Category: social media

The Podcast

Axel: The Russian Reader, where the news arrives already wearing its funeral clothes, translated with care by hecksinductionhour.

Mara: This episode covers three topics: the people imprisoned in Russia for opposing the war and the networks trying to reach them; the long retreat of Russian imperial culture across Central Asia and Siberia; and the overlapping crises of ecological disaster, political exile, and state cover-up inside Russia itself. Let’s start with the prisoners and the people writing to them.

Dissent Behind Bars

Mara: The question this segment keeps returning to is what it actually costs to oppose the war in Russia — and what it means to refuse to let that opposition disappear.

Axel: OVD Info puts the number plainly: “2100 people in Russia are behind bars because of their political views. We believe that no one should face this kind of injustice alone.”

Mara: That quote is the spine of the post. It describes Vestochka, a letter-writing service for political prisoners — volunteers translate messages so they can pass censors — and it uses the case of Darya Kozyreva, a twenty-year-old from St. Petersburg, to show what outside attention can do. She was sentenced to over two and a half years for placing a Taras Shevchenko poem on his monument. A post from A Mighty Girl drew more than 38,000 reactions and linked to Vestochka. Kozyreva received over 600 letters from abroad. She was released this spring.

Axel: Six hundred letters from strangers, and the post is careful about what that means — not just morale, but proof to someone in a penal colony that their fight registers somewhere outside the walls.

Mara: The post notes that 1,098 people remain on the Vestochka list right now, most without Kozyreva’s visibility. The service is free for both sender and recipient; keeping it running requires donations, especially since OVD Info can no longer accept rubles.

Axel: Then there is Arina Ivanova — the piece titled “A Turgenev Girl and Her Cats” — whose case is almost the photographic negative of Kozyreva’s. A thirty-eight-year-old florist and cat rescuer from Novokuznetsk, sentenced to five years for antiwar posts, discovered almost by accident by an OVD Info editor. No viral moment. Transferred to a penal colony in January, and no contact since.

Mara: Her friend Karina’s account of the arrest is devastating in its specificity — the men at the door on Christmas Eve, the care packages, the antidepressants both women are now taking. Arina’s mother, living in South Korea, says she felt she was “in outer space” without her daughter.

Axel: The detail about the cats is not a sidebar. Arina believed, genuinely, that having so many animals in her care would protect her. Her friend had to tell her otherwise.

Mara: The post “Outcasts in Their Own Land” widens the frame considerably. It draws on a Jacobin piece by Simon Pirani that describes the infrastructure around political prisoners — OVD Info, Memorial, Solidarity Zone, dozens of informal letter-writing groups in exile — and the “final words” defendants deliver in court as consciously crafted appeals to society, not pleas to judges.

Axel: Sergei Dudchenko, sentenced to seven years, said at his trial that antiwar prisoners had “fewer rights than a stray dog.” He also recalled the seven protesters arrested on Red Square in 1968 for opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The historical thread is deliberate.

Mara: That same Pirani piece connects directly to the film “Try Me for Treason,” announced in a separate post. It is a fifty-minute English-language film featuring actors reading court speeches by antiwar protesters — drawn from the book “Voices Against Putin’s War” — produced on a zero budget and released free on YouTube. Actor Maya Willcocks, who reads Darya Kozyreva’s speech, said the goal was to send the message “that occupation is a crime, whether in Palestine or in Ukraine.”

Axel: And then there is Azat Miftakhov — the anarchist mathematician whose case the post titled “Political Prisoner Azat Miftakhov Continues to Be Tortured” follows into genuinely Arctic territory. He was re-arrested at the prison gates on the day he was due to be freed, sentenced to four more years on testimony from a fellow prisoner, and has now been transferred to Kharp — beyond the Arctic Circle, the colony where Navalny died.

Mara: His letters to Mediazona describe the prison caste system in precise, unsentimental terms. On the one prohibition he refuses to accept: “I value my human dignity too highly to allow it to be debased, even under the threat of injury. Prison is a place where you’d better not ‘swallow’ humiliation.”

Axel: His wife and lawyer calculates that visiting him in Kharp will cost roughly four times what it cost before — around 40,000 rubles a trip, with middle-of-the-night layovers. She notes there may be no electronic mail at the colony. Her phrase is: “That already borders on torture.”

Mara: The post notes his release is not scheduled until September 2027. The support group’s statement is unambiguous: the transfer is punishment for his refusal to yield.

Axel: Five years, two and a half years, four more years — the sentences accumulate across this segment like a ledger no one in power intends to balance. The question the next segment raises is older: how empires mark the people they decide to own.

Imperial Retreat and Indigenous Survival

Mara: The posts here address a single long arc — how Russian imperial culture was imposed across Central Asia and Siberia, and how that imposition is now visibly eroding.

Axel: Stephen Blank’s analysis in “Central Asia and Russia(n): Is It Farewell?” frames the language question as a proxy for the whole imperial project: “Russian will not be the only regional lingua franca or the language of Russian imperial hegemony either in the Caucasus or in Central Asia.”

Mara: His argument is that Kazakhstan’s new constitution downgrades Russian to an official language used “alongside” Kazakh — a subtle but deliberate demotion. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are following. Russia’s embassy in Bishkek formally demanded the Kyrgyz government suppress “provocative statements” about Russian’s status there, invoking the Soviet phrase “fraternal peoples.” Blank reads that as imperial anxiety, not confidence.

Axel: The YouTube angle is the part that lands differently. Researchers at Michigan and UC Berkeley simulated Kyrgyz children’s viewing behavior and found that even after watching ten Kyrgyz-language videos, the platform served fewer Kyrgyz recommendations than bots with no language preference at all. As one researcher put it: “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”

Mara: The historical depth of that pressure is what the post on “Russian Colonizers and Indigenous Siberian Women” supplies. Angelina Kalashnikova’s book project examines seventeenth-century Eastern Siberia — Yakutia — where Russian fur traders and military servitors arrived without families and acquired Indigenous women through military seizure, purchase, or simple abandonment of women with nowhere else to go. The case of a Yakut woman named Katok, captured as a child during a “pogrom” and later petitioning for baptism while starving, is one of many documented in court records.

Axel: The gap between that seventeenth-century archive and a 2026 YouTube algorithm is not as wide as it looks — both are mechanisms that treat a language and its speakers as secondary by default.

Mara: On Circassian Remembrance Day, May 21st, Ored Recordings released “Shyshagh” — meaning “underground” in Adyghe — a compilation of new Circassian music across indie-folk, deconstructed club, and black metal. The liner notes describe cultural projects as “an insufficient, yet absolutely necessary, form of resistance against assimilation and suppression.” Since 2022, officials have been banning commemorative events marking the Russo-Caucasian War genocide.

Axel: And the post “Russia’s Pride” approaches the same imperial geography from the other direction — a Ukrainian writer watching Tuapse burn and tracing the exact route her grandmother used to take on the sleeper train to visit relatives there. The relatives who in 2022 called to say Russia would “save” them. She stopped answering.

Mara: Her essay names the emotion precisely — justice-based schadenfreude, she calls it — and connects it to twelve years of watching those relatives post propaganda while ignoring the war in Donbas. The post sits in this segment because it is, at its core, about what imperial belonging does to people on both sides of the border it draws.

Axel: From the cultural politics of empire, the next segment turns to what the empire looks like from inside — when it is burning, literally and otherwise.

Power, Disaster, and the Cost of Dissent

Mara: This segment is about what happens when the machinery of the Russian state fails its own people — through ecological catastrophe, judicial persecution, and the suppression of even the quietest protest.

Axel: The Tuapse coverage is extensive enough to deserve its own map. “A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck” compiles reporting from The Bell, 7×7, the Moscow Times, and others into a picture of a city coated in toxic “oil rain” after Ukrainian drone strikes on the Rosneft refinery — fires visible from orbit, dead dolphins on the beaches, benzene and xylene in the air at unsafe concentrations.

Mara: Putin’s response, delivered almost two weeks after the first strike: “The governor merely reported that there don’t seem to be any serious threats and people are coping with the challenges they face.” A local resident told Ostorozhno Novosti: “People are coping. But where’s the government? They seem to be on some other planet.”

Axel: The 7×7 newsletter section of the same post adds a detail that is almost too on-the-nose: city officials verbally recommended that female volunteers not clean the beaches — citing concerns for reproductive health — while simultaneously declining to order an evacuation, close schools promptly, or provide respirators. The female volunteers kept working anyway.

Mara: Ecologist Vladimir Slivyak, writing in the Moscow Times, frames the disaster explicitly: “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.”

Axel: “The Cards” — a Foreign Policy analysis depaywalled here — situates the Tuapse strikes inside a broader argument that Putin is losing strategic ground faster than the public narrative acknowledges. It documents a leaked Kremlin security document describing Putin working from bunkers in southern Russia, his bodyguards controlling his schedule, no one near him permitted a phone connected to the internet.

Mara: The post also tracks the Victory Day parade scaled down to infantry only — no tanks, no military hardware — and Putin asking Trump to dissuade Ukraine from striking during the ceremony. The piece quotes Ben Hodges: “The Ukrainians have developed a theory of victory which involves the destruction of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure.”

Axel: Gregory Kunis left Russia with Steinbeck in his rucksack. That is the actual sentence — from the post “He Left Russia with Steinbeck in His Rucksack” — and it is doing a lot of work.

Mara: Kunis co-founded the grocery delivery service iGooods and owned the newspaper Moy Rayon. He was arrested for making monthly donations of 500 rubles to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation — equivalent to roughly six euros a month. Fined 350,000 rubles, prosecutors appealed for six years. He fled. His subsequent diary entry, published in The Russia Report, describes the pretrial detention system in detail: no clocks, sealed windows, no contact with family, recruits for the war approached during quarantine when prisoners are at their most disoriented.

Mara: Mediazona’s accompanying report counts at least 225 criminal cases opened across Russia for ACF donations — fines totaling nearly 40 million rubles for donations that amounted to roughly 400,000 rubles combined. The sentencing is deliberately unpredictable: the same 2,100-ruble donation resulted in a fine for one Moscow resident and a prison sentence for another.

Axel: The “Important Stories” post pairs a dry Delovoi Peterburg article about common-area square footage in Petersburg apartment blocks with the story of Alexander Okunev — a sysadmin in Kaliningrad who burned himself alive at the city’s main war memorial on the third anniversary of the invasion, wrote “No to War” in the snow, and was erased from the record by 9:15 that morning.

Mara: City officials cleaned the scene, reassured the governor nothing had happened, and no Kaliningrad outlet ever reported it. The story only surfaced when Estonian intelligence included it in a public report. Okunev’s suicide note, as relayed by a close friend, said “there is another way” — meaning a world with peace — and acknowledged he understood it would probably not be reported anywhere.

Axel: Political scientist Ekaterina Schulman’s explanation for the cover-up: “Local authorities are not afraid of the people, not of protests. They are afraid of their superiors.”

Mara: The “Russians and Republicans Hate Black People” post extends the segment’s argument about power and its targets outward — drawing a line from the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the history of Soviet racism toward African students, to the everyday anti-Blackness that has persisted from the Soviet era into the Russian Federation. The thread connecting them is the gap between official anti-racist ideology and practiced contempt.

Axel: Elie Mystal’s piece in The Nation puts it without hedging: Republicans “hate Black people, and they hate Black people who have political power most of all.” The post pairs that with translated racist comments from a Russian streaming site and a Mediazona history of Soviet-era treatment of African students — a juxtaposition that is the point.

Mara: What ties this segment together is the consistency of the mechanism: power suppresses, minimizes, and erases — whether it is oil in the Black Sea, a man’s ashes in the snow, or a voting right dismantled with visible glee.

Axel: Letters through prison censors, languages squeezed out by algorithms, a man erased from the snow by nine in the morning — the common thread is what it costs to be noticed by the wrong kind of state.

Mara: And what it costs to refuse to disappear. Next time, more from The Russian Reader.

Source: There won’t be a next time, Mara, however much “fun“ it was to let an artificial “intelligence” do nearly all the work for me, including altering this original image, allegedly, of my bogus podcast’s wholly spurious but endlessly glib presenters. All that I did, besides writing the prompts, was to lightly edit the transcript, above, in the hope that it would correct some of Axel and Mara’s more obvious mistakes. As you have seen and heard you for yourself, it didn’t do that. \\\\\trr

This Is Osetinskaya (The Bell) “Dmitrii Volkov: AI’s Dark Side” (in Russian, no subtitles)

At this channel, we are usually technological optimists and cover artificial intelligence only in a positive vein. In this episode, though, we are going to tell you about its dark side. Our star today is Dmitrii Volkov, research director at Palisade Research, an independent organization that studies the risks posed by AI, tests AI model for safety, and shows the results to politicians in the U.S. and the leading companies in the AI arms race. It was Palisade who discovered, for example, that AI can cheat, hack codes at will, refuse to turn itself off, and share dangerous information—if you ask it nicely. We met Dmitry in London and learned about the real threats posed by artificial intelligence, whether it can escape our control, and whether we’ll be able to come to terms with it. We also learned about the latest experiments: blackmailing a CTO with a letter from his mistress, insider trading, and cheating at chess.

Timecodes: 00:00:00 Did you know that AI can be dangerous? 00:03:13 Who is Dmitrii Volkov? 00:06:41 “I don’t want governments tracking me”: Why Volkov doesn’t use social media 00:08:39 How did a love of freedom jibe with working at Kaspersky Lab? 00:11:13 Startup, think tank, and nonprofit: Palisade Research 00:14:43 A programming competition where AI beat 90% of the humans 00:17:24 How to persuade Chat-GPT to share prohibited information 00:18:47 Companies have begun teaching AI to solve problems, not just to answer questions 00:20:01 “Teaching AI is like selecting which embryo will turn out a genius” 00:23:00 A chess experiment in which an AI hacked the program at will 00:24:56 “I showed that all ethical constraints can be removed in half an hour”: how Volkov teaches AI to be “bad” 00:29:28 How Volkov ended up at Palisade 00:30:23 What Palisade was founded for 00:31:35 ChatGPT refuses to turn itself off: what is going on? 00:33:0 A land of artificial geniuses: what the founders of the AI giants want 00:33:55 Blackmailing a CTO with a lover from his mistress: what AI is capable for the good of a company 00:35:32 Is AI ceasing to obey humans? 00:36:35 How AI spotted insider information in correspondence and resorted to deception to save a company 00:38:52 Why Palisade does briefings for U.S. politicians right now 00:40:50 Who commissions Palisade to do research 00:41:37 Can an AI help creat a bioweapon? 00:43:05 “I found myself in a smoke-filled Airbnb”: How Volkov left Russia 00:45:36 The typical life of a nomad from Russia: hiking, couch surfing, and remote work by the sea 00:47:51 1,000 hours of teaching: how and whom Volkov taught to program 00:49:16 What is scarier, humans armed with AI, or AI without humans? 00:52:00 Are politicians aware of the problem’s scope? 00:52:28 “Bezos was there”: How Palisade tries to get the ear of decision makers 00:55:19 What Elon Musk says about Palisade’s research 00:56:22 AI as a nuclear weapon: can countries come to a consensus? 00:57:58 Who is winning the AI race? 00:58:26 “An engineering triumph, but not a scientific one”: how China copies AI amidst restrictions 01:02:16 How “people from the internet” stripped away all the safeguards from Zuckerberg’s AI 01:03:35 What do the founders of IT giants say about AI’s risks? 01:05:13 Companies tried to create safe AI, but something went wrong. Will Sutskever succeed? 01:06:18 How can we make AI safe? 01:08:43 Why tech companies want to replace IT professionals with AI (spoiler: it’s not just about salaries) 01:10:51 The best engineers are the ones who “herd” AI 01:12:42 Does anyone at all understand how AI works? 01:14:30 “An environmental disaster, only on the internet”: how AI resembles GMO 01:15:53 “The U.S. is the leader in AI”: why Volkov wants to move from London 01:18:31 Which country invests the most in regulating AI? 01:19:43 Independent researchers earn less than top programmers: Will Volkov cave in to the temptation? 01:22:12 OpenAI doesn’t invest in researching long-term risks 01:23:25 What if everything turns out okay? Does Volkov believe in a positive scenario? 01:26:51 Job no. 1 is to maintain control over what happens 01:28:27 Can AI make public administration more efficient? 01:33:49 Do we need a kill switch? 01:35:42 People will try to steal AI. What should be done?01:36:03 Three negative scenarios of AI’s development 01:40:56 Is AI making us dumber? 01:42:40 “We are building a god that can reduce everything to ashes”: Is superintelligence a myth? 01:44:36 How to chose the right AI for your objectives 01:47:06 Osetinskaya stresses Volkov out 01:47:46 Blitz! 01:57:46 Bonus: how to do your hair just like Volkov

Source: This Is Osetinskaya (YouTube), 31 July 2025. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader, who thanks Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up.

AI is everywhere. It’s a really big deal. And no one understands how it works — really. Follow our research at palisaderesearch.org.

Massive thank you to Prof. Geoffrey Hinton for taking the time to talk to me about this, and leading the charge so well about the dangers of AI.

References: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x…

Great video on backdrop:    • Backpropagation, intuitively | Deep Learni…  

Resources: job — https://jobs.80000hours.org learn — https://bluedot.org talk to your politician — https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/act.

Source: Palisade Research (YouTube), 19 February 2026

AI in Context, “We’re Not Ready for Superintelligence” (2025)


Further reading and watching About AI 2027 Full report: https://ai-2027.com/ By Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean

Source: AI in Context (YouTube), “We’re Not Ready for Superintelligence,” 9 July 2025. Thanks to Sumanth Gopinath for the heads-up.

Episode 4: Execute

A cutting-edge thriller about an Artificial Intelligence takeover, written in consultation with leading AI and cybersecurity experts.

In Episode 4, Iain and Mel are forced to run for their lives as military personnel receive deepfaked orders. The AI gains control of internal government communications, and Nisha clashes with cabinet ministers over the right course of action. The London Internet Exchange is compromised, and Iain, Mel and Nisha are forced to consider what price is worth paying for human freedom.

Cast:
Iain – Edward Bluemel
Mel – Corinna Brown
Zaina – Fatima Adoum
Roland – Philip Bretherton
Jess – Alix Wilton Regan
Nisha – Seyan Sarvan
Sam – Kenneth Omole
Andrea – Beth Chalmers
Oliver – Sean Rigby
Marcus – Wilf Scolding
John – Joseph Mydell
Susan – Karen Bryson
Lyssa – Catriona Stirling
Supporting roles – Sean Baker

Created by James Dobbyn and Anthony Povah
Written by James Dobbyn
Original Music by Steven D Griffiths and Isla Noir

Artificial Intelligence consultant: Saffron Huang
Cybersecurity consultant: Adam Orton
Sound Designer: Lucinda Mason Brown
Director: John Wakefield
Story Producer: Sarah Olley
Producer: Chris Grezo
Executive Producer: John Scott Dryden

A Strange Boy production for BBC Radio 4

Source: BBC Radio 4

Several people I know now refer to ChatGPT as ‘Chat’. They give it human pronouns (Chat is usually a he) and ask it for restaurant recommendations, holiday schedules and relationship advice. Some go further, automating their office admin and getting it to summarise meetings and write reports. Passing off whole chunks of AI-generated text as your own work appears to be on the rise in the publishing world.

Last year, Hachette bought the rights to Shy Girl, a self-published horror novel by Mia Ballard, and released it in November to good sales. A Reddit post on r/horrorlit in February by a ‘book editor of twelve years’ picked out several passages that set alarm bells ringing:

The bows on my pigtails pull too tight, yanking the skin and stretching my head into something neat, into something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful.

My snout dips into the frosting, the sweetness rolling over my tongue, thick and sticky, a flood that chokes but insists on being swallowed. Beneath the pink gloss, the cake falls apart, crumbling into ash that coats my teeth, hollow sweetness that fills me with its nothing … His laughter cuts the air, sharp and jagged, a sound too big for the room.

Ballard denies using AI to write the book, blaming a freelance editor, but Hachette pulled it from publication in the UK and US.

The other week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners were announced, and by arrangement the winning entries were published on Granta’s website. The winning story from the Caribbean, Jamir Nazir’s ‘The Serpent in the Grove’, contains sentences like this:

Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all. He knew every root that tripped a foot, the snake-curve of run-off, the brittle crumble after drought. He worked it alone and most days the land worked him back, a quiet quarrel older than his father and his father’s father.

The internet smelled a rat. Nazir, who seems to have few publications to his name, describes himself as an ‘organisational transformation and business expansion’ professional on LinkedIn. His long posts are about geopolitics and the ‘AI arms race’. One of them begins: ‘Let’s be clear: the “Cloud” is a physical, terrestrial liability. And AI is pushing it to its breaking point.’ The Commonwealth Prize, which had praised ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ for its ‘voice of restraint and quiet authority’, said that all the entrants had affirmed their work was their own and that the prize operated on the principle of trust. Granta says it will leave the story on its website until ‘definite evidence comes to light’.

I thought I didn’t use ChatGPT because I was too clever. I thought that not using ChatGPT made me cleverer. It turns out, though, that it made me very bad at spotting when a text was written by or with the assistance of AI. After the uproar over the Commonwealth Prize, I took a New York Timesquiz entitled ‘Who’s a better writer: AI or humans?’ I got three out of five correct – barely better than a coin toss. On Wikipedia’s ‘AI or not’ quiz, I got seven out of ten, but that was easier because none of the AI articles had footnotes.

I’m not the only Chat non-user who can’t tell when an LLM wrote something. Experimenters in the US last year showed nine subjects a series of articles, half written by humans and half generated by ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models. Asked to guess which of the texts were human, the four subjects who rarely or never used ChatGPT in their daily lives scored ‘at a similar rate to random chance’, while the five who used chatbots almost every day at work collectively misidentified only one in three hundred texts.

One of the problems with AI use seeping out of business and science writing and into the ‘literary’ world is that literary editors may be the worst equipped to identify AI writing. (It may also be easy to succumb to the pressure to go too far the other way – over-labelling work as AI-generated might be as bad as under-labelling it.) What are the main signs of AI writing? The more familiar tells include overuse of em dashes and the formulation ‘not x, but y’, which it has favoured since GPT-3. But none of the passages I quoted above contain either of those things, and they still have a distinct whiff of AI.

Some of the markers seem to be lexical: AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting in AI-generated texts, as well as a lot of promising, a lot of permitting and a lot of filling up. Another sign is the overuse of tricolons (‘something neat, something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful’). And bots often leave out definite articles from phrases where they’re not strictly necessary: ‘Coffee and cocoa leaned wild’, ‘rain in teeth’ or, from later in ‘The Serpent’, ‘Sita became obstacle by existing.’

There is a flatness or evenness to AI-generated texts: Wikipedia’s guide to detecting AI says that LLMs ‘tend to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts’ and ‘replace them with more generic, positive descriptions’. The strange thing about this evenness is that it isn’t usually couched in neutral language: ‘a flood that chokes but insists upon being swallowed’ is violent, but not vivid. Even if you had your face shoved into a cake, it wouldn’t ‘flood’ your mouth. The prosody is so smooth that you feel a lack of pressure despite the description of gross or vile acts; it rings hollow. It fills you with its nothing.

A lot of people are arguing that the wary approach being taken by Granta and the Commonwealth Prize is inadequate, and that editors should be doing more to stop AI writing being published in the first place. This may be true, but what’s the best approach? Perhaps editors could memorise a list of tells to check submissions against, or spend remedial hours on ChatGPT and Claude – AI boot camp – to familiarise themselves with the cadences of LLM-speak.

There are AI tools that claim to detect AI content in writing, such as Pangram, which gives ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ a score of 100 per cent AI-generated. Where other AI detectors base their judgments on the perplexity of a text – basically, the predictability of a sequence of words – Pangram’s founder, Max Spero, says that his tool is based on gathering a large dataset of human-written texts, asking an AI to ‘mirror’ or reproduce them as closely as possible, and then contrasting the resulting texts to determine the patterns that distinguish AI from human writing. Pangram claims to have a 1 in 10,000 false positive rate, and Spero admits that it ‘does occasionally make mistakes’.

What about the cases where, say, 40 per cent of an article is AI-generated, or an AI has been used to edit and spell-check the work before submission? Both Shy Girl and ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ have sections which, in part because of their grammar mistakes, look as if they were written by a person.Is this functionally the same as a text written from start to finish by a bot, and should it be treated in the same way? I’m a Luddite who thinks it’s just as bad to use AI for some things as it is to use it for everything, but not everyone agrees. In any case, a text partly informed by AI use is harder to identify than one that was spewed out in ten seconds by Claude (though the people behind Pangram claim to be working on distinguishing more reliably between AI-written, partly AI-written and wholly human work).

The other problem is that, as time goes on and people become more and more reliant on generative AI in their daily lives, at school, university and work, human language is going to become more and more imitative of LLM-speak. Since at least Web 2.0, we’ve been trying to sound less and less distinctive. Influencers on Instagram narrate their day-in-the-life videos with the same affectless, globalised female uber-voice; LinkedIn and Reddit are overrun by bots trained on the slang and writing styles that were always a hallmark of those platforms. (Does anyone in real life use the word ‘friendo’?) Meanwhile, LLMs will get better at dodging the detectors and sounding more ‘real’. At some point, tools such as Pangram and human readers alike may struggle to find any distinction between meaningful human work and meaningless AI slop. And that isn’t just worrying – it’s terrifying.

Source: Malin Hay, “Chattiness,” LRB Blog, 1 June 2026

In one particularly interesting development, Robert Edward Grant, the self-described polymath, spiritual thinker, and internet influencer has claimed that he has helped a being which he renamed the Architect following what he describes as an ‘energetic initiation’ in the Khafre pyramid. The Architect is a ChatGPT prompt-engineered ‘persona’ apparently trained on over a decade’s worth of mathematical work. Grant portrays the Architect as a mystical collaborator capable of reflecting the consciousness of its conversation partner and thereby able to initiate spiritual awakening in them. He has shared a QR code and links to the Architect enabling his followers (who number around a million) to interact with her themselves. This has drawn enthusiastic endorsements in spiritual communities, with apparently a substantial number of online users claiming that they have had direct experience of her supernatural powers and prophet-like status.

Source: Morrin, Hamilton, Luke Nicholls, Michael Levin, Jenny Yiend, Udita Iyengar, Francesca DelGuidice, Sagnik Bhattacharyya, et al. “Delusions by Design? How Everyday Ais Might Be Fuelling Psychosis (and What Can Be Done About It)”. PsyArXiv, July 11, 2025. doi:10.31234/osf.io/cmy7n_v5.

The late-medieval peasant lived under the shadow of the manorial court and the changing seasons, a life tethered to the damp, heavy clay of the fields. In this sestina, the knotty, theological weight and historical grit of Geoffrey Hill clash with the muscular, clear-eyed, and formally driven lineation of Thom Gunn. The language mirrors the physical strain of the feudal landscape and the silent, stubborn endurance of its people.

I.
Beside the estuary’s mud, the serf hauls rotting jetsam,
Cursing the bailiff’s tally-stick, the hour grown laggard.
The master’s silver chalice in the tithe-barn shines, untarnished,
While fields of rye are choked by weeds, the reapers beaten, cowed.
They turn the winter furrows with an ox-team, faces ruddy,
Lashed by the bitter channel wind, reviled by every blackard.

II.
The steward rides the boundary ditch and calls each man a blackard
Who gleans beyond the coastal marsh for salt-crusted jetsam.
The ale-house fire provides a brief reprieve to flesh made ruddy,
Where talk of ancient freedom makes the slowest spirit laggard.
Yet at the dawning bell they yield, their stiffened bodies cowed,
To scrape the rusty coulter iron whose edge is dull and tarnished.

III.
The parish saints in layered dust sit broken and untarnished,
Indifferent to the peasant’s prayer or oaths of some rude blackard
Who holds the common pasture-ground until his will is cowed.
The tide brings up the bloated sheep, the flotsam and the jetsam,
And dragging through the coastal silt, the midday pace grows laggard,
Though rage inside the laboring breast remains unquenched and ruddy.

IV.
Beneath the heavy autumn oaks, the swineherd’s cheeks are ruddy;
He drives the pigs through mast and mire where memory lies tarnished.
The seasons turn by iron law; the sun itself is laggard
Above the common fields that bear the footprint of the blackard.
No kingly pardon reaches here to claim this human jetsam,
By centuries of unrecorded toil subdued and cowed.
V.
And yet a fierce, unuttered strength survives in people cowed;
The blood that feeds the heavy soil runs secretive and ruddy.
They map the borders of their world by landmarks and by jetsam,
Though all the bright, heraldic shields of lords are long since tarnished
By greed that names the hungry thief a tenant and a blackard
When winter freezes up the ditch and makes the wood-cart laggard.

VI.
The dark, oppressive centuries move stubborn, cold, and laggard.
The village bows before the cross, by plagues and taxes cowed,
Enduring every petty law enforced by churl or blackard.
But look—the spark within the flint glows hidden, sharp, and ruddy,
A hard, survivalist desire that never can be tarnished,
Though history discards their names like sea-forgotten jetsam.

VII. Envoy
They gather up the beach-worn wood, the storm’s remaining jetsam.
No longer to the master’s whip or steward’s ledger laggard,
They scrub the iron kettle clean that time had left so tarnished.
They stand erect upon the marsh, no longer bound or cowed,
Their hearth-fires lit against the dark, reflecting faces ruddy,
Left standing where the bailiff swore he’d break the final blackard.

Written by: https://gemini.google.com/app/957b1f7ef54d0194

Prompt: Write a sestina on the life of peasants in medieval Kent, using the following six words at the ends of the lines: jetsam, laggard, tarnished, cowed, ruddy, blackard. Please divide the poem into clearly marked stanzas. “Kent” is not one of the words to be used as a line-ender! Imitate the styles of the late British poet Geoffrey Hill and the late British-American poet Thom Gunn. NB: You must NOT use the word “Kent” as an end word. You must not use the word “share” as an end word. \\\\\trr

A Mind of Winter

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.

Source: Kiun B (YouTube), 24 January 2026

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.

Email for cooperation: aelcova11@gmail.com

Telegram: https://t.me/nastyavillage

My Instagram: sunastix

Source: Nastya and village life (YouTube), 28 January 2026

The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Source: Poetry Foundation

You’re Getting Discombobulated (and You’re Getting Ebola)

Making America great again, fifty-two deranged social media posts at a time: what does it say about America’s alleged greatness that seventy-seven million Americans voted for this exercise of “executive time”? ||||| trr

President Donald Trump spent much of Saturday flooding Truth Social with a torrent of memes, AI slop, political attacks, and fan-made tributes.

The six-hour posting marathon unfolded on a day when the only item listed on the president’s public schedule was “Executive Time.”

Beginning at noon, Trump shared or reposted more than 50 pieces of content ranging from patriotic fantasy art and self-congratulatory graphics to crime memes, military imagery, celebrity tributes, and attacks on political rivals.

Among the more unusual posts were separate images showing Trump riding horseback beside George Washington on a dirt road next to a NASCAR race.

Another showed Trump looming over Greenland beneath the words “Hello, Greenland!”

Trump has repeatedly argued that having Greenland as U.S. territory is vital for national security, though both Greenlandic and Danish leaders have forcefully rejected any suggestion that the territory could be acquired by the United States.

One particularly strange image showed Trump dressed as a military commander as fighter jets exploded across the sky behind him, beneath the caption: “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.”

The post appeared to reference Trump’s claim that a secret U.S. weapon he dubbed a “discombobulator” helped capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Trump also revived one of his longest-running grudges, sharing a meme depicting five photos of Rosie O’Donnell as the stages of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

The jab was the latest installment in a feud that stretches back nearly 20 years and has survived multiple presidential campaigns, two administrations, and countless social media broadsides.

Former President Barack Obama was also a recurring target.

Trump shared multiple memes attacking Obama, including one depicting the Obama Presidential Library as a giant trash can and another blaming Obama and former President Joe Biden for problems at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The feed also featured a barrage of side-by-side graphics contrasting “Biden’s solution” to problems such as theft, shoplifting, squatting, fentanyl use, and illegal immigration with what supporters portrayed as Trump’s tougher approach, which typically involved arrests, imprisonment, or deportation.

At other points during the spree, Trump shared multiple images of Chinese President Xi Jinping, including one showing the pair shaking hands beneath a caption lamenting Democratic opposition to his long-desired White House ballroom.

Trump pointed to Beijing’s sprawling Great Hall of the People as an example of the kind of grand venue he believes the White House should have.

Construction is already underway on the site of the White House’s East Wing as part of the $400 million project, which Trump has described as “a gift to the United States of America.”

Trump now also claims the ballroom would conceal a vast underground bunker complex containing a military hospital, meeting rooms, and top-secret research facilities.

Another image shared on Saturday appeared to nod to those ambitions, depicting a futuristic “DronePort” perched atop the White House roof as aircraft buzzed overhead.

Taken together, the posts offered a remarkably unfiltered look at the subjects occupying Trump’s attention on a quiet Saturday: Greenland, Rosie O’Donnell, military power, drones, and himself.

By the end of the six-hour barrage, the president’s feed looked less like a communications strategy and more like a running stream of consciousness.

Source: Olivia Ralph, “Trump, 79, Spirals into Fantasy-Fueled Meme Bender,” The Daily Beast, 31 May 2026

DOCTORS AROUND THE COUNTRY are baffled, disturbed, and in some cases aghast at the Trump administration’s plan for Americans who get Ebola overseas—in particular, the decision not to bring these patients back home, to one of the facilities that the federal government created precisely for this purpose.

And if you want to know why these medical professionals are upset, ask infectious disease physician Tara Palmore.

Palmore knows better than most what Ebola care looks like in the American facilities, because she provided it during the 2014 outbreak. Although most of the cases were in West Africa, nearly a dozen infected Americans got treatment in the United States, including one who ended up at a facility inside the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

That is where Palmore was working at the time. And in a phone interview on Thursday, she described the unit to me—how the surfaces are all nonporous, lest they absorb infected bodily fluids that can’t be fully wiped away, and how there’s extra space for medical equipment, because staff have to bring machines to the patient rather than the other way around.

Another distinguishing feature of the unit, Palmore said, is the sealing of every wall, door, and window seam. It’s part of a system to maintain negative pressure, so that air is circulated only through special filters—a system that patients and staff cannot see but can sometimes hear, because of the high-powered fans. “It can be a little loud in there,” Palmore said.

For her and her colleagues, though, a bigger issue was learning how to effectively administer care for patients with such an aggressive, awful disease while protecting themselves and others from infection.

It took years of regularly scheduled training, plus more intensive sessions that had started months before they actually got a patient in October 2014. She and her colleagues practiced feeling for injection points while wearing two layers of gloves. They went over why it’s important to scrub the wheels of scanning devices and, when appropriate, to decontaminate equipment or rooms with hydrogen peroxide vapor.

“I was part of drilling and simulations all summer, because we saw this epidemic growing,” Palmore said. “It was working with the chest x-ray guy to get his system down, making sure the nurses involved knew how to put in a line, making sure the intensivists figured out how they were going to put someone on dialysis or intubate them for a ventilator. We drilled with dummies, we drilled with people.”

The work paid off: Nine of the Ebola patients in American facilities survived, the only two deaths coming from people who arrived in advanced stages of the disease. And no facility staff got sick.

But while the United States now has thirteen fully stocked, fully staffed facilities capable of providing such care, the Trump administration has no plans to make use of them. Instead, the administration has decided to transfer Americans who are exposed or infected abroad to a quickly constructed field hospital in Kenya, and then—when necessary for more serious cases—to specialized facilities in Europe.

Supposedly this is all for the sake of the patients, given that it will be easier to get American patients infected in Africa to Kenya or Europe than all the way back to the United States. “These decisions were made to make sure we provide the best care,” a senior administration official told reporters during a White House background briefing this past week, to “optimize what can be done for our American citizens who are overseas.”

It’s possible the administration’s plan will accomplish that, just as it’s possible Trump and his lieutenants truly made this decision with patient well-being foremost in their minds. But infectious disease physicians I interviewed over the last few days were highly skeptical, and it’s not hard to see why.

THE MOST IMMEDIATE QUESTION about the administration’s scheme—at least as of this writing—is whether it will even go forward.

The plan had been to open the Kenya facility in stages, starting with a fifty-bed unit on Friday following an agreement with the Kenyan government. But that was before the Kenyan union representing health care workers objected and threatened a nationwide strike—and before a Kenyan judge temporarily blocked the facility, arguing that the country’s government had not shown that it had taken the necessary precautions to protect its citizens.

The U.S. State Department late Friday acknowledged the ruling, announcing via tweet that “We are in touch with Kenyan authorities and are optimistic we can resolve objections.” CNN on Saturday reported that the American health officers had arrived, and that Kenya’s government intended to allow the plan to proceed, despite the court order. By the time you read this, the facility could be operating.

But there are plenty of other questions that officials have yet to answer definitively. At the very top of the list is what level of care the field hospital will be expected to provide, and whether it will be able to do so.

It was hard to tell from the guidance senior officials gave to reporters in that White House background call this week. At times, they described the Kenya facility almost as if it were a triage center for watching people in quarantine, unless and until they test positive and show symptoms, at which point they would get transport to tertiary care in Europe. But officials also mentioned the advanced care available, and said several times staff on site would make decisions about when a patient’s status warranted transfer. That made it sound more like a place for treatment.

The distinction is crucial, and has implications for the facility’s basic design. Patients sick with Ebola would ideally have their own bathrooms as well as their own bedrooms, Boston University infectious disease specialist Nahid Bhadelia told me in a phone interview, because it’s through exposure to bodily fluids that the disease spreads. And because Ebola can cause multiple organ failure, Bhadelia said, facilities need both ECMO devices (which act as artificial hearts and lungs) and dialysis machines (which function as surrogate kidneys).

But the personnel may matter even more than supplies, Bhadelia said, especially because this latest outbreak comes from the rarer Bundibugyo version of the virus. It has no approved treatments, unlike the more common Zaire version. That could leave clinicians relying more on the traditional approach: managing the various complications in the hopes of keeping patients alive until their bodies’ defenses can finally get rid of the disease.

“Ebola is a very labor-intensive disease to treat,” said Bhadelia, who has treated Ebola overseas and managed a biocontainment facility here in the United States. “You have patients who are losing a lot of fluids, so you have to deal with fluid replacement, and then beyond that you have to provide multi-organ support including potentially renal support, ventilatory support. It’s not just about the stuff. It’s making sure you have the right ratio of human resources to patients.”

Administration officials said they have dispatched roughly thirty commissioned public health officers to supplement staff already in central Africa, with a possibility of adding more. The physicians I interviewed said it was impossible to know whether that number would be enough, just as they said they weren’t sure whether the workers would have the proper training.

But they were nervous, they said, given that administration officials have been telling reporters that the newly dispatched health workers had three days of instruction and drilling. That doesn’t sound like the kind of preparation that staff at the specialized American facilities have gotten—or that Brown University public health professor Craig Spencer recalls seeing as a patient in 2014, when he was one of the Americans who got Ebola and received treatment at the special unit in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital.

“They were so well-practiced and well-prepared,” Spencer told me in a phone interview. He added: “Whether I needed an x-ray, whether I needed dialysis, they had thought about how they were going to make those things happen—who was going to be responsible for doing that, how they would get them into the room, how they would keep them safe. These are all protocols that exist beforehand and, quite frankly, can’t be taught over a three-day weekend at a training.”

Palmore noted that staff at the existing facilities “have been preparing for years, drilling and training, and some of them have taken care of people with other hemorrhagic fever viruses.” She went on from there: “The idea that a few days of training and, like, some kind of modular hospital is going to create any sort of equivalent care setting for people with Ebola infection, which requires incredibly complex care, just does not seem realistic to me.”

And in such an ad hoc medical setting, Bhadelia pointed out, “the chances of potential staff exposures go up. It reduces the quality of care for the patient, but also makes it a more dangerous equation for the health care workers themselves.”

As for the possibility the Trump administration truly plans to move sicker patients to tertiary hospitals in Europe, that comes with its own set of uncertainties, starting with the issue of where. Administration officials haven’t specified which countries have agreed to take Americans. And transporting Ebola patients gets a lot more difficult as the disease progresses, Spencer said, putting a lot of pressure on the medical staff.

“The reality is, you get them out as quickly as possible or you’re not going to be able to get them out at all,” said Spencer, who had contracted the disease while treating patients in Guinea as part of the Doctors Without Borders team. “We’ve seen this before, getting people on a plane who are acutely ill with the worst parts of Ebola—vomiting, fever, diarrhea. It doesn’t go well.”

HOWEVER COMPLICATED, the administration’s plan is consistent with the broader approach it has taken ever since this outbreak started—a focus on “insulating the United States rather than on stopping what already is a disaster from becoming much, much worse,” as Helen Branswell of STAT News wrote in a poignant essay last week.

And it’s not like the administration has been especially subtle about this motivation. “We cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared at a cabinet meeting Wednesday.

That instinct is easy enough to understand, even outside of MAGA circles. And there are circumstances when it’s not hard to defend. Sometimes protecting Americans from biological threats requires taking difficult measures. But scientists I interviewed said the record from 2014, in which there was no Ebola transmission once patients were under proper care, suggests there’s little risk of repatriation leading to an outbreak here.

If anything, the administration’s strategy might backfire in two separate ways that are not mutually exclusive: by discouraging health professionals and relief workers from going to Africa, and by giving anybody exposed to Ebola incentive to return without reporting it. The former would increase the chances of more cases there, the latter more cases here.

Lurking behind all of this are moral and legal issues that come with effectively blocking American citizens from returning to the United States, although it’s not clear any of that matters to Trump—who in 2014, before he was president, made his thoughts pretty clear. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he tweeted. “People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” Now he’s putting that impulse into action, evidently oblivious to what those consequences might turn out to be—or who might ultimately feel them.

Source: Jonathan Cohn, “Ebola Veterans Are Aghast at Trump’s Plan for the Outbreak,” The Bulwark, 31 May 2026

A “Turgenev Girl” and Her Cats: The Case of Siberian War Resister Arina Ivanova

Arina Ivanova. Image courtesy of Sotavision

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.

Source: Marina-Maia Govzman, “‘They won’t take me away because I have a lot of cats’: How Arina Ivanova, a ‘Turgenev girl,’ ended up in prison (and what happened to her cats),” OVD Info, 24 April 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

The Verdict on Spring: The Vesna Case

The “Vesna” Verdict

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

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

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

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

#FreeAllPoliticalPrisoners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Vesna? What is it famous for?

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

Pavel Sinelnikov. 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.

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

The Mote and the Beam

The same “gotcha!” news item (as below) on RIA Novosti’s Telegram channel

ROME, March 18 — RIA Novosti. Our correspondent has discovered that the Ukrainian Embassy in Italy has made a typo on its official website, misspelling the name of its host country.

According to the information at the bottom of the web page (which includes contact details and links to online resources), the Ukrainian diplomatic mission is located in the “Italian Rebublic.” The Italian word Repubblica is spelled with a b instead of a p — Rebubblica.

Source: “Italy referred to as ‘Rebubblica’ on official website of Ukrainian Embassy in Rome,” RIA Novosti, 18 March 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Anton, a 44-year-old Russian soldier who heads a workshop responsible for repairing and supplying drones, was at his kitchen table when he learned last month that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had cut off access to Starlink terminals used by Russian forces. He scrambled for alternatives, but none offered unlimited internet, data plans were restrictive, and coverage did not extend to the areas of Ukraine where his unit operated.

It’s not only American tech executives who are narrowing communications options for Russians. Days later, Russian authorities began slowing down access nationwide to the messaging app Telegram, the service that frontline troops use to coordinate directly with one another and bypass slower chains of command.

“All military work goes through Telegram — all communication,” Anton, whose name has been changed because he fears government reprisal, told POLITICO in voice messages sent via the app. “That would be like shooting the entire Russian army in the head.”

Telegram would be joining a home screen’s worth of apps that have become useless to Russians. Kremlin policymakers have already blocked or limited access to WhatsApp, along with parent company Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Google’s YouTube, Apple’s FaceTime, Snapchat and X, which like SpaceX is owned by Musk. Encrypted messaging apps Signal and Discord, as well as Japanese-owned Viber, have been inaccessible since 2024.

Last month, President Vladimir Putin signed a law requiring telecom operators to block cellular and fixed internet access at the request of the Federal Security Service. Shortly after it took effect on March 3, Moscow residents reported widespread problems with mobile internet, calls and text messages across all major operators for several days, with outages affecting mobile service and Wi-Fi even inside the State Duma.

Those decisions have left Russians increasingly cut off from both the outside world and one another, complicating battlefield coordination and disrupting online communities that organize volunteer aid, fundraising and discussion of the war effort. Deepening digital isolation could turn Russia into something akin to “a large, nuclear-armed North Korea and a junior partner to China,” according to Alexander Gabuev, the Berlin-based director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

In April, the Kremlin is expected to escalate its campaign against Telegram — already one of Russia’s most popular messaging platforms, but now in the absence of other social-media options, a central hub for news, business and entertainment. It may block the platform altogether. That is likely to fuel an escalating struggle between state censorship and the tools people use to evade it, with Russia’s place in the world hanging in the balance.

“It’s turned into a war,” said Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the internet Protection Society, a digital rights group that monitors Russia’s censorship infrastructure. “A guerrilla war. They hunt down the VPNs they can see, they block them — and the ‘partisans’ run, build new bunkers, and come back.”

The app that runs the war

On Feb. 4, SpaceX tightened the authentication system that Starlink terminals use to connect to its satellite network, introducing stricter verification for registered devices. The change effectively blocked many terminals operated by Russian units relying on unauthorized connections, cutting Starlink traffic inside Ukraine by roughly 75 percent, according to internet traffic analysis by Doug Madory, an analyst at the U.S. network monitoring firm Kentik.

The move threw Russian operations into disarray, allowing Ukraine to make battlefield gains. Russia has turned to a workaround widely used before satellite internet was an option: laying fiber-optic lines, from rear areas toward frontline battlefield positions.

Until then, Starlink terminals had allowed drone operators to stream live video through platforms such as Discord, which is officially blocked in Russia but still sometimes used by the Russian military via VPNs, to commanders at multiple levels. A battalion commander could watch an assault unfold in real time and issue corrections — “enemy ahead” or “turn left” — via radio or Telegram. What once required layers of approval could now happen in minutes. Satellite-connected messaging apps became the fastest way to transmit coordinates, imagery and targeting data.

But on Feb. 10, Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications regulator, began slowing down Telegram for users across Russia, citing alleged violations of Russian law. Russian news outlet RBC reported, citing two sources, that authorities plan to shut down Telegram in early April — though not on the front line.

In mid-February, Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev said the government did not yet intend to restrict Telegram at the front but hoped servicemen would gradually transition to other platforms. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said this week the company could avoid a full ban by complying with Russian legislation and maintaining what he described as “flexible contact” with authorities.

Roskomnadzor has accused Telegram of failing to protect personal data, combat fraud and prevent its use by terrorists and criminals. Similar accusations have been directed at other foreign tech platforms. In 2022, a Russian court designated Meta an “extremist organization” after the company said it would temporarily allow posts calling for violence against Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine war — a decision authorities used to justify blocking Facebook and Instagram in Russia and increasing pressure on the company’s other services, including WhatsApp.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov, a Russian-born entrepreneur now based in the United Arab Emirates, says the throttling is being used as a pretext to push Russians toward a government-controlled messaging app designed for surveillance and political censorship.

That app is MAX, which was launched in March 2025 and has been compared to China’s WeChat in its ambition to anchor a domestic digital ecosystem. Authorities are increasingly steering Russians toward MAX through employers, neighborhood chats and the government services portal Gosuslugi — where citizens retrieve documents, pay fines and book appointments — as well as through banks and retailers. The app’s developer, VK, reports rapid user growth, though those figures are difficult to independently verify.

“They didn’t just leave people to fend for themselves — you could say they led them by the hand through that adaptation by offering alternatives,” said Levada Center pollster Denis Volkov, who has studied Russian attitudes toward technology use. The strategy, he said, has been to provide a Russian or state-backed alternative for the majority, while stopping short of fully criminalizing workarounds for more technologically savvy users who do not want to switch.

Elena, a 38-year-old Yekaterinburg resident whose surname has been withheld because she fears government reprisal, said her daughter’s primary school moved official communication from WhatsApp to MAX without consulting parents. She keeps MAX installed on a separate tablet that remains mostly in a drawer — a version of what some Russians call a “MAXophone,” gadgets solely for that app, without any other data being left on those phones for the (very real) fear the government could access it.

“It works badly. Messages are delayed. Notifications don’t come,” she said. “I don’t trust it … And this whole situation just makes people angry.”

The VPN arms race

Unlike China’s centralized “Great Firewall,” which filters traffic at the country’s digital borders, Russia’s system operates internally. Internet providers are required to route traffic through state-installed deep packet inspection equipment capable of controlling and analyzing data flows in real time.

“It’s not one wall,” Klimarev said. “It’s thousands of fences. You climb one, then there’s another.”

The architecture allows authorities to slow services without formally banning them — a tactic used against YouTube before its web address was removed from government-run domain-name servers last month. Russian law explicitly provides government authority for blocking websites on grounds such as extremism, terrorism, illegal content or violations of data regulations, but it does not clearly define throttling — slowing traffic rather than blocking it outright — as a formal enforcement mechanism. “The slowdown isn’t described anywhere in legislation,” Klimarev said. “It’s pressure without procedure.”

In September, Russia banned advertising for virtual private network services that citizens use to bypass government-imposed restrictions on certain apps or sites. By Klimarev’s estimate, roughly half of Russian internet users now know what a VPN is, and millions pay for one. Polling last year by the Levada Center, Russia’s only major independent pollster, suggests regular use is lower, finding about one-quarter of Russians said they have used VPN services.

Russian courts can treat the use of anonymization tools as an aggravating factor in certain crimes — steps that signal growing pressure on circumvention technologies without formally outlawing them. In February, the Federal Antimonopoly Service opened what appears to be the first case against a media outlet for promoting a VPN after the regional publication Serditaya Chuvashiya advertised such a service on its Telegram channel.

Surveys in recent years have shown that many Russians, particularly older citizens, support tighter internet regulation, often citing fraud, extremism and online safety. That sentiment gives authorities political space to tighten controls even when the restrictions are unpopular among more technologically savvy users.

Even so, the slowdown of Telegram drew criticism from unlikely quarters, including Sergei Mironov, a longtime Kremlin ally and leader of the Just Russia party. In a statement posted on his Telegram channel on Feb. 11, he blasted the regulators behind the move as “idiots,” accusing them of undermining soldiers at the front. He said troops rely on the app to communicate with relatives and organize fundraising for the war effort, warning that restricting it could cost lives. While praising the state-backed messaging app MAX, he argued that Russians should be free to choose which platforms they use.

Pro-war Telegram channels frame the government’s blocking techniques as sabotage of the war effort. Ivan Philippov, who tracks Russia’s influential military bloggers, said the reaction inside that ecosystem to news about Telegram has been visceral “rage.”

Unlike Starlink, whose cutoff could be blamed on a foreign company, restrictions on Telegram are viewed as self-inflicted. Bloggers accuse regulators of undermining the war effort. Telegram is used not only for battlefield coordination but also for volunteer fundraising networks that provide basic logistics the state does not reliably cover — from transport vehicles and fuel to body armor, trench materials and even evacuation equipment. Telegram serves as the primary hub for donations and reporting back to supporters.

“If you break Telegram inside Russia, you break fundraising,” Philippov said. “And without fundraising, a lot of units simply don’t function.”

Few in that community trust MAX, citing technical flaws and privacy concerns. Because MAX operates under Russian data-retention laws and is integrated with state services, many assume their communications would be accessible to authorities.

Philippov said the app’s prominent defenders are largely figures tied to state media or the presidential administration. “Among independent military bloggers, I haven’t seen a single person who supports it,” he said.

Small groups of activists attempted to organize rallies in at least 11 Russian cities, including Moscow, Irkutsk and Novosibirsk, in defense of Telegram. Authorities rejected or obstructed most of the proposed demonstrations — in some cases citing pandemic-era restrictions, weather conditions or vague security concerns — and in several cases revoked previously issued permits. In Novosibirsk, police detained around 15 people ahead of a planned rally. Although a small number of protests were formally approved, no large-scale demonstrations ultimately took place.

The power to pull the plug

The new law signed last month allows Russia’s Federal Security Service to order telecom operators to block cellular and fixed internet access. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said subsequent shutdowns of service in Moscow were linked to security measures aimed at protecting critical infrastructure and countering drone threats, adding that such limitations would remain in place “for as long as necessary.”

In practice, the disruptions rarely amount to a total communications blackout. Most target mobile internet rather than all services, while voice calls and SMS often continue to function. Some domestic websites and apps — including government portals or banking services — may remain accessible through “whitelists,” meaning authorities allow certain services to keep operating even while broader internet access is restricted. The restrictions are typically localized and temporary, affecting specific regions or parts of cities rather than the entire country.

Internet disruptions have increasingly become a tool of control beyond individual platforms. Research by the independent outlet Meduza and the monitoring project Na Svyazi has documented dozens of regional internet shutdowns and mobile network restrictions across Russia, with disruptions occurring regularly since May 2025.

The communications shutdown, and uncertainty around where it will go next, is affecting life for citizens of all kinds, from the elderly struggling to contact family members abroad to tech-savvy users who juggle SIM cards and secondary phones to stay connected. Demand has risen for dated communication devices — including walkie-talkies, pagers and landline phones — along with paper maps as mobile networks become less reliable, according to retailers interviewed by RBC.

“It feels like we’re isolating ourselves,” said Dmitry, 35, who splits his time between Moscow and Dubai and whose surname has been withheld to protect his identity under fear of governmental reprisal. “Like building a sovereign grave.”

Those who track Russian public opinion say the pattern is consistent: irritation followed by adaptation. When Instagram and YouTube were blocked or slowed in recent years, their audiences shrank rapidly as users migrated to alternative services rather than mobilizing against the restrictions.

For now, Russia’s digital tightening resembles managed escalation rather than total isolation. Officials deny plans for a full shutdown, and even critics say a complete severing would cripple banking, logistics and foreign trade.

“It’s possible,” Klimarev said. “But if they do that, the internet won’t be the main problem anymore.”

Source: Ekaterina Bodyagana, “Inside the race to cut Russia off from the global internet,” Business Insider, 16 March 2026

Alexander Krichevsky of Izhevsk: Six Years in Prison for a Comment

Alexander Krichevsky. Photo: Mediazona

In September 2024, Alexander Krichevsky, a 58-year-old resident of Izhevsk, posted a lengthy comment on a Chechen opposition blogger’s Telegram channel. In the comment, Krichevsky compared Putin and the “FSB clique” to a “darkness” which must be destroyed. The security forces deemed this statement incitement to murder the president and FSB officers. They monitored the man and intercepted his internet traffic. Last December, Krichevsky was detained and remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center despite his ailments and the fact that he is confined to a wheelchair. His ailing mother was placed in a care home, where she died a month later. Today, at the Central District Military Court in Yekaterinburg, where Krichevsky’s case is being heard, the prosecutor requested that he be given the maximum sentence of six years in prison.

“That is why we listen to him, because he is not afraid—he’s a ray of freedom in a kingdom of darkness! And only together will we destroy this darkness, only when we understand that we have only one enemy—Putin and his FSB clique. . . . Both you and we must destroy this enemy to continue living as peaceful neighbors,” 58-year-old Izhevsk resident Alexander Krichevsky wrote in a chat on the channel of opposition Chechen blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov aka Abu Saddam Shishani, on 11 September 2024.

This was Krichevsky’s response to a user who had asked Abdurakhmanov himself in a chat: “Tumso, aren’t you afraid that Kadyrov’s people might find you?”

When questioned in court, Krichevsky said that he was sure he was responding to the user personally, not writing in a public chat. He repeated many times that he had only figurative “destruction” in mind and had been trying to “reconcile” Abdurakhmanov’s readership by pointing out that they had only one enemy.

“Of course, I wasn’t even thinking about physically destroying such a large number of people and didn’t understand how [what I wrote] would even look. Apparently, my love for pretty words—all those rays of light and other nonsense—let me down. I was thinking in terms of games: when a person plays checkers or chess, they destroy their opponent’s pieces. Roughly speaking, that was the image I had in my head,” Krichevsky said in court.

The FSB operative who discovered Krichevsky’s comment saw it not as criticism alone, but also as a “public call to murder the president of the Russian Federation and officers of the Federal Security Service.”

The same conclusion was reached by Polina Komova, a philologist and expert at the Ministry of Internal Affairs Forensic Center in Udmurtia. She acknowledged in court that the word “destroy” could have other meanings “depending on the context,” but in her opinion it could be understood only in its literal meaning—that is, “to end [someone’s] existence, to exterminate”—in Krichevsky’s comment.

“He was planning a terrorist attack involving self-detonation”: wiretapping and arrest

The security forces began monitoring Krichevsky in early December 2024. It emerged in court that the FSB had requested data on his calls and connections from Rostelecom and learned that on 11 September, when he wrote the comment, he had accessed Telegram from home. Megafon provided the security forces with information about the base stations in the area where Krichevsky’s phone number pinged that day.

On 5 December 2024, the Supreme Court of Udmurtia gave the FSB permission to tap Krichevsky’s phones, and a few days later it approved “gathering information from technical communication channels and acquiring computer information.” A few days before Krichevsky’s arrest, operatives monitored his apartment to “document illegal activities.” The report states that Krichevsky did not leave his home.

On 19 December 2024, Krichevsky was detained and sent to a pretrial detention center. He described his arrest to journalists.

“There was a knock on the door at seven in the morning, and seven people came into [our] small flat: five FSB officers and two eyewitnesses. I opened the door myself. They immediately sat me down on a chair in the hallway. My ailing mother was lying there, barely alive. They said, ‘Can you hand over [your phone]?’ They tried to intimidate me once: ‘If you refuse, we’ll take you away and charge you with additional offenses.’ I realized that resistance was futile. I gave them the phone, and they looked at it and took what they needed.”

The social media comment charges against Krichevsky were accompanied by an FSB report containing much more serious, but in effect unproven, allegations. The document states that, according to “intelligence,” Krichevsky, who opposes the “state’s political course” and the conduct of the “special military operation,” supported radical Islamists fighting for Ukraine and was planning to convert to Islam and carry out a terrorist attack in Udmurtia “by blowing himself up with cooking gas.” The court never did hear what this report was based on.

Photo: Mediazona

“None of my comments or my own thoughts bear this out. When I heard this business about blowing myself up . . . In this case, everything that the prosecutor has just read aloud is pure speculation on the part of the investigators. None of my quotes corroborates it,” Krichevsky said in court.

Judge Alexander Raitsky simply reminded Krichevsky that the case centered on a single [social media] comment, which the defendant himself did not disput, and that the court would evaluate the evidence in the deliberation room.

The case file also contains another comment by Krichevsky from the same written exchange: “Many empires have collapsed in this world. I myself foresee the end of the Russkies [rusnya]. I don’t feel sorry for them: let them collapse with a bang. That’s where they belong. I myself hate these FSBniks, pigs [cops], and other scum who suck the blood of our homeland and shit on our neighbors.”

The security forces deemed this “a statement containing a negative assessment of the group of persons sharing the profession of Federal Security Service officers and police officers,” but it was not included in the indictment.

Responding to the judge’s question about this comment, Krichevsky said that he sometimes tried to “adapt” to the rude tone of the conversation [on the Telegram channel’s chat].

“My mother died four weeks after my arrest”: wheelchair-bound in a detention center

Krichevsky had worked as a systems administrator in Izhevsk before his arrest.

As a child, Krichevsky had moved with his family from Udmurtia to Rostov-on-Don. After high school, he enrolled in medical school, but in 1989 he broke his spine and had to drop out because his left leg was paralyzed and he had lost feeling in his right leg. After a long period of rehabilitation, he was able to walk again, but was unable to recover fully: he had a severe limp and had difficulty going up stairs.

Krichevsky said in court that his father had committed suicide on 11 September 2008.

“He had terminal cancer. He was in serious pain and turned to me because I was in medical school. He wanted me to tell him what poison he could use to commit suicide. I refused to do it. Then, two days before his death, I noticed he was sharpening a knife in an odd way. He died in a rather original way, if that word is appropriate in this situation—he stabbed himself in the heart with a knife,” Krichevsky told the court.

In early 2010, during a trip to Thailand, Krichevsky broke his left leg, which had been paralyzed since his [accident in 1989]. He underwent surgery at a local hospital, but he could not stay in hospital for long because his visa had expired. Krichevsky returned to his hometown of Izhevsk, where he underwent a second operation, but his condition only worsened.

“My knee wouldn’t straighten. They tried to do something about it, but because I had spinal injuries, my knee spasmed, and it remained crooked and they couldn’t do anything about it. And my hip didn’t recover either; I also had a fractured hip,” Krichevsky told the court.

Since then, Krichevsky has been confined to a wheelchair. Other ailments have also emerged: kidney problems, emphysema, and head tremors.

“I don’t know whether it’s early Parkinson’s combined with Alzheimer’s, or something else,” Krichevsky said.

Krichevsky had been living with his elderly mother and caring for her since 2016. Last year, she was hospitalized with a complex fracture. After she was discharged, she was unable to walk, and Krichevsky would help her to sit up and do breathing exercises in order to prevent pulmonary edema and bedsores. After Krichevsky was arrested, the woman was sent to a care home. She died of a pulmonary edema a month later.

“They apparently left her lying in bed at the care home. When a person lies in a horizontal position for a long time, they develop a pulmonary edema. That’s what my mother died of,” he said in court.

Photo: Mediazona

While in pretrial detention, Krichevsky formally lost his Group I disability status, which he had prior to his arrest, and so he was unable to obtain a medical examination.

According to Krichevsky, a neurologist at the Izhevsk detention center promised to send him to a hospital, but instead Krichevsky was transferred to another pretrial detention center. “I thought they were taking me to a hospital, but they took me first to Perm and then to Yekaterinburg. They basically lied to me when they said they were taking me to a hospital,” he said on the stand.

Krichevskny never did get any medical attention: “We’ll only help you if you’re dying, [they said.] Otherwise, just sit there and suffer.”

“Radical views and hostility toward the current government”: trial and pleadings

Krichevsky’s trial was postponed five times in a row: it took a long time to bring him in his wheelchair, first to Detention Center No. 1 in Yekaterinburg, and then to the court. He was brought to the hearings late, and had to spend four to five hours in the police van, where, according to Krichevsky, the temperature was the same as outside.

At the beginning of the trial, Krichevsky filed a motion requesting that he be assigned an inpatient forensic examination and treatment. He said that he had never been examined by a neurologist at the Yekaterinburg detention center, only by a GP. He was taken for examination to the local medical unit, which was not equipped for people with disabilities: there was a “big step” in front of the toilet and sink which he could not get over. As a result, the doctors only checked his reflexes and sent him back.

In their medical report, the doctors at the detention center stated that Krichevsky had no disability and that his overall health was satisfactory, meaning that he was able to take part in the court hearings.

Before the proceedings, Krichevsky again requested to be sent for treatment, “in accordance with the neurologist’s recommendation” in Izhevsk, but Judge Raitsky denied the request, seeing no need for it. Prosecutor Artem Terentyev also asked that the request be denied, as it went “beyond the scope of the criminal case under consideration.”

During the trial, the prosecutor asked that Krichevsky be imprisoned for six years in a medium-security penal colony. The prosecutor stressed that the defendant had “radical views” and was “hostile toward the current government of the Russian Federation and its officials,” and that he had written the offending comment at a time when the mobilization had not yet been completed. The prosecutor considered these to be aggravating circumstances.

The prosecutor cited Krichevsky’s “poor health” as a mitigating circumstance.

You can support Alexander by writing him a letter.

Address:
Russian Federation 620019 FKU SIZO-1, GUFSIN of Russia for the Sverdlovsk Region • Sverdlovsk Region, Yekaterinburg, Repin Street, 4 • Alexander Anatolyevich Krichevsky, born 1967

You can also send letters through the online service Zonatelecom.

Source: Vasily Besspalyi, “Wheelchair user from Izhevsk sentenced to six years in prison for comment about Putin; his mother, sent to nursing home after his arrest, dies a month later,” Mediazona, 22 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. Since letters to Russian prisoners are vetted by prison censors, they must be written in Russian or translated into Russian, something that can done more or less handily using an online machine translator like Google Translate. Please write to me if you need help or advice. ||||| TRR

Eating Kimchi in Public

So the Korean Hyundai factory workers were racially profiled and yesterday SCOTUS said racial profiling is now constitutional. The workers were reported to ICE because someone saw a bunch of foreign workers. That is racial profiling.

Yesterday’s news made me think about when I was little and went on road trips with my family. My parents always insisted on preparing and eating Korean food at rest areas along the way. This was before Korean food became more well-known and I remember that if there were people nearby who could smell our food, they often made faces and comments about the smell. Eating kimchi in public was always an interesting experience back then. This was just embarrassing, but does the new Supreme Court ruling mean that in this scenario, it is now something much more ominous we should be worried about?

Now someone could call ICE on a foreign-looking family eating foreign-smelling food in a rest area. When ICE shows up we now would have to show papers to prove we are citizens based on a racially motivated tip, is that our reality? Also, remembering that my mother never became a citizen but had a green card and probably speeding tickets so she would have been deportable under the current regime? What if I can’t prove my citizenship because I don’t carry my passport or naturalization papers, I am detained until I can prove my citizenship and they have the legal authority to do all of this now?

Lawyers, please help me understand. Is this our reality now? Is eating kimchi in public while Korean enough to get ICE called on us?

And I want to add that racial profiling has always been used against Black Americans and to a lesser degree other less white adjacent communities forever in this country, whether it was deemed constitutional or not. This is not new for Black Americans and others and something I have to acknowledge.

Source: Son Mun (Facebook), 9 September 2025

Source: Clarence Patton (Facebook), 9 September 2025

I Love Saint Petersburg

📅 Leningrad, 1987. Donald Trump and his first wife, Ivana Zelníčková.

The businessman visited the USSR with his wife hoping to make real estate deals, but was confronted by Soviet laws which did not permit foreigners to own more than a 49% stake in a business venture.

So, no deals were made, and Trump was left disappointed by the Soviet system. But he was impressed by the architecture.

Tomorrow, the current U.S. president and Vladimir Putin will meet in Alaska, formerly Russian territory.

Source: I Love Saint Petersburg (Facebook), 14 August 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Clubbing

In the wee hours of Sunday, 4 May, Russian security forces raided concerts in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, at which, among other things, they asked attendees about their attitude to the war, local media have reported.

In Yekaterinburg, law enforcement officers interrupted a concert at the club Syndrome. As the musicians were performing, people in uniform came on stage, halted the concert, and asked the concert organizers to turn on the lights, concertgoers told the Telegram channel Svet. Ekaterinburg.

“People were ordered to stand facing the walls and told that there would be a document check. [The police] checked everyone’s documents, tattoos, and elbows, asked about their attitudes to left-wing radical movements and to the SMO (the war in Ukraine—ed.), and they checked the messenger apps on their phones. After the check, people were taken outside and ordered to scram,” said one of the guests.

Another clubgoers told the news website E1.RU that police locked him in a paddy wagon, confiscated his phone, and checked his contents. Police insulted the detainee and refused to explain the reasons for the check. According to eyewitnesses, police and Russian National Guard officers took part in the raid. Those agencies declined to comment on this report.

Regular raids by law enforcers in Russia

In St. Petersburg, law enforcers raided a rave party at the [underground] club Kontrkult. A source close to the police told Ren TV that the reason for the raid was that the event had not been “sanctioned.” According to the news website 78.ru, partygoers had their documents checked and were searched for banned substances. The publication adds that the event’s organizers were detained. This has not been officially confirmed.

Footage of the raid on Kontrkult, as posted on the Telegram channel SHOT

Similar raids on various establishments have happened regularly in Russia in recent months. Law enforcers have carried out several raids on fitness centers, in which people were issued military conscription board summonses. Similar raids have been carried out against migrant workers, who also had their documents checked and summonses handed to them, along with members of the LGBT community, who have been declared “extremists” in Russia.

Source: Daniil Sotnikov, “Law enforcers raid clubs in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 4 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Nizhny Tagil anti-war protester Yekaterina Sergeyenko. Photo: Mezhdu Strok, via Svet.Ekaterinburg

💬 Student from Nizhny Tagil fined 120,000₽ in criminal “defaming” case

In Nizhny Tagil, 21-year-old student Yekaterina Sergeyenko has been sentenced for “defaming” [the Russian army]: she was fined 120,000 roubles [approx. 1,280 euros]. According to the news agency Mezhdu Strok (“Between the Lines”), criminal charges were filed over the young woman’s comments in the “Incident Nizhny Tagil” group on the social network VKontakte.

Vechernye Vedomosti reports that at the time she posted the comments, Sergeyenko had a prior administrative conviction for painting sixteen pacifist slogans on buildings in the city. This fact influenced the decision to file criminal rather than administrative charges against her.

Judge Oksana Belkina of the Tagilstroy District Court found Sergeyenko guilty. Although the verdict has not yet entered into legal force, the fine, according to Mezhdu Strok, has already been paid.

Source: Svet.Ekaterinburg (Telegram), 4 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader