought care packages to him in prison.”
Olga has carefully researched Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code and argues that it has simply been “misapplied to a completely peaceful, innocent man.”
“We have a really good, tight-knit family. Although [Mikhail’s] dad lives in Petersburg, and we’re divorced, we have a decent relationship, and we’ve even started conversing more often now. And all the kids are tight-knit. Misha was always quite kind; we even wanted him to become a doctor, since kindness is quite valuable in a doctor. But he chose a different path in life. He wanted to be a programmer, and he’s been successful at it,” says Olga.
According to her, many of Mikhail’s friends in Luxembourg, where he had worked in recent years, are now deeply concerned about him.
“He always had a good head on his shoulders, and he became quite well known in Russian diaspora theatrical and cultural circles, and not only in those circles. He even did the sound for the Orthodox Church of Luxembourg,” says Olga. “There are videos on YouTube of him playing ‘Under the Blue Sky’ on the guitar in concert and his boss, a Frenchman, singing it in Russian. It is an ironic twist of fate that a person like can be destroyed so simply. . . . Summer is the time when theaters get ready for the high theatrical season, and right then Misha vanished. A support group has emerged, all of his friends. I honestly had no idea that there were so many of them.”
Mikhail’s friends have been writing petitions requesting his release from police custody, which his relatives have been passing on to his lawyer.
“Although Mikhail lived in Luxembourg, he visited us quite often recently. He has a girlfriend in Slovakia, and when he went to see her, he found ways to come through [Poland] and see us,” says Olga.
According to Loshchinin’s family, Mikhail has begun to suffer from retinal detachment while in custody.
“In 2024, he visited an ophthalmologist, who informed him that surgery was not necessary at the time, but that it would have to be performed immediately if he began seeing flashes in his line of sight. Now he has been seeing those flashes,” Olga explains. “It is hard to get proper medical care in prison, and I’m afraid that he may simply go blind in there. I can’t imagine that my son, who has done nothing nasty in his life, is now being treated as one of the most dangerous criminals, and all because he hadn’t cut off his ties with Russia. If you take someone’s phone and check their messages, every other person could be under suspicion.”
“Thousands of people across the country are being held without charge”
Loshchinin’s defense attorney declined to comment for this article because he is bound by a non-disclosure agreement.
According to our count, at least 148 people in Russia faced criminal charges of treason, espionage, and clandestine collaboration with foreigners in 2023, and at least 88 such cases were brought before the courts. The trend continued in 2024 and 2025. According to statistics on court rulings for the first half of 2025, as published by the Judicial Department of the [Russian] Supreme Court, 115 high treason cases were instigated, which was twice as many as in the first half of 2024. At the same time, according to data from Department One, the Supreme Court has underestimated the number of convictions in such cases by at least threefold.
“Mikhail Loshchinin wired money to a private individual in Ukraine,” explains Smirnov. “According to the security forces, this is a form of high treason, and it has existed for over ten years: providing financial assistance for activities contrary to the security of the Russian Federation. The FSB often takes advantage of this. They might have claimed, for example, that the young woman to whom Mikhail wired money works for the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] or is involved in the Territorial Defense Forces. Something like that. And that wiring her money was thus a criminal offense.”
The attorney is not surprised that Mikhail was detained in Pytalovo for a month without charges, staying in a hotel at his own expense and under guard.
“There are thousands of people across the country being held without charge. Some are under administrative arrest, while others are in former hotels refitted as [detention] centers, or in actual hotel rooms. Most often, police investigators need the time to get the go-ahead to file criminal charges. Moscow gives the go-ahead for such cases.”
“There is no good outcome in these situations,” Smirnov notes.
“They might sentence him up to thirteen years in prison. The only hope for release is through a prisoner exchange, and that would involve a political decision,” argues Smirnov. “How many people in Russia have been released in the last ten years via prisoner exchanges? A couple dozen, probably. And how many political prisoners are there in the country currently? Ten to fifteen thousand. [Mikhail’s] chances are a bit greater since he’s a Belgian national, of course. There are not so many Belgian nationals [in Russian prisons], and if Belgian politicians get involved in the campaign to secure his release, the chances will grow for sure.”
Olga, Mikhail’s mother, says that Belgian consular officers have tried on several occasions to get permission to visit him in the detention center but were turned down.
“He’s a Russian national, but Russia doesn’t recognize his Belgian citizenship,” says Smirnov. “Most countries don’t recognize dual citizenships: it’s a normal practice. So, Belgian consuls aren’t being allowed to see him. It’s been the usual practice for decades.”
Smirnov argues that people living abroad should not travel to Russia unless absolutely necessary “because it’s a big risk.” If travel is unavoidable, you should prepare in advance by purchasing a separate telephone, planning your itinerary with care, seeking advice from those in the know, and being ready for the fact that the border guards will question you and search all your devices.
“My friends died at the hands of Russian soldiers. Why can’t I talk about it?”
This question will cost Varvara Volkova 7 years in a Russian penal colony. Here’s her story.
Varvara was a flight attendant, not an impassioned political activist. In a neighbourhood chat, she stated the obvious: Russian forces are killing civilians in Ukraine. The prosecution framed it as “fake news” motivated by hatred toward the armed forces, and the court accepted it.
The mechanism used to go after her relies on a Soviet-style culture of snitching: a Russian tank driver complained about her comments, then a professional informer, who intentionally hunts dissidents, amplified the case and demanded she be jailed.
In fact, there’s a whole network of these informers — they call themselves “SMERSH.” For those who don’t know Russian history, it is a reference to Stalin’s WWII counter-intelligence service. It means “Death to Spies” — a direct revival of the terror methods of the 1930s. They published screenshots of her messages everywhere trying to ruin her life; claimed she called the soldier a “fascist”; said she offered to make tea for Ukrainian soldiers if they reached the Moscow region. For words spoken in anger, the system decided to smash her life to pieces.
There is a grim irony in this tragedy: the regime destroyed Varvara to protect the “honor” of the military and her accuser. But the tank driver who reported her is already dead: he was killed in the war earlier this March.
Observers abroad often underestimate the price of resistance in today’s Russia. It is not just a fine anymore, but years and years of one’s life. Varvara Volkova shows us the true bill — and it is devastating.
I track the consequences of speech in modern-day Russia, make sure to follow for more updates.
Preface by the Editorial Board: Below we publish the translation of an article of our Russian comrades about state repression in their country. The article reports, among others, about the situation of comrade Felix Eliseev. He has been in prison for 2.5 years as part of a 14-year prison term. Felix was sentenced for “treason” as he was accused of making propaganda against Putin’s imperialist war against Ukraine and sending money to Ukraine to buy weapons. While the prison authorities do everything to break him, Felix does not lose his spirit and endures his imprisonment stoically. (See https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/felix-eliseev-a-revolutionary-communist-in-russian-prison/)
We call readers to support Felix by spreading this information about a communist and anti-fascist serving an unjust sentence!
According to the human rights organization Memorial, there are currently over 1,000 political prisoners in Russia, while other groups estimate the number could be as high as 2,500. This number is three times higher than in 2020, more than twice as high as in 2022, and continues to grow. In 2025, there was a sharp increase in criminal cases under articles on “justification of terrorism,” “sponsoring terrorist activity,” and “treason.” This is not due to increased terrorism, but to the fact that the security forces, having perfected their repression mechanisms, have begun to intensify their crackdown on “sponsorship” cases, such as those of the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation, recognized as an extremist organization in Russia) or cases related to money transfers to the Ukrainian army, which occurred back in 2022. The term “terrorism” itself has become so vague that even the average person doesn’t always understand what it actually means.
Among political prisoners are many individuals with progressive leftist views, serving time for anti-war activities or “inaccurate” public statements online. The “Foundation for Support of Left-Wing Political Prisoners” provides support to at least some of these individuals. Among them are: defendants in the “Tyumen Case”; defendants in the “Chita Case”; Anton Orlov, a trade union and leftist activist, coordinator of the independent medical workers’ union “Action” in Bashkortostan; Daria Kozyreva, an activist from St. Petersburg known for her anti-war protests and criticism of the Russian army; Gagik Grigoryan, a young activist imprisoned in 2023 at the age of 17; Azat Miftakhov is a Russian mathematician and anarchist, sentenced in 2021 to six years in prison for allegedly setting fire to the United Russia office in 2018. After serving this sentence, he was arrested again in 2023 on charges of “justifying terrorism” in a private conversation with a prison cellmate and sentenced to four years in prison; defendants in the “Kansk teenagers case”; defendants in the “Network case”; Boris Kagarlitsky is a left-wing publicist known in many parts of the world; Ruslan Ushakov is the author of articles published on opposition Telegram channels, sentenced to eight years in prison for posts in a public chat.
The case of the communist Felix Eliseev
Another political prisoner is Felix Eliseev, a Russian communist, blogger, and administrator of the Telegram channels “She Fell Apart” and “Kolkhoznoye Madness.” He was arrested in December 2022 and charged with justifying terrorism. According to investigators, Eliseev posted two anti-war posts on his Telegram channel, one of which endorsed a Ukrainian Armed Forces helicopter strike on an oil depot in Belgorod. The charges were later upgraded, and Eliseev was charged with “treason”. The court alleges that he transferred funds through a cryptocurrency account to a “curator,” who used the funds to purchase equipment and weapons for Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers.
Felix, like many other political prisoners convicted of “terrorist and extremist” offenses, is serving his sentence under intense pressure from the prison administration. He is regularly placed in solitary confinement cells, where they do everything they can to break him mentally and physically.
However, political repression in Russia involves more than just horrific criminal cases of “terrorism,” “treason,” and other “betrayals of the nation.” It also includes the persecution of undesirable and dissenting youth who dare publicly speak out against the war and the ruling elite, thereby gathering many other concerned young people around them.
The “Stop Time” case
One example of such government abuse is the “Stop Time” case. The “Stop Time” case concerns the persecution by Russian authorities of members of the St. Petersburg street music group “Stop Time” – Diana Loginova (pseudonym Naoko), Alexander Orlov, and Vladislav Leontyev – for their participation in impromptu concerts, including one near the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station, where they performed anti-war songs by artists designated by the authorities as “foreign agents.” On October 16, 2025, Loginova was arrested and sentenced to 13 days of administrative arrest for performing a song by an artist unpopular with the authorities. The other members of the band were also arrested and sentenced to 12-13 days. These events resonated in the media (both pro-government and opposition) and society, becoming a topic of discussion in the context of artistic freedom and the tightening of censorship in modern Russia.
On October 29-30, the musicians received another 12-13 days of arrest, and on November 11, two of them were arrested for another 13 days. On November 23, the musicians were released from arrest. The lead singer and one of the band members left Russia that same day.
In many Russian cities, street bands followed “Stop Time’s” example and performed opposition songs by artists-foreign agents to large audiences in public squares. They also faced pressure from the authorities and harassment from Z-Neanderthals.
Also, recently, spiders in a jar have started eating each other. Criminal cases have been brought against several well-known military Z-bloggers for discrediting the army! More than two years after Strelkov’s imprisonment and Prigozhin’s murder, a new steamroller of repression is purging those loyalists who are too undesirable.
All of the above demonstrates that Russian society has no legal means to publicly express its attitude toward the events unfolding around it. For any word “against,” the sword of Damocles of Russian justice hangs over every citizen. Despite this, concerned Russians, especially young people, are finding ways to rally together and show the world that not all is lost in this country.
Meanwhile, cowardly security officials and government officials tremble at the mere thought that the masses will sooner or later awaken from their slumber and rise to deliver justice to the imperialist oppressors in the Kremlin. In Russia, literal punishments are being introduced for thought crimes. Thus, in September of this year, an administrative law punishing “searching for extremist materials” came into force. This law allows the FSB to view any citizen’s internet search history, and if it contains views of materials deemed extremist or terrorist, the user faces a visit from masked officers and a fine. The first cases under this law have already been filed.
Furthermore, the country is introducing a so-called “white list” for the internet—only those websites approved by Roskomnadzor are permitted to be accessed; others are inaccessible, and VPNs cannot be connected. So far, in the spirit of Russian tradition, this system is poorly functioning and flawed, but the day is not far off when Russian society will find itself locked in a “cheburnet.” (*)
Freedom for political prisoners!
For freedom of speech, conscience, and the internet!
Down with political repression!
Radical democratization of the country, not the fascist regime of a dictator!
All power to the working class and the working masses, not to a handful of oligarchic monopolists!
(*) Cheburnet is a mixture of two words: Чебурашка (Cheburashka) and internet. Cheburashka is a character from Soviet cartoon for children. Despite it is kind and helpful, in modern mass consciousness it is associated with Soviet censorship. So cheburnet basicaly means internet under the censorship of Russian government and intelligence agencies.
My name is Elena Nikolaevna Bogatova, and I am the mother of political prisoner Ilya Alexandrovich Shakursky. I am crying out for help to save my son so that he does not rot away in solitary confinement.
They took my only son away when he was twenty-one years old. He is now twenty-nine. He has been tortured. He has serious health problems that we still cannot solve. He still has eight years to serve, and they could turn him into a disabled person. I cannot help him on my own, so I am asking all caring people to help us.
It is impossible for a mother to know that her child is being destroyed, and that she cannot save him!
Although he committed no crime, he is in prison under the harsh Article 205 [of the Russian Criminal Code; Article 205 proscribes “terrorist acts”], enduring all the hardships of prison life, without ever receiving any encouragement; we cannot even hope for parole. Right now, [the prison authorities] want to turn him into repeat offender so that he cannot have any visits, phone calls, letters, or packages. They want to take everything away from him.
I ask you to write an appeal. I understand that there are many of us now, and everyone is exhausted. But we must stand together for the sake of our loved ones, for the sake of the younger generation, which is currently being destroyed. Hear the cry of a mother who cannot bear the pain for her son and for all those behind bars. If we push with our shoulders, the walls will collapse….
OVD-Info Faces a Critical Situation: We Have Lost All Our Ruble Donations
26.11.2025
Russian payment services have refused to continue working with us, without providing any explanation, and have cut off our ability to accept one-time and recurring donations. This has severed our connection to our main source of support—the 12,000 individuals who regularly transfer money to OVD-Info.
The services’ refusal to cooperate with us is one of the many manifestations of state pressure on human rights organizations and independent media. Some of them even had to close due to the loss of donations in rubles.
This is a severe blow to our work. With these donations we were able to pay for the work of defense lawyers and legal experts, travel to the regions, maintain our free hotline, and help those who are politically persecuted in Russia. Furthermore, regular donations allowed us to plan our long-term work and development.
We do not plan to close or reduce the scope of our work, because repression is not diminishing. Any political activity, expressing a view against the invasion of Ukraine, or criticism of Putin instantly becomes grounds for persecution. We simply cannot abandon Russians to face this brutal, repressive system alone. We are defending over 90 defendants in criminal cases, almost every day we send lawyers to police stations, courts, searches, penal colonies, and pre-trial detention centers. We answer dozens of messages and calls daily—and we want to continue doing this.
However, now everything depends on whether we can find another 12,000 people who will regularly support OVD-Info.
Yulia Lemeshchenko. Photo from the Memorial website
The Second Western Military District court in Moscow last week sentenced Yulia Lemeshchenko to 19 years’ imprisonment for high treason, sabotage, and preparing and training for an act of terrorism.
Yulia, 42, is a Russian citizen, born in Staryi Oskol, in Belgorod region. She lived in Voronezh in southern Russia, until 2014. Then she moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine, with her son and her husband, who had found work there. Later on the couple separated.
Yulia took up powerlifting and in 2021 was named Ukrainian women’s champion.
In 2024 Yulia did military training in Kyiv – firearms, explosives and flying drones – and returned to Russia, via a third country. She sabotaged power transmission infrastructure near St Petersburg, and in Voronezh conducted surveillance on Aleksei Lobodoi, an air force commander responsible for bombing Kharkiv.
Yulia was arrested in January this year. She did not deny the facts outlined in the prosecution case, but told the court that “from a moral standpoint” she considered herself not guilty. This is a translation of her final statement to the court, published by Mediazona.
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Ukrainian Champion in a Russian Court: Yulia Lemeshchenko’s Final Statement
As you see, I don’t have any sheets of paper and I haven’t especially prepared, but I think I will improvise. I will now probably say a few things that were already said during this hearing, but let this be a sort of summing-up, in a monologue.
So I already spoke here about the fact that, in any war, two sides clash, and each side insists that it is right and that its cause is just. I took one of these sides. I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but, all the same, for me, Ukraine is home. I love that country. And I love Kharkiv, with all my heart.
There is a district in Kharkiv called Severnaya Saltovka. About 500,000 people lived there. Half a million. A few people I knew lived there. My hairdresser lived there. After the Russian shelling and bombing, not a single house in that district was left undamaged. Not a single one. And I am not just talking about a few broken windows. I am talking about whole blocks of flats in ruins.
Right next to the block where I lived, there were explosions. In my block, on the ground floor, my neighbour Anya lived with her four-year-old son Nikita. A shell exploded right under their window. Their apartment was completely destroyed. What has happened to Anya and her son I don’t know. I don’t know whether they are still alive.
Friends of mine have died in this war, one relative – my second cousin – and colleagues of mine. War is monstrous. I could not stand aside. When war comes, people who are affected can either try somehow to fight, or they can flee. People flee – I don’t know – maybe because they are cowardly or weak. I don’t consider myself to be a cowardly or weak person. So I decided to fight back – to fight against Russian military aggression.
It is possible that, by saying these things, I am getting myself still deeper into trouble. But my honour, and my conscience, are important to me. I did what I believed to be necessary. I did what I could. To regret, to repent – who knows, maybe I will do that on my deathbed. But for now, what will be, will be. I have nothing further to say.
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When the court hearing began, Mediazona reported that the judge, Vadim Krasnov, read out evidence that Yulia gave after being arrested in January. After the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Yulia at first moved to Germany. In 2023 she returned to Ukraine and made contact with the “Free Russia” legion, but did not join.
In 2024, when she did her military training, the instructors – who did not answer questions about which part of the armed forces they served in – said that, by way of payment for her work, she could receive Ukrainian citizenship.
The judge asked if she had done so, to which she replied, with a smile, “not yet”.
During the hearing, Judge Krasnov asked Yulia why she had chosen such a radical method of struggle, rather than, for example, providing medical help to the wounded.
“I can only answer that question with another, rhetorical question”, she replied. “Why did Russia decide to use violent methods to destroy Ukrainian cities? A war had started. Do you understand?”
The judge responded that, by 2022, the war had already been underway for eight years. Yes, but it had become frozen, Lemeshchenko said. After the invasion, she wanted to help Ukraine however she could, and was invited to become a saboteur.
“How far were you prepared to go?” asked the judge. “I did not want to do anything that would take human lives”, Lemeshchenko replied. “They accepted that point. On that we had an agreement.”
The judge said that the sabotage Lemeshchenko carried out near St Petersburg left hospitals without electric light. She replied that the aim had been to paralyse a drone factory, that she was sincerely sorry if anyone in Petersburg had suffered. And that she and her son had many times sat in their apartment, without light, when Kharkiv was being bombed.
Lemeshchenko also told the court that, during interrogation, agents of the federal security service (FSB) had threatened to murder her, and pushed her head against a wall. She had tried to tell them the truth. She said that she did not retract her evidence – and nor would she complain about her treatment, as she did not believe that those responsible would be punished.
□ Here is Yulia’s statement in court, recorded with English interpretation. Yulia is recognised as a political prisoner by Memorial, and her case was reported by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
□ The last word in court by Anton Khozhaev, a trainee officer accused of desertion to the Ukrainian side, and more on Russian anti-war protesters
In the wee hours of Sunday, 4 May, Russian security forces raided concerts in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, at which, among other things, they asked attendees about their attitude to the war, local media have reported.
In Yekaterinburg, law enforcement officers interrupted a concert at the club Syndrome. As the musicians were performing, people in uniform came on stage, halted the concert, and asked the concert organizers to turn on the lights, concertgoers told the Telegram channel Svet. Ekaterinburg.
“People were ordered to stand facing the walls and told that there would be a document check. [The police] checked everyone’s documents, tattoos, and elbows, asked about their attitudes to left-wing radical movements and to the SMO (the war in Ukraine—ed.), and they checked the messenger apps on their phones. After the check, people were taken outside and ordered to scram,” said one of the guests.
Another clubgoers told the news website E1.RU that police locked him in a paddy wagon, confiscated his phone, and checked his contents. Police insulted the detainee and refused to explain the reasons for the check. According to eyewitnesses, police and Russian National Guard officers took part in the raid. Those agencies declined to comment on this report.
Regular raids by law enforcers in Russia
In St. Petersburg, law enforcers raided a rave party at the [underground] club Kontrkult. A source close to the police told Ren TV that the reason for the raid was that the event had not been “sanctioned.” According to the news website 78.ru, partygoers had their documents checked and were searched for banned substances. The publication adds that the event’s organizers were detained. This has not been officially confirmed.
Footage of the raid on Kontrkult, as posted on the Telegram channel SHOT
Similar raids on various establishments have happened regularly in Russia in recent months. Law enforcers have carried out several raids on fitness centers, in which people were issued military conscription board summonses. Similar raids have been carried out against migrant workers, who also had their documents checked and summonses handed to them, along with members of the LGBT community, who have been declared “extremists” in Russia.
💬 Student from Nizhny Tagil fined 120,000₽ in criminal “defaming” case
In Nizhny Tagil, 21-year-old student Yekaterina Sergeyenko has been sentenced for “defaming” [the Russian army]: she was fined 120,000 roubles [approx. 1,280 euros]. According to the news agency Mezhdu Strok (“Between the Lines”), criminal charges were filed over the young woman’s comments in the “Incident Nizhny Tagil” group on the social network VKontakte.
Vechernye Vedomosti reports that at the time she posted the comments, Sergeyenko had a prior administrative conviction for painting sixteen pacifist slogans on buildings in the city. This fact influenced the decision to file criminal rather than administrative charges against her.
Judge Oksana Belkina of the Tagilstroy District Court found Sergeyenko guilty. Although the verdict has not yet entered into legal force, the fine, according to Mezhdu Strok, has already been paid.
