In this video, we follow Daiaana through a typical Saturday in Yakutsk as the temperature drops to –54°C. You will see how she heats her home where radiators run at maximum power to keep the cold at bay. Daiaana shows how she keeps her food in the frozen air outside her window and uses solid blocks of frozen milk for her morning coffee. You’ll also see how she dresses in 11kg of heavy layers and reindeer fur boots just to step outside safely. You will also discover how her sister drives in the thick “Ice Fog” using insulated car blankets to survive the Arctic winter. From the high cost of fresh fruit to a night out in high heels on solid ice, this is the reality of daily life in the coldest city on Earth.
This village was once alive. She was thriving. Now it is a quiet monument to a fading lifestyle. Empty houses stand as silent witnesses, and the fields are gradually being developed by the forest. But “dying” does not mean «dead.» I live here. My companions are my animals. And my ritual, my act of self-preservation, is cooking. The process is slow, physical, and closely related to nature and the seasons. Join me to spend the day caring for the animals, cooking dishes that tell a story of resilience, loss, and quiet beauty.
Even Lunacharsky Street is so transparent Bicycles and horses race home On these streets, my love, I honed my style I touched the air with my hand Even Lunacharsky Street can be so gloomy and wicked at times And a cloud with a pointy beard delivers a delicious jolt And it groans languidly
There is nothing beyond the black sky And nothing will be first Perhaps the gods played a trick on you And scattered their plywood arrows in the corners Somewhere far away I take you without asking Somewhere far away I bury myself alive In letters and numbers I’m drowning and floundering With an artificial belly Like a clown in a circus
Upward and downward This is Real life This is The fleeting joy of a glance on the street A smile, warmth Your shadows kiss You don’t care, you keep going Leaving behind perhaps another life I can’t do it—this thought terrifies me so I can’t do it
There is nothing beyond the black sky And nothing will be first Perhaps the gods played a trick on you And scattered their plywood arrows in the corners Somewhere far away I take you without asking Somewhere far away I bury myself alive In letters and numbers I’m drowning and floundering With an artificial belly Like a clown in a circus
Upward and downward This is Real life This is The fleeting joy of a glance on the street A smile, warmth Your shadows kiss You don’t care, you keep riding Leaving behind perhaps another life I can’t do it—this thought terrifies me so I can’t do it
Amnesty International has published its annual Death Sentences and Executions report for the year 2025, with data showing a sharp increase in the number of executions carried out. At least 2,707 people are known to have been put to death by the state last year, up 78 percent compared to 2024. As our infographic shows, the death penalty continues to be quite widespread in Asia, with China, India, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia, among others, employing it. The use of capital punishment is very rare in Europe: it only exists in Belarus, and Amnesty International notes that 2025 was the first year it recorded neither new death sentences nor executions since President Alexander Lukashenko assumed office in 1994. While Russia technically also retains the death penalty in its law, the country is considered abolitionist in practice, meaning no executions have been carried out in at least ten years.
In the Americas, the death penalty is also mostly a thing of the past, with the notable exceptions of Guyana, Cuba and the United States. Last year, the U.S. executed 47 people across 11 states, almost twice as many as in 2024 (25 executions). Florida alone accounted for almost half of these executions (19). Capital punishment is still more common in Africa and the West Asia. In 2025, Iran executed at least 2,159 people, more than double its 2024 figure and the highest number on record since 1981, and the Islamic republic has been consistently using the death penalty as a tool of political repression.
113 countries and territories around the world have abolished the death penalty completely, most recently Zambia. In 2023 and 2024, African nations Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and Zimbabwe abolished the death penalty for all but very serious crimes. 87 nations still have capital punishment on the books, but 24 of them are considered abolitionists in practice. In March of this year, the Israeli Knesset voted to expand its death penalty law in such a way that applies only to Palesinians and dismantles fundamental safeguards to prevent the arbitrary deprivation of life and protect the right to a fair trial, a decision condemned by Amnesty International. The NGO has called on Israel to repeal the decision.
A personal account of day-to-day life in Iran told through the calls of two Iranian sisters – one in the UK, the other in the Iranian city of Shiraz. Since the outbreak of war at the end of February, a near total internet blackout and a shutdown of international phone lines by the Iranian authorities has meant limited information has got out of the country. Despite the risks involved, the sisters have made recordings of their conversations which have been shared with the BBC. They discuss when the bombs land, the destruction of places they love and the realities of an economy that’s being brought to its knees. They struggle to sleep at night. Salaries don’t come through. It’s a roller coaster of emotions. But there are also moments of calm and comfort…a spot of dark humour and the scent of hyacinths.
Actors: Leila played by Lisa Zahra Gita played by Zahra Ahmadi
This Census chart shows changes in where Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander populations were living in 2010 and 2020.By 2020, more than half of Native Hawaiians (at the top left, in blue) were not living in Hawaii, something local Hawaiian leaders attribute to the high cost of living on the islands.
This week, Rafia Zakaria won the 2026 National Magazine Award in the category of Columns and Essays. The winning piece, “Water Pressure,” was published in Issue 150 of The Believer and is available to read in full on our website. It follows Zakaria’s father on his search for clean water in Karachi, Pakistan, where the mounting climate crisis has crept into all aspects of daily life. Zakaria discussed the prize and the celebrated essay with our managing editor, Ginger Greene.
THE BELIEVER: You won a National Magazine Award last night in New York for your essay, “Water Pressure.” What did it feel like to see this piece recognized in that way?
RAFIA ZAKARIA: It was a tremendous surprise… It is very difficult to place personal essays, but it is the personal story that can ultimately make an abstract issue—such as water scarcity in a faraway city like Karachi—seem as real as the heat wave that was happening in New York on the day of the award ceremony. I was so grateful to work on this project, and to have the freedom and latitude to explore what extreme heat can do to ordinary people in an ordinary megacity.
BLVR: Your story explores the many difficulties of procuring water and power in Karachi, in an ever-warming world. What inspired you to approach this subject? And what were some of the difficulties you faced as you developed the essay?
RZ: I feel like a lot of climate journalism focuses on the deterioration of beautiful natural environments and the loss of wild ecosystems. I wanted to focus on how extreme heat, as well as water and power scarcity, affect human relationships, how it erodes and corrodes the scheme of relations between people and the environment. Sometimes it is not possible to see how it is happening, when you are in the midst of dealing with these problems every day. But as someone who is in and out of Karachi, I was able to perceive these dynamics.
One of the difficulties I faced reporting this story was a lack of precedence for this sort of exploration. For instance, there is excellent and deep reporting on natural or man-made disasters and their aftermath. But there is less writing on persistent issues, like decades-long water shortages, where there is no single cataclysmic event on which to center a story. I wanted to show that the story of chronic scarcity can also be told in an impactful and interesting way.
BLVR: The piece opens with a vivid scene from your family’s neighborhood in Karachi, in which a man is angered when he notices your aunt receiving an overflow of water into her underground water tank, such that it’s wastefully flooding out onto the street. Their confrontation ends when your aunt begins to throw rocks at him to get him to leave her alone. I was curious: What was your first reaction when you heard this story? Was it relayed to you as a problem of “water envy,” as you call it?
RZ: I will admit that my aunt’s reaction was a bit extreme, but it crystallized how chronic scarcity can create levels of seething frustration that can bubble to the surface in absurd ways. The story was told to me in the context of: Is she OK? But actually no one facing this sort of privation day after day is really OK. Water is a mainstay of existence, so the fact that you can now have an iPhone but not access to clean water is a bizarre juxtaposition of privilege and paucity.
I also felt that my aunt’s actions put into stark focus what people likely want to do but usually don’t. I came up with the term “water envy” because I wanted to start creating a vocabulary for phenomena that are felt, but for which there are often no words. I think the phrase encapsulates how policing resource consumption becomes just another part of living in a neighborhood. In most cases people will not challenge each other to the extent they do in this instance, but that is why it is such an apt story: Both characters had reached the end of their rope.
BLVR: Water politics in Karachi are complicated. For one thing, there are the daily strategies middle-class Karachiites have developed to procure water, which involves pumping water from the main lines into private underground water tanks. Navigating the uncertainty of main-line waterflow has become a full-time job for your father, as you point out. At the same time, there are many more people who don’t have access to these “pump games,” because they can’t afford a private tank. They are forced to purchase water from private companies that hike up their prices. How has the situation with Karachi’s water mafia progressed since you reported this piece?
RZ: I think the situation is much more dire now, because the pressures have become more acute. The population has grown dramatically and grows further still on a daily basis. Temperatures have risen, owing to climate change phenomena like the heat domes I talk about in the piece. As a result, people increasingly have to resort to taking their chances and obtaining water without knowing its source or even if it is potable.
In the summer there are thousands of deaths that are ultimately caused by lack of clean water, but they are not often tallied under this category. As the heat index rises in Karachi, these situations are pushed to the limit and people—particularly the very old and the very young—begin to die. The water mafias are more entrenched and merciless now; they know how to throttle competition and work with street gangs and land mafias to ensure that the consumers in a specific area have no options but to pay them.
BLVR: As we approach the summer months, Karachi is already reaching excessively high temperatures. In early May, the city recorded a peak of 111 degrees Fahrenheit, the city’s highest reading since 2018. This heat, as you describe in your piece, compounds with power outages and water shortages, which seeds the ground for long-term public health crises. How are you feeling about the upcoming summer?
RZ: I dread the summer months for Karachiites. If you fall sick during the summer, it is hard to get reliable care in a timely fashion and, most of all, to find a relatively cool environment to recover in. Any illness could threaten survival. Since there is no easily available large-scale refrigeration in poorer areas, there is also a huge risk of eating spoiled food. There is no way of telling if something in a store fridge was left out for hours the night before, or if the energy source powering the fridge is reliable. So it’s Russian roulette all summer long.
This summer will not be any different. The political rift between Karachi and the rest of the province means that the city is constantly starved of resources and the federal government seems disinterested in the plight of the people that live there. Many Karachiites are the children of people who migrated from India in 1947 and hence distinct from Punjabis, who make up the majority ethnicity. All of these divisions make the situation one of constant chaos. People are living a bit of a Hobbesian existence there.
BLVR: How has the situation in Karachi shaped your relationship to your experience of the US? You recently moved to Salt Lake City in Utah, which is also in the midst of a climate-related disaster. Have you noticed any similarities between the two places?
RZ: Well, there is a war over water underway in Utah as well. Last week, three county commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, passed a proposal to build a 40,000 acre data center in the area—that is twice the size of Manhattan. The residents, aghast at what their elected representatives have done, are now trying to organize a referendum that will stop the plan. If the data center is built, the project will suck up all the water left in the already drying Great Salt Lake. It is estimated that it will also increase nighttime temperatures by 8 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit.
This situation really reminds me of Karachi, and it is difficult for me not to feel a bit like a Cassandra. Utahns have little idea of what that sort of scarcity and extreme heat can do to the fabric of society. It transforms our individual and collective relationships with the natural environment, but also the relationships we humans have with each other.
May 21st marks Circassian Remembrance Day, or the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Russo-Caucasian War. This war, spanning from 1763 to 1864, resulted in the loss of independence for the North Caucasus region and, for the Circassians (one of the region’s indigenous peoples), in genocide and mass exile from their historical homeland.
In the 1990s, Circassian activists, public figures, politicians, and scholars successfully secured official recognition for this date as a day of mourning. Since then, two official narratives have coexisted in the North Caucasus, particularly in Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, and the Krasnodar Krai: one asserting the voluntary integration of North Caucasians into Russia, and the other describing a colonial war, genocide, and expulsion.
The state actively supports the first narrative in every way possible, while the second is methodically squeezed out of the public discourse.
Every year on May 21st, a mourning procession, comprising both walkers and horsemen, winds its way through Nalchik. They proceed along the central thoroughfare, passing the monument to Maria Temryukovna, the Circassian wife of Ivan the Terrible, which bears the inscription “Forever with Russia,” before continuing on to another monument: Psezhig (The Tree of Life), created in memory of the Circassian victims of the Russo-Caucasian War.
Since 2016, Ored Recordings has been releasing projects timed to coincide with this somber date. The liner notes for these albums remains unchanged: again and again, we speak of trauma, and of the immense difficulty in discussing it, as the state systematically closes off any space for dialogue. While in the early years we opted for highly neutral phrasing, since 2022, officials have begun banning commemorative events; consequently, finding the right words has become increasingly challenging. We are permitted to remember, mourn, or reflect only within strictly prescribed forms. Thus, cultural projects and musical releases serve as an insufficient, yet absolutely necessary, form of resistance against assimilation and suppression.
This year, we decided to shift our focus away from the trauma itself or the specific subject of the Russo-Caucasian War, choosing instead to present a cross-section of new Circassian music — music that is not merely being preserved, but is actively evolving.
Shyshagh (ЩIыщIагъ, meaning “underground” in Adyghe) offers a snapshot of an imagined Circassian underground scene, as curated by Ored Recordings.
Three artists have contributed their distinct visions of independent Circassian music to this compilation.
For this release, Cherim (Maykop born, Tbilisi based) has departed from his signature industrial hip-hop and hauntological ambient styles, recording two indie-folk ballads featuring lyrics that are at once simple and deeply poignant. The tracks contain echoes of both Soviet-era pop music and the lo-fi underground tradition exemplified by acts such as Low or Rivulets.
Temir (from Nalchik, based in Paris) is an electronic producer, collagist, and vocalist who translates Circassian aesthetics into the realms of deconstructed club, ethereal pop, and other forms of emotive avant-garde music. Ethnographic archives from the last century, along with rehearsal raw recordings from Jrpjej, served as the foundation for these qafe without dancing.
Two additional tracks come courtesy of duos featuring Timur Kodzoko (originaly from Nalchik, Göttingen based), a co-founder of Ored. From our archives, we unearthed an old rehearsal recording by Zafaq, a dormant Circassian Black Metal project. It is raw, instrumental bm-rooted in traditional melodies, yet one that explicitly rejects the aesthetics of folk metal. In 2020, the drums were handled by Amar Abazov, founder of the Zhest records.
The second track comes from Shkhafit (meaning “free” in Adyghe), a drone-folk project by Timur and his son, Astemir Kodzoko. It is a semi-improvised acoustic ambient piece performed on the shichepshin (Circassian fiddle), as well as various other string and wind instruments. It evokes the ghosts of an unfulfilled future and the spirit of new pshynatles-sagas. It is a soundscape where Mark Fisher visits Murdin Tesh.
Shyshagh stands as Ored Recordings’ most ironic and chaotic release to date. As yet another May 21st passes, we see no immediate light at the end, yet we remain ready to unite and carry on!
Cherim – recorded in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2026. All music by Cherim Tsei. Production for the song “Pari (Nothing)” by Temir.
temir – recorded in Paris, France, in 2026. All music by temir. “Duguj” based on Jrpjej rehearsal recordings. “Zechir” based on archival Circassian recordings.
Zafaq – recorded at the House of Radio, Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, in 2020. Timur Kodzoko – guitar Amar Abazov – drums
Shkhafit – recorded in Göttingen, Germany, in 2026. Timur Kodzoko – strings, bowed instruments, and effects Astemir Kodzoko – physharmonium and wind instruments
Cover photo: Tulip tree in the village of Golovinka, Lazarevsky District, Krasnodar Krai/Shapsugia. Photo by Lilit Matevosyan Cover design: Milana Khalilova Text: Bulat Khalilov (English translation by Bella Mirzoeva)
Source: Ored Recordings (Bandcamp). I have included the entire album here for your listening pleasure, but I would urge to download it from Bandcamp, paying what you can to Ored Recordings to support their fine mission. That’s what I just did. \\\\\ trr
The following two stories turned up next to each other in my inbox several mornings ago. The first story (about the hidden costs of common areas in Petersburg’s new estates) was promoted as its “Article of the Week” by the business daily Delovoi Peterburg, whose chronicles of post-Soviet capitalism on the march in my favorite city I have been reading and sharing here for two decades, usually against the grain. The second story (about how the authorities in Kaliningrad hushed up the recent death by self-immolation of an antiwar protester at the city’s main WWII memorial) was published by the exiled investigative journalism website Important Stories aka IStories, which is celebrating its sixth birthday. Seemingly written on different planets in different languages, they give an accurate sounding of the bewildered, muted condition of the “Russian soul” (i.e., Russian society) after four-plus years of a vicious, genocidal war unleashed by a thoroughly corrupt “post-fascist” dictatorship. ||||| TRR
Photo: Sergei Yermokhin/Delovoi Peterburg
When she buys a flat—a fifty-square-meter flat, for example—a tenant also gets into the bargain several hundred square meters of lobbies, corridors, and stairways, for whose upkeep she will pay monthly. Those same square meters determine whether she will be able to squeeze past her neighbor in the lift lobby, whether it is easy to push a pram into the building , and whether coming home is a pleasurable experience.
The common areas are the only part of the apartment block the buyer does not choose although she passses through them every day.
How many square meters are not allocated to flats
The proportion of sellable space in apartment blocks depends primarily on their category.
“In the comfort class, the average is sixty-five to seventy percent; in the business segment, sixty to sixty-five; in the premium class, sixty; and it’s fifty to sixty for the elite class,” explains Olga Ryankel, head of residential property research at Nikoliers.
ELEMENT product director Alexander Matyushkin cites a target figure of up to seventy percent in his firm’s projects, with the actual average standing at around sixty-five percent
Lenstroytrest reports a ratio of seventy-five to eighty-two percent, and considers this to be balanced. According to Maxim Zhabin, development director at the Edino Group, the range for market heavy hitters hovers between sixty-five and eighty-five percent.
“If a developer artificially ‘squeezes’ common areas for the sake of the ratio, this is usually interpreted in practice as cutting corners on the facilities,” he says.
What constitutes non-residential space
An increase in total floor area is determined not by a single factor, but by a combination of factors, and the contribution of each depends on the project category and architectural designs.
In the mass-market segment, the primary contributors to floor area are landings, corridors, and stairwells. And yet, an increase in the number of lifts expands the non-sellable area by fifteen to twenty percent, smoke-free stairwells add a further eight to ten percent, and complexly designed building exteriors also increase the non-sellable perimeter, notes Matyushkin.
Zhabin also cites lift lobbies and stairwells as primary factors, adding to them the utility areas and entrance lobbies.
Optional spaces the developer includes over and above the standard requirements comprise a separate category.
Natalia Kukushkina, head of product and analytics at the CDS Group, differentiates between two categories of common spaces.
“The total floor area includes both essential elements, such as stairwells, basements, entrance lobbies, and communal facilities on each floor, spaces without which a building cannot be constructed, as well as spaces added at the developer’s discretion. These may include non-essential spaces such as spacious lobbies, coworking spaces, pram storage rooms, gyms, swimming pools, communal terraces on top floors, and so on.”
Where comfort ends and excess begins
Ultimately, each developer decides for themself how much common space to include in their project. Yekaterina Zaporozhchenko, chief executive officer at PRO Aparty, suggests a specific indicator: arrears on maintenance fees exceeding ten percent are a sign that residents do not feel the spaces they are paying for are value for their money.
“There should be just enough common spaces for them to be used, and the maintenance budget should not exceed the average figures for the segment,” she explains.
Yudita Grigaite, marketing director at Lenstroytrest, is convinced that excessive common space increases costs and operational burdens without adding any value.
Matyushkin highlights the reverse risk: excessive optimization is also dangerous. A shortage of lifts or narrow corridors diminish the quality of the built environment more than is apparent when a tenant is purchasing an apartment.
“A well-designed common space sets down a clear daily route from courtyard to flat without imposing unnecessary obstacles, and it provides practical arrangements for dealing with prams and deliveries, adequate ventilation and lighting, and clearly defined areas of liability,” says Zhabin in describing the working model.
Inefficiency arises when maintenance costs are high yet residents are unclear about what exactly they are paying for.
How square meters of common space are converted into a line item on the bill
The ratio of sellable space to total floor area translates into two figures residents encounter on a regular basis: the price per square meter at the time of purchase and the maintenace charges they pay after they move into their flat.
The math is straightforward: the higher the percentage of common space, the more expensive each square meter of living space. Developers figure the cost of building and finishing common space into the price of flats.
“The ratio between living space and total floor area directly impacts both the cost of a square meter and future operating expenses, all of which are reflected in the maintenance rates. Therefore, a building’s economic model should be balanced. The comfort of the common areas should be in line with the project’s class and the buyer’s expectations, while maintenance costs should be reasonable,” says Anzhelika Alshayeva, commercial director at the KVS Group, when asked to describe the process.
The difference in maintenance bills among segments is tenfold.
According to PRO Aparty, the difference ranges from sixty to six hundred rubles per square meter. Kukushkina warns of the scenario that this gap generates in practice.
“All additional expenses in a maintenance bill are regarded as too high, and some residents absolutely refuse to pay them. Ultimately, a building might end up with a swimming pool which is closed, a common terrace which is not cleaned, and facade lighting which is turned off.”
The third factor is density which, as Zhabin reminds us, is manifested in “queues to the lift, acoustics, and the amount of traffic in the courtyard,” that is, in factors which are not visible when potential buyers look at flats but which are felt daily.
What buyers don’t see
Ryankel notes a systemic problem in the mass-market segment: prams.
“Unfortunately, the spaces for storing prams and bikes are not separated n the majority of new apartment blocks, ultimately giving rise to a conflict of interests and the impossibility of organizing the space comfortably. And yet, developers often mention a pram storage area without specifying its size. As a result, a space of just seven square meters ends up trying to accommodate prams, bicycles, and tires.”
“Up to eighty percent of the user experience is shaped not inside their flat, but on the way there: from the building’s entrance to their front door. This includes logistics, how the lift works, acoustics, traffic flow, and the convenience of the infrastructure,” says Matyushkin.
There is also a time-related factor that is not taken into account at all when purchasing a flat.
Zaporozhchenko points out the costs of renovating furniture in common areas and maintaining the building’s utility systems after five to seven years, as well as keeping the building’s exterior clean—expenses that no buyer factors into their budget when signing the contract.
Zhabin adds that without a cleaning schedule and proper ventilation even the most luxurious finishes in a building’s entrance lobby will cease to feel “upscale” after a few years.
According to the market players surveyed, pressure on profit margins in the mass-market and comfort-class segments will soon compel developers to increase the share of floor space sold while maintaining visible indicators of quality, such as high ceilings in lobbies and high-quality finishes in entrance areas.
Club-style venues—coworking spaces, community centers, and gyms—will remain a key marketing tool, but some of them will be switched to a fee-based model or be leased out to external management companies on a commercial basis to ease the burden on utility bills.
The gap between rates in the mass-market and premium segments will continue to grow, along with the number of conflicts over maintenance bills in buildings whose infrastructure is at odds with the financial solvency of its residents.
Information about the self-immolation of a resident of Kaliningrad born in 1988 in protest against the war was first published in an open report of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service. The authors of the report did not disclose the name of the deceased. We managed to find out the details of the incident together with Delfi Estonia and Lithuanian broadcaster LRT. We reconstructed what happened based on Russian Investigative Committee documents, conversations with Okunev’s relatives and colleagues, and European security sources.
Five CCTV cameras are installed in front of the 1200 Guardsmen Memorial in Kaliningrad, the USSR’s first monument to soldiers killed in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945. In the center of the memorial is the Eternal Flame. From time to time, various incidents occur near the memorial, which are then widely reported in the local news, and their perpetrators become the subjects of criminal cases. Since last year, for the “desecration of war memorials,” a sentence of up to five years in prison has been [stipulated].
Thus, in February this year, a drunken Kaliningrad resident wanted to light a cigarette from the fire and warmed his feet over the flames. In January 2026, a couple of residents stole a basket of flowers from the monument. In September 2025, another couple had sex at the memorial.
Six months before that, around 5 am on February 24, 2025, 37-year-old Kaliningrad resident Alexander Okunev burned himself alive at the memorial to 1200 Guardsmen in protest against the war — and no one found out about it.
“He was sitting in a corner, not where all the people were”
In the 2010s, Kaliningrad earned the title of the protest capital of Russia, and a series of large-scale rallies even led to the replacement of Governor Georgy Boos.
However, since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the city has not exhibited any notable protest activity. In the first days of the invasion, a wave of anti-war actions swept through Kaliningrad. At one point, the city became a leader in the number of protocols issued for “discrediting” the army. But almost immediately, protests died down as they did throughout the country. Igor Luzin, a Kaliningrad activist and former employee of Navalny’s local headquarters, explains that the “political field” in Kaliningrad has been cleaned up just like the rest of Russia.
Alexander Okunev was not an activist. He avoided talking politics at work (he was a sysadmin at a firm selling retail equipment), did not argue about the full-scale war with his family, and apparently was not active on social media. Okunev had almost no friends, had no girlfriend, and lived alone.
He practically did not talk to his colleagues, could ignore even his superiors: he could keep silent in response to a greeting or not answer the questions. At corporate parties, New Year’s Eve, for example, he tried not to leave his office.
“Was sitting there in a corner, not where all the people … Somehow always in himself, lived his own life,” recalls his former colleague. “Closed. Strange.” However, there were no complaints about his work: “His programmer’s brains were cool”. His colleague believes that Alexander could have made a good career, “but it feels like he didn’t care much about money”. When Okunev decided to quit (about six months before the incident), everyone was upset.
“We asked him, have you found another job? No. Are you going somewhere? Maybe. No one had any idea what or why he left,” says his former colleague. Acquaintances call Okunev “kind, responsive, fair”: “He always helped everyone”. He was fond of origami, and when one of his colleagues had a birthday, he could secretly put “some flowers” on their table. Regarding his hobbies, people close to him say that he liked to watch movies and ride a bicycle.
After the dismissal, Okunev really did not find another job. “Sat at home, practically did not communicate with anyone,” heard his ex-colleague.
Cleanup
Having decided on such a desperate protest act as self-immolation, Alexander Okunev did not seem to be trying to attract attention. Maybe he was afraid that someone could stop him. But he obviously chose the date (the anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine) and the place (the main war memorial in the city) for a reason. Perhaps the time too: the Russian missile struck Kyiv on February 24, 2022, began just about five in the morning.
Okunev’s charred corpse, despite the numerous cameras at the memorial, was discovered by a random passerby only at around 6:40 a.m. The snow appears to have been spray-painted with the words “No to War”. Employees of the investigative department for the Leninsky district of Kaliningrad went to the scene. In the report of the events of the night, Okunev’s self-immolation is mentioned along with reports of two other corpses and a ninth-grade girl who had left home.
The incident was reported to the head of the city administration, Elena Dyatlova. She immediately took everything under her control, the European intelligence officer knows. She was assisted by Evgeny Maslov, head of the local service for the protection of cultural heritage. The main thing for them was to quickly get rid of the body and the words on the snow — the officials were worried mostly that journalists would know what happened. The Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Kaliningrad Oblast, Andrey Yermak, was especially worried that the self-immolation took place near the monument of the Great Patriotic War — too symbolic.
Everything was settled by 9:15 am. Traces of the incident were removed, and authorities were relieved to report to the local governor and other local officials that no one had seen anything, the source of IStories Media said.
Information about the self-immolation of an unnamed Kaliningrad resident first went public only along with a report by Estonian intelligence in the winter of 2026: “On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war, at five o’clock in the morning on February 24, 2025, a man born in 1988 wrote ‘No to War’ in the snow near the monument to a Russian soldier in Kaliningrad and set himself on fire in protest.”
None of the Kaliningrad media ever reported the news. There were no local or propaganda Telegram channels or other social media posts about Okunev. [Alexander’s] family did not spread the word about the incident either. “What’s the point of somehow publicizing and telling all this? What for?” one of them told reporters.
“There is another way”
An acquaintance of Okunev says that on the eve of his suicide, he behaved “absolutely normally.” There was no hint of what he was going to do, and “what happened came as a shock to everyone.” Okunev’s relatives speak of some “expert examinations” conducted as part of the investigation, which found that “there was no outside influence” on A[l]exander. The family was questioned by the local Investigative Committee; the police came to Okunev’s former colleagues for a “character [profile]” but came away with “Worked well, did not communicate with anyone.”
A close friend of Okunev recounted to IStories Media the content of his suicide note.
“He wrote that there is another way. Apparently, he meant a world with peace. And he didn’t want to live in the world we have, so he made this decision… But we are all aware that world peace is a utopia.”
The note also shows that Okunev understood that “most likely, it will not be in the news anywhere, it will not be widely covered anywhere,” the source tells IStories Media.
Elena Maslova, head of the Kaliningrad administration, and Evgeny Maslov, head of the cultural heritage protection service, have not responded to journalists’ requests.
Culture Minister Andrei Yermak replied that he was not familiar with the results of the investigation of this “accident”, so he would not comment on anything. He expressed confidence that law enforcement agencies “will comment on the situation as soon as the investigation is finalized.”
“These people are afraid not of the people, but of their superiors”
In January 1969, the self-immolation of Jan Palach, a philosophy student at Charles University, brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets and became a symbol of resistance to the Soviet occupation in Czechoslovakia. The self-immolation of street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi provoked mass protests in Tunisia, which eventually led to the resignation of the country’s president.
In Russia, the self-immolations of journalist Irina Slavina and Udmurt scientist Albert Razin did not lead to any notable collective action. Could Okunev’s suicide have provoked some protest if people had learned about it?
Sociologist Margarita Zavadskaya thinks not.
“Self-immolation is a powerful symbolic act,” she says, “but public outrage alone is not enough to trigger large-scale collective action under conditions of severe repression and limited access to information.”
So why did the Russian authorities try so hard to conceal information about what happened? To prevent “protest contagion” and imitation, she explains. Moreover, such an anti-war suicide contradicts the government’s theory of a universal public consensus on war. And local officials would look incapable of maintaining control in the eyes of their superiors.
Political scientist Ekaterina Shulman also does not believe that fear of further protests was behind the Kaliningrad authorities’ actions.
“Local authorities are not afraid of the people, not of protests. They are afraid of their superiors,” she says, “they were afraid to hear: ‘You oversaw, allowed a scandal, there are media publications, what do you eat your bread for?'”
“Authoritarian regimes are afraid of symbolic sparks. They understand that a single act of protest may not cause an immediate mass movement, but can become a moral symbol around which scattered anxiety and discontent begin to crystallize,” says Lithuanian political scientist Nerijus Malukiavicius. “That is why such regimes seek to ‘clean up’ the scene, silence history, and discredit the victim.”
Russia is readying for Victory Day — a major state holiday that the Kremlin has elevated into something of a sacred ritual — in far-from-perfect condition. For several weeks, Ukraine has been systematically and successfully attacking oil infrastructure across the country, with ecological consequences that local authorities are struggling to contain. The aftermath of the strikes, largely unreported in national media, is even visible from space. The attacks have only added to public discontent with Putin’s policies — but it is unlikely to have any serious consequences for the Kremlin.
Throughout the second half of April, Ukraine made the Black Sea resort of Tuapse its primary target. Tuapse is a sprawling oil city — home to a Rosneft oil refinery, one of Russia’s oldest, which operates alongside an export terminal that ships petroleum products overseas. From April 16 to May 1, Ukraine hit the town four times, damaging both the terminal and the refinery.
The drone strikes led to a genuine ecological catastrophe. Fires at the refinery caused plumes of smoke visible from orbit. Burning petroleum poured down one of the city’s streets. What became known as “oil rain” — thick black toxic precipitation — fell across the city, leaving stains on plants and animals. In several districts, air quality data showed an unsafe concentration of dangerous chemicals, specifically carcinogenic benzene and xylene, as well as choking soot. Residents living close to the terminal reported vomiting and nausea.
Some of the spilled oil entered the Tuapse River and, after heavy rain, flowed into the Black Sea. Ecologists from the Transparent World project studied satellite images from April 25 and concluded that the size of the spillage covered up to 3.8 square kilometers. The spill near the resort’s central beach was more than half a kilometer long. There is a shortage of workers and equipment to clear up the mess, an operation which has been complicated because the oil soaks deep into the pebble beaches, and the sea continually washes new pollutants ashore. In addition, residents keep finding dead dolphins on the beaches.
Local authorities declared a state of emergency — a special legal status allowing the immediate deployment of resources and a coordinated disaster relief effort. They recommended locals avoid going outside for long periods, keep windows closed, wear masks, and rinse their eyes, noses and throats. However, there was no official stay-at-home order. For many days, Tuapse’s schools did not cancel classes (before eventually being ordered to close only after one of the last attacks), even as air pollution significantly exceeded safe norms. Employers were similarly reluctant to allow staff to work remotely. “At the same time, you have to stay home but also go to work as usual. Choose for yourself which rule to break,” said one Tuapse resident who first had to take her children to school through a town blanketed in acrid smoke, before driving to work.
Vladimir Putin’s response has been muted. “Drone strikes on civilian infrastructure are becoming more frequent. The latest example is the attacks on energy facilities in Tuapse, which could have serious environmental consequences,” he said almost two weeks after the first attack. He then added: “However, the governor merely reported that there don’t seem to be any serious threats and people are coping with the challenges they face.” Residents were not impressed, judging by one report from the Black Sea resort. “People are coping. But where’s the government? They seem to be on some other planet. You can feel the anger: some people are doing something, while others are scratching their asses,” a local resident told the Ostorozhno Novosti publication.
National TV channels did not devote much time to the ecological catastrophe: the weekly news review, Vesti Nedeli, presented by leading propagandist Dmitry Kiselev, ran a five-minute segment on Tuapse in the second half of the show. In it, Governor Venyamin Kondratyev said that he would do everything “to ensure the resort season goes ahead.” Ecologists consider this unrealistic.
Tuapse is not the only place that has been hit by Ukrainian drones. On April 29 and 30, Ukraine attacked a refinery and pumping station in Perm, a city of one million people in the Urals, about 1,500 km from the front line. Ecologists told Agentstvo that an environmental catastrophe could unfold along similar lines there. The skies over Perm were shrouded by smoke, oil fell like rain and carcinogens entered the air. Meanwhile, the local authorities did nothing: the mayor’s page on vKontakte (the Russian version of Facebook) posted nothing about the attacks on the refinery.
Overnight into May 3, Ukraine attacked Primorsk, Russia’s biggest oil terminal on the Baltic Sea — the latest time in a string of long-range strikes on the site. The port typically handles about 40% of oil Russia’s maritime oil exports. The Leningrad Region’s governor reported a fire had broken out, but no oil leak. The next night, a Ukrainian drone attacked an elite residential complex in the western part of central Moscow — a protected area, home to foreign embassies and where ex-president Dmitry Medvedev owns expensive real estate.
Amid the ongoing Ukrainian attacks, the Kremlin has taken a previously unthinkable step and scaled back the full-scale military parade to celebrate May 9 (for more on how this sacred day in Russia’s calendar became a way to glorify the current war, read here). Military hardware has trundled through Red Square every year since 2008, although following the invasion of Ukraine the parade has gotten smaller and smaller. This year, there will be no display of military equipment. Only infantry soldiers will march in the parade. “Amid … terrorist threats, of course, we are taking all measures to minimize risk,” said Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov, explaining the decision. In addition, Muscovites living in one of the most digital cities on Earth, again face a mobile internet shutdown from May 5-9. Operators are blocking access to the network “for security reasons.”
Increased taxes for business, rising prices for customers, regular mobile internet outages, the blocking of Telegram (Russia’s most popular online messenger) and general war fatigue among the population have seen Putin’s approval rating continue to fall for a second month. According to the latest survey by state pollster VTsIOM, 71% of Russians back the president — the lowest level since the invasion of Ukraine. FOM, another pollster that works with the presidential administration, recorded a drop in support to 73% — also its lowest reading since the opening days of the invasion in 2022. The decline in approval will not lead to any protests in Russia, an expert studying Russian public opinion told The Bell.
Why the world should care
Ukraine’s systematic and increasingly successful drone strikes against Russian cities clearly cast a shadow over Putin’s plans for May 9, arguably the most important day of the year for the Russian leader. The Kremlin uses the event not only to celebrate Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, but increasingly to justify the current war and lionize the Russians fighting at the front. In previous years, Kyiv has refrained from attacks on this date. Regardless of whether that remains the case this time, the key point remains: Russian society is not just tired of the war, but is starting to feel its full impact: constant restrictions, lockdowns, and dim economic prospects. In the fifth year of fighting, growth rates that were once trumpeted by Kremlin economists are already out of reach.
This is the 7×7 newsletter, which tells the tale of two journalists, Alisa and Yelisei, who have set out on a voyage around Russia’s cities and towns to find out what life is like in the country’s regions. Care to join them?
The Ulysses have arrived in Tuapse. On the night of 1 May, the local marine terminal here caught fire once again following a drone attack. As a result of the incident, petroleum byproducts spilled into the river and the sea, polluting approximately sixty kilometers of coastline. Volunteers immediately rushed to the scene. Many of them already have experience in combating fuel oil pollution on the coast: they worked on the 2025 oil spill in Anapa.
The volunteers have been sadly convinced that the authorities had not learned from the previous disaster, and that they were once again left to deal with the oil alone. Officials, meanwhile, did nothing but issue directives on how not to tackle the spill’s aftermath. For instance, they proposed barring women from being involved in the cleanup efforts. You can find out how they justified this stance—and how the female volunteers responded—in the newsletter below.
“There is only one solution: once there are enough men available for this work, there will no longer be any need for women to do it,” the female volunteers in Tuapse remarked wryly as they head back to the beach. They had a busy May Day holiday digging up oil-contaminated pebbles on beaches, washing oil off dogs, cats, and birds, and recording videos appealing for help. They also could not help but notice that there were more women than men out on the beach.
Meanwhile, a correspondent for Kommersant reported that Tuapse city hall and the regional department of the Emergency Situations Ministry had not permitted female volunteers to clean up the oil due to “concerns” for their reproductive health. The conversation took place during a meeting with volunteers. Several women present at the meeting said that they would take care of their own reproductive choices themselves.
City hall issued no formal legal ban on women’s involvement in the cleanup effort, limiting itself instead to a verbal recommendation. Yet even these suggestions sparked considerable controversy.
Ecologist Roman Pukalov urged women to refrain from working directly on the beaches. According to him, after spending forty years studying the effects of petroleum products on humans, he has concluded that “the fairer sex constitutes the primary risk group.” He asked female volunteers to focus on other forms of assistance (aside from beach cleanup) such as organizing meals, overseeing the delivery of humanitarian aid, and coordinating targeted fundraising efforts.
“We members of the fairer sex make up the majority,” Anastasia, a volunteer from the Anapa-based volunteer squad Ghosts, reminded Pukalov in the comments section. She herself requires medical attention after being involved in the cleanup of fuel oil in Veselovka. She urged her fellow female volunteers to take care of themselves and undergo all necessary medical checkups following their time in the field.
Other volunteers noted in the comments that fuel oil is not only dangerous to reproductive health. It can also lead to anemia, to which women are more susceptible than men. The women should therefore undergo a medical checkup before the cleanup begins so they are aware of the risks involved, and volunteer coordinators should explain the potential harm of petroleum byproducts and discourage those at high risk of harm to their health from taking part in the cleanup.
What has upset the female volunteers most was that no one has been carrying out medical checks or providing any information at all about the dangers of fuel oil. The officials simply impose bans, and do so under the guise of concern for reproductive health. Yet the women working to clean the beaches may not even want to have children.
Alisa: “If officials were so worried about the women’s health, they should pay to have them tested and treated, if necessary.”*
Petroleum products can in fact cause a range of health problems in women: disturbances in the menstrual cycle, complications during pregnancy and fetal abnormalities, and the onset of anemia.
Women are more vulnerable to the effects of petroleum products: their dangerous components accumulate in fatty tissue, which women have more of, and affect the endocrine system. In some cases, these components are eliminated more slowly than in men, due to the effect of sex hormones on the liver.
Alisa (right): “And yet no one has been calling on the women of Tuapse to evacuate the city!” Yelisei (left): “For that to happen, the authorities would have to admit that the disaster is real and that it has consequences.”
The volunteers themselves complain that they are short of hands. The authorities, meanwhile, have promised to have the beaches completely cleared of oil by 1 June. But environmentalists doubt that the clean-up crews will manage to meet the deadline: the area affected by the spill is simply too vast.
What is more, the city is experiencing “oil rain”: petroleum byproducts are released into the air and settling on the ground in the guise black droplets along with the rainfall. They then seep into the soil, poisoning plants, animals, and the drinking water.
The oil rain poses a particular risk to pregnant women living in the city, rather than those directly involved in the cleanup.
“In this sense, now is the worst possible time to try to have children. There is a high probability that these children will suffer from developmental abnormalities. Pregnant women need to keep their windows closed, wash the floors at home twice a day, wear a mask (even indoors), change their clothes daily, and take every possible precaution to avoid exposure to this filth. And the same goes for those who aren’t pregnant, too,” ecologist Igor Shkradyuk told 7×7.
The authorities did in fact evacuate residents from one district—not due to the risk of oil poisoning, however, but rather due to the aftermath of the drone strikes. Residents of private homes destroyed by fire were among those who left. Yet the authorities have been making strenuous efforts to conceal the true magnitude of the pollution. For instance, Sergei Boyko, head of the Krasnodar Territory’s Tuapse Municipal District, said on Solovyov Livethat Tuapse would be ready to welcome tourists during the resort season, arguing that “what happened on one beach will in no way affect the other beaches.”
The Emergency Situations Ministry’s Tuapse office eventually explained to Kommersant that volunteers are barred only from the most heavily polluted (and, therefore, most dangerous) beaches. Nevertheless, the women have been going on with their work despite these “recommendations”: they have not only being cleaning the beaches but also washing animals, removing polluted sand, coordinating volunteers, sending out appeals for assistance, and recording videos documenting the situation.
Yelisei (right): “I think they would like it if they were called environmental superheroines, or just superheroines, like earlier.” Alisa (left): “I think they’d like it more if more rescuers came to Tuapse, whatever their sex, and if the rescuers who are already here stopped being pestered.”
If you have read about the risks of poisoning and are still willing to help, check out the volunteers’ channels on Telegram and VKontakte. Volunteers are urgently needed right now to catch birds, wash animals, and clean up the fuel oil. Before setting out, be sure to contact the coordinators, as particular jobs, locations, and needs for supplies may change during the course of the day. A bot set up by the volunteers provides their contact details. You can also help remotely: fundraising efforts support washing operations, the bird-catching team, and the equipment warehouse are ongoing.
* AI tools were used to produce the images in this article.
Source: 7 x 7 weekly email newsletter, 5 May 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader
No sooner had local officials declared that they had finally brought under control a fire that raged for days at an oil refinery in Tuapse, a port town on Russia’s Black Sea coast, than it flared up again.
The blaze is visible from as far away as Sochi — and even from space. Satellite images show vast oil slicks spreading across the sea. Online, volunteers are posting videos of dead marine life, including dolphins, their bodies coated in crude.
How much oil has already been spilled: hundreds of tons, or thousands? No one seems to know.
President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that there were “no serious threats in Tuapse, and people are managing to cope with the challenges they face on the ground.” Governor Venyamin Kondratyev told him so, he said.
Putin is no stranger to calamity, or to minimizing it. But it is worth taking a look at what is actually happening.
The inferno first erupted last week. Storage tanks filled with petroleum products burned, sending columns of black smoke visible more than 100 kilometers away.
The volume of combustion byproducts released into the air was so large that Tuapse experienced what residents called “oil rain,” because it felt like the city had been doused with oil. A film resembling an oil slick settled on streets, plants, people and any pets or stray animals that happened to be outside at the wrong time.
That film contains a toxic mix of pollutants, including carcinogens such as benzene. Because the fire is still burning, dangerous concentrations of these substances persist in the air. Black rain may well continue.
Officials say levels of harmful substances are two to three times above what is considered safe.
To paraphrase a Russian proverb, lying is nothing compared to lifting sacks. Talk is cheap.
There is no reliable independent data, but it is hard to imagine that concentrations near the fire are merely double or triple permissible limits. More likely, they are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times higher.
Last week, roughly 60% of the facility’s storage capacity was on fire. Now the rest is burning.
The resulting clouds of soot and carcinogens are especially dangerous for children, the elderly and those with cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. People with fragile health are already feeling the effects. The rise in cancer rates will come later; that is how such exposures work.
And when the fire finally burns out, the disaster will not end. Toxic residues left behind by the fires and the oily rains will remain in the environment, re-entering human bodies again and again.
Nor is the damage confined to the air. At least several hundred tons of petroleum products have spilled into the Tuapse River and the Black Sea. Satellite imagery showed large slicks as early as last week; the leakage continued this week. The impact on marine ecosystems and the coastline will be severe. Drinking water contamination is a real risk.
To understand what may come next, one need only recall the spill in the Black Sea at the end of 2024, which saw thousands of tons of oil products released. Fish, mollusks, dolphins and birds died in large numbers.
As then, volunteers are now desperately scrambling to respond while Putin and Governor Kondratyev tell the country that there are no serious problems.
Remember those videos where they’re cleaning oil off the birds? Well, most of them die anyway. I don’t mean to say that washing the birds is pointless — some of them will survive. Just not many.
Even if the visible oil is removed from beaches, the problem will linger for years. Each storm will dredge buried petroleum products back up to the surface. Effective, repeated cleanup requires sustained resources and political will, both of which are in short supply given the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the global oil market.
In my more than 35 years of environmental work, I cannot recall a single instance in which the Russian authorities were prepared for an emergency. They always take a long time to decide what to do at the outset of a crisis, when time is of the essence.
A proper response to a major refinery fire would begin with clear public guidance: stay indoors, close windows, limit exposure. It would include the distribution of effective protective equipment — not surgical masks, but respirators capable of filtering fine particles — and, crucially, early evacuation to areas with clean air.
Reports of evacuations suddenly appeared on Tuesday. In reality, residents of a few streets were moved to a nearby school, still within the zone of contamination, rather than taken somewhere where the air isn’t polluted with carcinogens.
This catastrophe is part of the broader consequences of the senseless and bloody war Putin unleashed more than four years ago. He isn’t bothered by the hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian military deaths for which he bears direct responsibility, so it’s naive to expect him to care about burning oil tanks and poisoned seas.
And things will only get worse.
Vladimir Slivyak is co-chairman of Russian environmental group Ecodefense and laureate of the Right Livelihood Award 2021.
In the autumn of 2024, Arina Ivanova packed a tracksuit, socks, a change of underwear, soap, a toothbrush, and a few dishes into a bag. Once she was ready, she made her way to a friend’s place and waited. In August 2025, Ivanova was sentenced to five years in a penal colony for disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. In January, she was transferred to a penal colony, and there has been no contact with her since.
Thirty-eight-year-old Ivanova was born and raised in Novokuznetsk, a coal and iron ore mining town in the southern Kuzbass (Kemerovo) Region of Siberia. On 13 August 2025, three days after Arina’s birthday, local media outlets reported on inspections of local schools in the runup to the new academic year, a military recruiting officer caught taking bribes, and the sale of an “elite three-bedroom apartment.”
Arina was sentenced to five years in a penal colony the same day, but there was no mention of it in the city’s media. Neither journalists nor human rights activists knew about Arina until Darya, who was working as a news editor at OVD Info, accidently discovered her in a Novokuznetsk pretrial detention center.
“Some colleagues of mine noticed on a court website that an Arina Sergeyevna Ivanova had been sentenced in Novokuznetsk for violating the law on ‘fake news.’ They sent them an official request for information,” recounts Darya. “The reply came back that the defendant had been sentenced to five years in prison. I took an interest, partly because I’m from Novokuznetsk myself. We turned up several administrative charges for various antiwar statements, and we sensed that this person had a firm stance, that she had convictions, which made us even more determined to locate and help her. Then I googled something like ‘Novokuznetsk woman fined for discrediting army” and found a news item about her on “Kuzbass without Extremism,” a [Telegram channel] for Center “E” [anti-extremism police] officers.
A post there dated 13 October of last year reports that an administrative offenses case had been launched against “Citizen Arina I.” for displaying Nazi symbols (per Article 20.3.1 of the Administrative Offenses Code), specifically for posting the slogan “Glory to Ukraine.” It further alleges that Ivanova “deliberately committed this offense with the aim of obtaining political asylum.”
Further down in the post are a few seconds of audio labeled “Arina I. Conversation with a Girlfriend.” The voices have been altered, and the words are barely decipherable: “Well, yes, I deliberately posted those comments so I could get political asylum.” “Do you realize that’s dangerous? They could even put you in jail for that.”
“They could show up any day now”
On the morning of 24 December 2024, a man identifying himself as a police investigator called Karina, a childhood friend of Arina’s, on her mobile phone. He told her they needed to meet to talk about Arina.
She immediately told Arina about the call, as Arina had been staying at Karina’s home since the autumn. Arina went to the door. Standing on the other side of it were men in uniform.
Ivanova was first summoned to the police in October 2023. The grounds for the summons, as stated in the case file, was an antiwar post of hers on [the Russian social media network] VKontakte, featuring a video titled “StopRussianfascism” and “an image of human figures arranged in the shape of a Nazi swastika.” Arina was fined 1,500 rubles under the Administrative Offenses Code article prohibiting the public display of banned symbols (Article 20.3.1). She was handed a second fine, in the same amount, for violating the same article, over a message posted on Telegram containing a “slogan used by Ukrainian nationalists.”
“She said she was having endless panic attacks,” Karina recalls. “The walls felt like they were closing in. She knew that any day now they could show up and take her away, and she, a ordinary, law-abiding person, would end up in prison for things she had said.”
In the autumn of 2024, Arina once again confided in her friend that she was having a hard time, and Karina suggested she come stay with her, just as before. Arina moved in with Karina four months prior to her arrest.
Karina says that her friend didn’t try to leave the country, even after being slapped with several administrative citations.
“People react to stress in different ways: some are proactive, while Arina just freezes up and takes a ‘come what may’ attitude,” Karina recounts. “We talked about the possibility of her leaving and seeking political asylum. I tried to urge her to go, but when I got home from work, she would just be lying there watching TV. That’s just how her psyche responded: she retreated into her shell and couldn’t find her way back out. Arina didn’t do anything at all, because she was scared, I think.”
On the morning of 24 December, three men entered Karina’s apartment.
“I didn’t want to let them in at all at first,” she recalls. “They asked whether I knew that Arina was on the wanted list. I didn’t. They went downstairs, brought back an arrest warrant, and said that if I didn’t let them in, they would break down the door and come in without asking me.”
“They don’t give a damn how many cats you have”
“She used to say, ‘They won’t take me away because I have so many cats,'” recounts Karina. “She’s a kind, naive gal, and telling her the truth felt like twisting the knife, but I had to snap her out of it and bring her back down to earth, because she was completely living in a fantasy world. I told her, ‘Arina, it makes absolutely no difference to them how many cats you have; they don’t give a damn. They’ll just show up, take you away, open the door, let the cats out, and that will be the end of it.'”
It wasn’t just her loved ones who noticed her bewilderment. Through mutual acquaintances, Arina got in touch with Yevgeny, a lawyer in Novokuznetsk. According to him, it was already clear at the time that things wouldn’t stop at just an administrative offenses case.
“Arina came to my office,” recalls Yevgeny. “She seemed lost and didn’t fully grasp what was happening. She had no clear plan: all her actions appeared chaotic and disjointed. I drafted a formal complaint regarding the administrative offense case free of charge, but it was never filed. Nor did Arina go to see the lawyer I had advised her to consult. I got the impression that she didn’t understand the gravity of the situation—specifically, how the mechanism for prosecution and imprisonment actually works.”
Realizing that arrest was imminent, Arina entrusted her cats to Svetlana, a volunteer. Arina had previously brought animals to Svetlana for spaying and neutering, and had sought her advice on their medical treatment and care. Svetlana, by her own account, runs a temporary foster facility located within a veterinary clinic.
When she was already in pretrial detention, Arina learned that the volunteer had demanded that the animals be retrieved, threatening to euthanize them otherwise.
“In my opinion, [Svetlana] isn’t a terribly rational woman. She wrote to me saying that ‘winter is coming’ and that she would have to euthanize these [cats] in order to take others in from the streets,” says Karina. “I don’t know what became of them…. I asked that woman to stop doing this work and to stop ‘rescuing’ animals.”
“My childish love for animals grew into something bigger”
“Like many others, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be early on in life,” Arina writes in a letter from the detention center. “Everything was decided by chance. When I was seventeen, I was looking for a summer job, and I stumbled upon a job posting for a small flower shop. I’ve always loved flowers, so I decided it was a good opportunity to learn something new.”
After graduating from a technical college specializing in construction, Arina worked as a florist for about fifteen years. When she realized that arranging bouquets no longer brought her the joy it once had, she decided to turn her hobby—cooking—into a career.
During the ten years previous to 2024, Arina and Karina had little contact with each other. Their paths began to diverge when Karina started a relationship and had a son.
“Arina mostly stayed at home,” recalls Karina. “We lost touch for a time. I would try to get us back in touch and would invite her over. It’s not like she turned me down exactly, but she was seemingly avoiding spending time with me, and so finally we settled on merely congratulating each other on holidays and birthdays. Then she took up volunteering, and she and her mom started taking in stray cats from everywhere. Then her mom emigrated and she stayed behind [in Russia] with the cats.”
Arina writes that she had been surrounded by animals since childhood. She would drag every stray cat and dog home, and spend all her pocket money on their medical care.
“I thank Mom for supporting me in this,” she writes in the letter. “My childhood love of animals grew into something bigger. Volunteering became not only a hobby but an important part of my life. Thanks precisely to the animals who acted as my lifeline, I stayed afloat in the wake of the events of February [2022].”
Arina’s mother Tatyana, born in the town of Perevalsk in [Ukraine’s] Luhansk Region, also had a tough time when the war broke out. She has been living for the past ten years in South Korea and, according to her, had been writing antiwar social media posts intended for Russian immigrants to South Korea who “support the whole thing.”
“I’m from Ukraine myself, and Arina and I traveled there so many times,” says Tatyana. “[The war’s outbreak] was a tragedy for me and sent me into a depression. I would scroll through my news feed to see what was happening there, and it was unthinkable. Arina naturally couldn’t help thinking about it either.”
“I relied on her like she was an adult”
Tatyana is sixty years old. In South Korea, she works as a hotel housekeeper. She had worked as a train conductor in the 1990s in Russia. She got the job when “salaries at some workplaces were delayed for a year, but there was a stable income on the railway.” But even there, the screws began to tighten: wages dropped, while responsibilities increased. When Arina was twenty-five, her mother moved to South Korea.
“We would have an ancient railcar, yet it had to look brand-new for the federal inspection commission,” Tatiana recalls. “Sometimes we would buy paints and varnishes—even a toilet seat—with our own money. My gut told me that things in Russia were only going to get worse, and that I needed to escape this hopelessness.”
According to Tatyana, Arina became independent at an early age. Her mother would leave for long stints working on the railroad, and the girl would be left alone in their apartment: there was simply no other way to feed the family, since unemployment was rampant throughout the country. Tatyana and Arina’s father had separated long ago, and Tatyana had no other relatives, so mother and daughter relied entirely on one another.
“It would happen that I’d travel to Simferopol or Kislovodsk, where fruit was cheap. I’d buy several bucketfuls, bring them home, hand them over to my daughter, and leave the same evening. When I came back home, there would be the jars of jam that my ten-year-old child had made. I relied on her like she was an adult.”
When Tatyana tried to find common ground with the investigator in Arina’s case, she described her daughter as a “Turgenev girl” and underscored that Arina had never had a boyfriend.
Since childhood, Arina had described herself as a “bookworm.” She tried to spend as little time in public as possible and avoided big groups. Even going to the supermarket was stressful for her, and so, according to Tatyana, she had the groceries delivered more often.
Karina has her own views of Arina’s relationship with her mother. The girls became friends when Karina was thirteen and Arina eleven. Karina says that Tatyana often manipulated Arina by suggesting that she couldn’t live without her, “that if Arina left, she would drop dead on the spot.”
“Arina would often leave home and live at our place,” says Karina. “One time her mom came and got her only after [she had been gone for] two weeks. To me as an outsider, it seemed that her mom used her like her own personal Cinderella. She did all the chores and had no personal life.”
Karina argues that this upbringing made Arina eager to please. Once, when Arina was staying with her, Karina had fancied “a particular kind of belyash,” and so Arina had brought her these belyash every single day, recalls Karina.
“Sad to say, I didn’t grow up in the happiest family, so I know firsthand what domestic violence is,” Arina writes from Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in Novokuznetsk. “My parents got divorced when I was around five years old. When I turned nine, the man who would become my stepfather appeared in our lives. The problems started almost immediately: my stepfather turned out to be a maniacally cruel man. There were rows nearly every day at home, rows that would end with him beating up my mom. When I would try to defend her, he would beat me as well. […] [Once] my stepfather came home at night and woke us up. He sat me on the bed, put a knife to Mom’s neck, sat down opposite me, and said that if I tried to get up he would slice her throat. And so I sat there till morning.”
Arina writes that calls to the police were of no help. To get away from her mother’s live-in partner, they moved frequently, but the man always learned where they were.
“He was a terrible man,” Tatyana recounts. “He drank a lot and suffered from a maniacal persecution complex. I would rent [other] apartments to hide from him. I would ask the police to intervene and then write to the prosecutor’s office because the police would take no action. But like a cunning worm, he would go to ground and vanish—and then it would all begin over again. That hell lasted nine years.”
Arina says that she left home at thirteen due to the situation there, “because it was unbearable, but after a month or so I came back since I was worried about Mom.”
Tatyana recalls this story differently. As she tells it, Arina had got mixed up with a bad crowd that used hard drugs, and it was during this time that she left home.
“Arina means everything to me: she’s my air, my sunshine, my life,” says Tatyana. “When I realized I couldn’t bring her back, I went to the hairdresser’s and got my hair done, bought a bottle of sleeping pills, and got ready to end my life. I was sitting in an armchair, the pills and a glass of water in front of me on a stand. I thought that I’d watch a TV program and that would be it. I was watching the TV, without seeing or understanding anything, when suddenly the phone rang. I picked up the telephone, and it was Arina.”
“I’m in outer space without her”
Karina telephoned Arina’s mom after her arrest and told her everything. They are now in constant contact and trying support each other.
“I’m only just coming to my senses, thanks to the antidepressants,” says Tatyana. “Until April, I was going out in my winter clothing and didn’t even realize that summer was round the corner: I was still living back in December, when they arrested her. You can’t even imagine how difficult it is for her and me that we’re separated. I have the feeling that I’m in outer space without her.”
On 13 August of last year, Novokuznetsk’s Kuibyshev District Court sentenced Arina Ivanova to five years in a medium-security penal colony for antiwar social media posts and comments on the law criminalizing the dissemination of “fake news.”
“I heard those comments in court,” says Karina. “I realize that she’s partly in the wrong: you shouldn’t speak out against your country at such a time. There are people who try to hold protest rallies against their country, and that’s a criminal offense because such people can cause trouble for the country. But I can say for certain that if Russia were picking a bone with Kazakhstan, Arina would be worried about the civilians there as well. I don’t get why the people who are baying for blood and writing ‘let’s nuke them’ on social media don’t get in trouble for it, while a person calling for peace is in the wrong.”
Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in Novokuznetsk is an elongated brick building. Karina headed there on 30 December, bearing a care package with which she hoped to cheer up her friend on the eve of the New Year’s holiday. Karina had never been in a place like that before.
“It’s a majorly depressing place,” she says. “There are nasty women who bark at you like dogs and treat you like an inmate. The first time I left that place, I felt so horrible that I cried all day and didn’t want to talk to anyone. That kept happening until I saw [Arina] in court, where she kept her chin up.”
Karina is also taking antidepressants now. She says that over the past year the overwhelming sense of injustice she feels had caused her to cry “a ton of tears.”
“I’m finally starting to get a grip on reality,” adds Tatyana. “Previously, I felt total apathy. I could think only about her. I worked like a robot, not even realizing I was working. The pills have kicked in now, but I’m having a hard time all the same. Why did they arrest my child and hand her such a long sentence? Because she loves people? Because she’s warm and compassionate? I just can’t wrap my head around it.”
In mid-November 2025, the appellate court upheld Arina’s sentence.
“Although I knew this would be the outcome, I was upset anyway,” Arina wrote. “In the near future, I have to get ready for the transfer to the penal colony. It is terrifying for me.”
I managed to speak with Svetlana, the volunteer to whom Arina entrusted her cats. According to her, she had seen Arina’s antiwar posts and advised her to delete them.
“I said to her, ‘Do you remember Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf? You won’t be able to change things. Think about the animals. You need to be thinking about them.'”
She says that the animals are alive (only three elderly cats have died, of natural causes) and that she had blurted out the remark about euthanasia to Karina “in the heat of the moment,” simply because Karina had not responded to her calls and messages.
According to Svetlana, she is currently fostering around forty cats. Some of the fourteen cats handed over to her by Arina have already been placed in new homes. Others remain in her care to live out their days, and “none have been euthanized.”
“I’m feeling so many emotions that I’m at a loss for words,” Arina wrote in reply to my letter recounting the plight of her kitties. “I spent the whole year feeling guilty for the animals’ death. Not a day went by when I didn’t remember them. And then, on Christmas Eve, I get such a letter. I don’t know any other word for it but a miracle!”
Arina was transported to the penal colony in the town of Yurga in January. There has been no contact with her since then. She has not answered letters from her mom, Darya, or me.
“There was a short prayer in the last letter I sent her. Later, she wrote that she’d been labeled a ‘religious extremist’ in the pretrial detention center and was threatened that such people were treated differently in the penal colonies. It was after that that she was sent to the penal colony, and there’s been no word of her for three months now. I don’t know what to think,” says Tatyana.
As this article goes to press (on 24 April 2026), we have still had no contact with Arina.
This presentation introduces a book project on the first decades of Russian colonization in Eastern Siberia, present-day Yakutia. Rather than framing colonization solely as a process of conquest and political alliance-building, the project foregrounds intimate and gendered entanglements between Russian newcomers and Indigenous communities. Russian fur traders, trappers, and military servitors typically arrived in the region without families and encountered Yakut, Tungus, Yukaghir, and Even populations. The resulting gender imbalance among settlers quickly made the trade in Indigenous women a profitable enterprise. At the same time, commercial transactions sometimes culminated in Orthodox marriages, blurring the boundaries between coercion, commerce, and social integration. By examining these practices, the study explores how racial, cultural, and religious boundaries were negotiated in everyday interactions between Russian colonizers and Indigenous societies in seventeenth-century Eastern Siberia.
There were three ways to acquire women in Eastern Siberia. The first was as the outcome of military expeditions, sometimes referred to as ‘pogroms’ in the documents. When Russian troops attacked local settlements or nomadic camps and emerged victorious, they would seize women, children, and cattle as spoils of war. Enslavement of women during times of conflict had deep roots in Siberian history. Historical documents provide numerous accounts of inter-ethnic military clashes that resulted in the plundering of the defeated, particularly involving the capture of women, children, and cattle.
A petition from 1642 for the baptism of a Yakut woman named Katok includes Katok’s explanation of why she desired to convert to Orthodoxy where she shares her life story. She recounts that she could not recall her father’s name as she was taken by Russians during a ‘pogrom’ when she was only a child. She further explained that she had previously lived ‘among Russians,’ but that she now has nothing to eat or drink and was starving to death. In short, Katok was forcibly captured from her community as a child, likely being one of those taken as trophies from the defeated local community.
Another form of enslavement in Siberia involved trafficking, where local people would sell their relatives to Russians. Sometimes the locals would sell their women to combat poverty. Gurvich mentioned that the Yukaghirs of Yana River sold their maidens and children to Russians because of hunger in 1659. However, the women sold to Russians were not always orphans or from poor families. There are documented cases where individuals of higher social status willingly sold their daughters. For instance, local prince Orgui sold his daughter Mychak to a Russian serviceman for a cow.
Russians did not necessarily purchase or capture local women in battle; sometimes they acquired them without any effort or payment. One such case is preserved in historical documents. It tells the story of Ladchka, a Yakut woman who was abandoned by her husband and left with no means of support. She sought refuge in the Russian camp and resided there for two years before eventually being brought to Yakutsk with her child in 1643. During her interrogation, Ladchka revealed that she had been a slave (‘yasyr’) of the fur trader Oderka Martemyanov. She had a child with him and expressed her desire to be baptised. It appears that Martemyanov acquired this woman without any cost, lived with her for a period, and then seemingly cast her aside.
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.
Daria Egereva, a decolonial activist and spokeswoman for the Selkup, an indigenous ethnic minority in Siberia, has been accused of “involvement in a terrorist organization” as part of a major criminal case against ten individuals and “other persons,” according to an appellate ruling by the Moscow City Court that has been uneartherd by Mediazona.
Egereva was detained and remanded in custody in December 2025. Decolonial activists then reported that she had been accused of involvement with the Aboriginal Forum [aka Aborigen Forum], an association of experts on the indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities of the Russian North. The organization was banned twice in Russia in 2024.
According to the appellate ruling, Egereva faces eight criminal charges: disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army; calling for separatism; participating in an “extremist” organization; inciting hatred or enmity; condoning Nazism; creating and participating in a terrorist community and a terrorist organization; and desecrating the Russian flag or coat of arms.
One of the well-known individuals implicated in the case is Petersburg journalist Maxim Kuzakhmetov. He was arrested in absentia and placed on the wanted list.
What specifically prompted the criminal case against Daria Egereva is unclear. The Moscow City Court’s ruling states that the activist’s defense team denies the charges.
Today, March 12, Moscow’s Basmanny Court held another hearing on Daria Egereva’s pretrial detention. The court extended her pretrial detention for three months, as requested by government investigators. The hearing was held in public and was attended by diplomats from several embassies, her husband, and her children. She is facing 20 years in jail on terrorism charges.
“Being held in a Russian prison is a tremendous ordeal for anyone. I spent five days in this nightmare in 2021. For me, it’s like five years of my life. Daria has already been held for 86 days, and her sentence was extended by 92 days. This is terrible, unlawful, a violation of rights. Demand Daria Egereva’s release!” – Andrei Danilov, Saami Indigenous representative.
“Last time, Daria Egereva’s detention was extended by a month; now it’s been extended to three. Despite appeals from Indigenous representatives from various countries, Daria remains in custody. It’s heartbreaking to see how the solidarity of people around the world in this situation is simply ignored.” – Aivana Enmynkau, Nuvuqaghmiit Indigenous representative.
On December 17, 2025, a large-scale, coordinated wave of repressive actions against Indigenous Peoples and their human rights defenders occurred in Russia. On that day, Darya Egereva, an ethnic Selkup, was arrested in Moscow. She is a co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC) and a long-standing participant in the international Indigenous rights movement. Daria’s colleagues and the international civil society connect her detention to climate change activism.
The website and the petition supporting Daria Egereva were launched as a part of the International Solidarity Campaign calling to #FreeDariaEgereva, where you can send a letter to Daria or find other ways to support her.
The International Committee of Indigenous Peoples of Russia (ICIPR) strongly condemns the new wave of repression against Indigenous human rights defenders in the Russian Federation, including their prosecution on fabricated charges of “extremism” and “terrorism” brought by the Russian authorities.
ICIPR considers these actions to constitute a deliberate misuse of anti-extremism and counter-terrorism legislation aimed at suppressing peaceful human rights work. We further regard them as a serious violation of the international obligations of the Russian Federation as a Member State of the United Nations, including its obligations under the UN Charter, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — in particular the prohibition of reprisals for cooperation with United Nations mechanisms.
On 17 December 2025, Ms. Daria Egereva was arrested in Moscow. She is an Indigenous Selkup human rights defender, Co-Chair of the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC), and a member of the United Nations Indigenous Peoples’ Coordinating Body (UN ICB). She has been charged with participation in the activities of a so-called “terrorist organization,” an offence carrying a potential sentence of 10 to 20 years of imprisonment.
These charges are based on her alleged association with the Indigenous human rights defenders’ network Aborigen Forum, as well as on her many years of human rights work with the Centre for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North (CSIPN). Notably, CSIPN was explicitly identified in UN Human Rights Council resolution 60/21 of 7 October 2025 among organizations subjected to forced closure and persecution by the Russian Federation.
The Aborigen Forum network, of which CSIPN was a member, was designated an “extremist organization” by the Russian authorities in July 2024, despite the fact that its members have never engaged in any acts of violence that could meet the definition of terrorism. At all times, the activities of the network and its members were peaceful, lawful, and focused on human rights advocacy, carried out exclusively through non-violent means and aimed at the protection of the rights of Indigenous Peoples, including through engagement with United Nations mechanisms.
Following its designation, the network decided to immediately dissolve and cease its activities; nevertheless, in December 2024 the Russian authorities included Aborigen Forum in the list of terrorist organizations.
On the same day, 17 December 2025, another human rights defender was arrested in Moscow under the same terrorism-related charges.
At the same time, beginning on 17 December 2025, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) launched a series of coordinated searches and interrogations targeting Indigenous activists and human rights defenders across the country, including in the Altai Republic, Tomsk, Murmansk and Kemerovo Oblasts, Altai Krai, Taimyr and Krasnoyarsk Krai, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), and the city of Saint Petersburg. These operations targeted members of Indigenous communities, including Selkups, Tubalars, Chulyms, Shors, Kumandins, Dolgan, Yukaghirs, Evenks, Sámi, and Nganasans.
On the same day, a separate search was conducted in Murmansk Oblast at the home of Ms. Valentina Sovkina, a member of the Sámi Indigenous People and of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII).
According to currently available information, at least 17 Indigenous leaders in different regions of the Russian Federation have been searched and interrogated by FSB. All their electronic devices have been confiscated.
ICIPR views these developments as politically motivated persecution and as a continuation of the systematic criminalization of peaceful Indigenous human rights work, including cooperation with international human rights mechanisms and participation in the work of the United Nations.
Call for International Solidarity
In light of this sharp escalation of repression against Indigenous Peoples, ICIPR hereby announces the launch of an international solidarity action by Indigenous Peoples and allies worldwide in support of Indigenous Peoples in Russia who are being targeted by state repression, including Indigenous human rights defenders.
We call upon Indigenous Peoples’ organizations and movements worldwide, UN bodies and mechanisms, including Special Procedures, States, academic institutions, and human rights organizations and civil society actors to speak out against these reprisals, to demand the immediate cessation of politically motivated prosecutions, and to uphold the fundamental principle that engagement with the United Nations must never be criminalized.
Solidarity is not optional — it is a shared moral responsibility.
We urge all partners to mobilize in solidarity. Further details on modalities and next steps will be shared shortly.
Svetlana Savelyeva. Photo courtesy of Mediazona via Sever.Realii and the Savelyeva family
A translator from the Irkutsk Region wanted to visit her boyfriend in Ukraine. She was detained, tortured, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
A court in Kursk has found Svetlana Savelyeva guilty of attempted treason and conspiring to cross the border illegally.
Savelyeva was detained in October 2024 in the Kursk Region and then held under administrative arrest until mid-December on the pretext that she had disobeyed the police’s orders. In December, she was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center on criminal charges.
According to the FSB investigators, Savelyeva had undergone “military training” in Kazakhstan, after which she planned to join the Ukrainian army during its partial occupation of the Kursk Region.
The translator herself said that she wanted to travel to Ukraine to reunite with her boyfriend, a Ukrainian army soldier named Alexander.
“We tried many ways to get her here to where I was. When Ukrainian troops entered the Kursk Region, Sveta was in Armenia, if I’m not mistaken. And then suddenly she says, Here I am, I’ll try to get into the area controlled by Ukraine. The biggest mistake was that I did, after all, let her go to Kursk,” the Ukrainian soldier told reporters.
FSB officers tortured Savelyeva to obtain a confession: they kept her naked in a cold room, beat and choked her, subjected her to electric shocks, and threatened her with murder and sexual violence.
In addition to Savelyeva, criminal charges were filed against driver Igor Sandulyak, who agreed to drive her to the front line. The regional court fined him 150,000 rubles [approx. 1,600 euros].
Source: Mediazona (Facebook), 2 April 2026. Translated by Thomas Campbell, who asks our fellow translators, wherever they are, to share this post in solidarity with Ms. Savelyeva.
