Russia causes the death of Kharkiv teacher illegally held in solitary confinement in Crimea (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 6th)
54-year-old Serhiy Diachuk has multiple rib fractures after two years in secret Russian FSB captivity (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 6th)
Could Ukraine have made a deal with Russia in 2022? Former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba on negotiations (Ukrainska Pravda, November 2nd)
Oil on the water: How Russia avoided accountability for the Black Sea tanker disaster caused by its sanctions evasion efforts (The Insider, November 2nd)
Valentyn Vyhivsky endured torture, years in solitary confinement and is still captive in Russia after his sentence (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 4th)
Ukrainian POW ‘dies’ in Russian prison as Moscow abandons vital convention against torture (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 3rd)
TUESDAY 10 NOVEMBER, 6.30pm Life Under Russian Occupation: Stories from Ukraine. Meeting with Anhelina Zinovieva (Donetsk), Sofia Naumenko (Mariupol), Daniil Shapovalo (Luhansk). Queen Mary, University of London. Hosted by Ukrainian Society and the Centre for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies (CEREES)
WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER, 7.00pm. Public meeting: Stand with the people of Ukraine. Meeting with Oleksandr Kyselov (Sotsialnyi Rukh Ukraine). Somers Town Community Hall, 150 Ossulston St, NW1 1EE. Hosted by Anti-Capitalist Resistance
FRIDAY 13 NOVEMBER, 6.00pm. Meeting: The US midterms, Ukraine and the fight against fascism. with Tanya Vyhovsky, Vermont State Senator (Progressive / Democratic), and Dylan Burns, journalist, streamer and founder of Track Ukraine. Hosted by Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. Register here
This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. To receive it by email each Monday, email us at2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.
Two Ukrainian soldiers eat borsch delivered to them near Bakhmut, Ukraine, on 7 February 2023. Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
At the entrance of Inshi Cafe in downtown Lviv, Ukraine, stood a full-size cardboard likeness of the country’s best-known chef, Yevhen Klopotenko. In immaculate kitchen whites, the 39-year-old was immediately recognizable by his handlebar mustache and eccentric coif: the right side of his head shaved close, with an unruly mop of curls thrown over his left ear. This is an updated take on the hair art of the ancient Ukrainian Cossacks, a nomadic warrior people central to Ukrainian identity. Likewise, Klopotenko seeks to modernize traditional Ukrainian cuisine, especially borsch, a beet-based soup that, he claims, is as Ukrainian as the Cassocks themselves.
“Sure, there’s borsch in other countries in Eastern Europe,” Klopotenko, who co-owns Inshi—which he closed a month ago—and another restaurant in Kyiv, explained in a phone interview. But, he went on to say, nowhere is borsch (the preferred Ukrainian spelling [sic]) so variegated and central to a country’s diet and culture as in Ukraine.
Klopotenko, widely considered Ukraine’s borsch aficionado, has turned the dish into his life’s work. In 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion captured one-sixth of Ukraine, Klopotenko raced to fast-track the process of enshrining Ukrainian borsch-making on UNESCO’s list of cultural heritage in urgent need of safeguarding. To help establish the dish’s distinct national roots, Klopotenko co-founded the Institute of Culture of Ukraine, which collected over 700 pages of evidence, including recipes and historical records from across the country. Borsch was inscribed on the UNESCO list that July.
Klopotenko’s field research is explicitly political: He strives to reconnect Ukrainians with their ancestors, building on the national renaissance that took off with independence in 1991 and was turbocharged by the Russian invasions. He wants to show that Ukraine is a full-fledged nation with deep roots and age-old traditions—in stark contrast to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiction that Ukrainians are really Russians, and thus a legitimate target of reconquest. For Klopotenko and many other Ukrainians, the country’s borschs are a critical element in the complex cultural tapestry that constitutes national identity.
Likes its kaleidoscope of borschs, the country of Ukraine is a patchwork of different traditions. Ukraine is made up of Jews, Hungarians, Roma, Tatars, Moldovans, and, yes, Russians, among others. Many speak in other languages at home and seamlessly switch to Ukrainian in public. Regionally, Ukraine is also a smorgasbord: Its constituent territories were for centuries divided among the Russian, Austrian, Mongolian, and Polish empires, as well as other foreign lords.
But borsch, whose name comes from the Slavic word for beet, is a passion of all stripes of Ukrainians. Most borschs today include some combination of beets, cabbage, onions, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, and broth. The first thing that strikes one, even before a bowl is in sight, is the soup’s earthy, tangy fragrance, often accentuated by fresh dill. Its audacious color usually (but not always) takes on a spectrum of vibrant reds and deep purples. The spectacular sweet-and-sour tango that borsch performs on your taste buds is the juxtaposition of its core ingredient, beet kvass—a fermented juice made by soaking beets for days—and the sweetness of the tomatoes. A fulsome dollop of sour cream on top balances the acidic and savory flavors.
Ingredients beyond the basics vary widely, which one learns quickly after striking out to explore Ukraine’s culinary landscape. Central Ukraine, around the historical [Cossack] city of Poltava, boasts a classic Ukrainian borsch: The broth can be beef-, pork-, or poultry-based, with generous chucks of smoked rib meat floating in a bouquet of root veggies. A home-style variation includes halushky, or small dumplings, that swim in the broth.
Central Ukraine is probably where borsch made its debut about a thousand years ago, according to the research of the Institute of Culture of Ukraine, one of the many until-now-unknown facts about the dish. It did not have the name “borsch,” and this was long before the likes of tomatoes or even potatoes appeared in European gardens. The earliest first known written mention of the word borsch dates to the 16th century, concocted out of fermented sorrel and wild grasses, notably hogweed. The borsch Ukrainians know today, Klopotenko said, hails back about two centuries. Ivan Kotliarevsky’s 1798 “Eneida,” a mock-heroic poem considered the first piece of literature published entirely in Ukrainian, mentions various traditional Ukrainian dishes consumed by Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants, including borsch.
In northwestern Ukraine’s Volyn region, along the Polish borderlands, borsch is sometimes cooked with the blood of wild boars. To the south, along the Hungarian border, ethnic Magyars spice up the dish with smoked paprika (a staple of many Hungarian dishes) created by roasting red peppers over a fire. In eastern Ukraine, borsch is often so thick that a spoon can stand up in the dark red stew. And, along the Black Sea, borsch can boast fish rather than meat, Klopotenko said.
Klopotenko’s restaurant in Lviv offered four kinds of borsch, including one flavored with red wine and another that contains wild mushrooms. His signature borsch is known for its smoky, rich flavor and features baked beets, plums, and smoked sour cream. (It also includes pork ribs, but all of his borschs also come in vegetarian versions, a rare courtesy in Ukraine.) But a locality’s truest borsch, Klopotenko said, is served in homes. His mother’s recipe was incomplete without pork ribs, celery root, and smoked dried pears.
Klopotenko contends that Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territories and the displacement of Ukrainians there threaten the survival of gastronomical traditions. Indeed, many experts, including those from Human Rights Watch, say that Russia targets cultural heritage in a deliberate strategy to erase Ukrainian nationhood and rewrite regional history. In Moscow’s thoroughgoing Russification of the occupied territories, everything Ukrainian—language, symbols, history—is snuffed out or labeled as Russian, including culinary staples.
On the Azov Sea, where all Ukrainian port cities are in Russian hands, Mariupol-style borsch traditionally features sprats, gobies, or other fresh fish. The local bychky (similar to dumplings) are pan-fried and then dropped into the broth shortly before the dish is served. Mariupol was occupied by Russia in 2022 and “cleansed” of Ukrainian culture, including gastronomy, so it’s unclear how common the dish is today. It isn’t that specific types of borsch were literally made illegal to prepare, but rather that the occupying forces erased the variety and identity of Ukrainian food, replacing it with monolithic Russian fare. Sure, Russians eat borsch, too, Klotopenko said, but with nothing of the Ukrainian flair.
Whether Crimean Tatars, also under Russian occupation, still cook borsch in massive kettles and with slabs of roasted lamb and ample coriander, is unknown. There are simply many fewer Tartars there than were in 2014, when Russia annexed the peninsula. Since then, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians have moved into Crimea, substantially altering its culture. Crimea is a Russian police state, and there is little truck between the peninsula and free Ukraine. But Crimean-style borsch can still be found in the homes of Tatars who have left Crimea. Around 25,000 Tatars relocated from Crimea to mainland Ukraine after 2014. Today, community groups preserve their culture in exile, convinced that they will return one day to a Ukrainian Crimea.
Russia’s onslaught continues to threaten the cultural fabric of the eastern parts of Ukraine, including the factory city of Dnipro, which boasts a tightly knit community of Ashkenazi Jews. Their borsch is pink, lighter than most variations of the dish, and of course, kosher: no pork, with cows and sheep slaughtered according to ritual. For now, at least, two restaurants at the community’s Menorah Center in downtown Dnipro serve kosher borsch; lemon juice replaces kvass, celery root replaces cabbage. The broth is simmered for four to five hours to induce a rich, concentrated taste. And it is almost always served with out-of-the-oven pampushka: soft white buns smothered in garlic butter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and was born in Kryvyi Rih, the next city over from Dnipro, probably grew up with a borsch like this.
On the other side of Ukraine, roughly 500 miles to the west, the people of the Carpathian Mountains, who live along the Romanian border, raise their children on white borsch, concocted with fermented white sugar beets and pork, seasoned with dill, parsley, and green onions. This is the favored meal of the Hutsuls, an eastern Slavic people descended from shepherds.
Last December, my Hutsul friend invited me into the homestead of the Makivnychuk family in Verkhovyna, a Carpathian town considered a Hutsul stronghold. There I was honored to attend a 12-course Christmas Eve dinner. The family borsch—cooked on a wood stove and served in candlelight because the Russians had knocked out the electricity—is a marker of identity. Marie Makivnychuk can trace her recipe back six generations, to a time when mountain folk ate what grew on their rock-strewn slopes. White beetroot grows best in the mountain’s cool climate.
Most Ukrainians, Kletopenko said, are aware that borsch is not uniform across the country, but they’re oblivious to the universe of borschs and the rich, historic backstories. And why should they bother, when their mother’s borsch is the most wonderful of all?
This is Yana Boretska, Operations Manager for the Kyiv Independent Store. So many of you have asked us for a Ukrainian borshch recipe, so here it is at last — my family recipe, the one I make for my family, my friends, and sometimes simply for my own enjoyment.
In 2022, the culture of Ukrainian borshch cooking was added to UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, recognizing its importance as a part of Ukrainian cultural heritage. At the Kyiv Independent, we celebrate the dish with our Borshch collection, which features the ingredients of borshch illustrated by Ukrainian illustrator Albina Kolesnichenko on T-shirts, sweatshirts, aprons, and tote bags.
Yana in Kyiv’s Podil district, wearing a Borshch tote bag
First, make the broth. Put the beef on the bone in a large pot and cover with about 4-5 pints (2.5–3 liters) of cold water. Bring to a boil and carefully skim off any foam that rises to the surface. Add the bay leaves and a little salt, then reduce the heat to low and simmer gently for 60–90 minutes, partially covered, until the broth becomes rich and flavorful.
While the broth is cooking, cut the boneless beef into medium-sized pieces. Heat a little oil in a large frying pan or heavy-bottomed skillet over medium-high heat. Add the beef and sear it well, stirring occasionally, for approximately 25–30 minutes, until it has a deep golden-brown crust. Once browned, set the beef aside.
Add a little more oil to the pan. Add the diced onion and cook for 4-5 minutes, until softened, then add the carrot and cook for another 3-4 minutes. Add the beets, and cook for 5-7 minutes, stirring regularly. Then, add the tomato paste, a small amount of water or broth, the sugar, and vinegar or lemon juice, and simmer everything together for another 5-7 minutes. Set aside.
When the broth is done, remove the beef on the bone from the broth. The meat can be removed from the bone, cut into pieces, and returned to the broth if you want.
Bring the broth back to a gentle simmer, add the fried beef, and cook for 5-10 minutes. Then add the potatoes and cook for another 10 minutes or so. Add the shredded cabbage and cook for another 5-7 minutes, depending on how soft you like it.
Add the sautéed vegetables to the pot, stir well, and simmer for another 8-10 minutes. Season with salt and black pepper to taste. Avoid a very aggressive boil— a gentle simmer helps preserve the beets’ beautiful red color.
In the last couple of minutes, add the garlic and fresh herbs. Turn off the heat and taste the borshch — adjust the salt, pepper, sugar, and vinegar/lemon juice if necessary.
Cover the pot and let the borshch rest for at least 30 minutes before serving, an hour if possible.
To serve
This is the most important part. Serve the borshch hot with a generous spoonful of sour cream directly in the bowl. Sour cream adds creamy richness and perfectly balances the acidity of the beets and tomato.
Finish with fresh dill and parsley, and with bread on the side — garlic bread works well. And to really go all out, why not wear a Borshch T-shirt while you eat?
Plate of traditional borshch with sour cream, served with pampushki (garlic bread buns). (Photo by: Natasha Breen/REDA/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
For me, borshch has always been about that feeling of home, warmth, and comfort. It carries a taste of Ukraine that is incredibly difficult to forget.
If you decide to try my version of borshch, I would genuinely love to hear how it turns out! If you have any questions while making it, simply reply to this email (<store@kyivindependent.com>), and I’ll be happy to answer personally and help with any details.
With love from Kyiv,
Yana, Operations Manager, The Kyiv Independent Store
SOURCE: “The recipe you’ve been waiting for: traditional Ukrainian borshch,” Kyiv Independent Store email newsletter, 5 November 2026. I just ordered a Kyiv Independent borshch apron and tote bag to go along with the Kyiv Independent borshch t-shirt which I’ve been wearing proudly the last few years. ||||| TRR
The Belair Lip Bombs, “Don’t Let Them Tell You (It’s Fair)”
I need you to hold me I need you to care I need you to listen They won’t understand Don’t let them tell ya Don’t let them tell ya Don’t let them tell ya Don’t let them tell you it’s fair
I see you look out the window I know you’re close to the brink A younger version of me I lie awake and I think So when you look in the mirror Tell me what do you see Starstruck, you gotta make your own luck And I’m making a woman out of me
Well I know they think I’m funny They’ve got all their money Look what I’ve become And just stop talking to me
They’re looking down upon me A metaphorical illusion of a mezzanine scene But don’t you quit that thing He’s just a rich cat, subtract the judgement from him And remember my name, remember my face Remember the place where I came And I’ll be out of your way
You’ve made it this far I’ll make you a star Hold onto my arms And let out all the grief in your heart
Well I know they think I’m funny They’ve got all their money Look what I’ve become And just stop talking to me
Well I know they think I’m funny They’ve got all their money Look what I’ve become Honey I’ve never felt this free
Well I know they think I’m funny They’ve got all their money Look what I’ve become And just stop talking They think I’m funny Got all their money But I don’t care Don’t let them tell you it’s fair
Russia has officially withdrawn from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture. It is a logical step. It was abnormal that a fascist state which had trampled on all norms of law and morality formally continued to be among the signatories of this Convention.
Everything has now fallen into place. A state that employs torture on a scale comparable to that of Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR has finally brought its de jure status into alignment with its defacto reality.
I would remind you that Putin’s Russian Federation has murdered 200,000 to 300,000 people in Chechnya, 133,000 in Syria, and approximately 200,000 in Ukraine, including tens of thousands of women, children, and old people.
Pictured above are two of the latest Russian victims of Putin’s Gulag.
On the left is Alexander Kondratov, production designer for the miniseries Liquidation and winner of the TEFI and Golden Eagle awards.
Kondratov was originally from Moscow, but moved to Kyiv in 2012.
In May 2026, he flew to Russia to get a new travel passport (what the hell for, one wonders). He was arrested immediately upon arrival at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport and charged with “high treason.”
There is little need to explain what “high treason” means in the parlance of Putin’s fascists. In Kondratov’s case, it consisted of “at least six posts” on the internet.
On 26 October 2026, Alexander Kondratov died in a prison hospital at the age of fifty-two.
When they arrested him, the Russian Gestapo broke his shinbone in two places and planted a kilogram of narcotics on him. He is currently being held in a cell designed for thirty-four inmates, which now houses thirty-five inmates.
The cell has a hole in the floor instead of a toilet. Kynev, who is on crutches, cannot use this hole and so has gone on a hunger strike.
The plight of these two men serves as a simple reminder: you must not be naive when dealing with a fascist state.
So here we are at last. After two years of Donald Trump’s Washington—the idiocy, the cruelty, the malice, the bullying, the bigotry, the hubris, the state violence, the monomania, the cowardice—it’s finally time for the president to make the first payment on the bill. Barring a catastrophic polling error (and when has that ever happened?), Americans seem set to deliver a colossal rebuke to Trump, who stormed into office last year ready to crack heads and is now doddering out the last days of his trifecta ranking asses.
The big political killer was Iran. Trump’s disastrous Middle East war fractured his coalition and doomed the country to a year (or more!) of terrible economic vibes. A week into the war, Trump’s approval rating was sitting north of 42 percent; it’s been slumping lower ever since. Nothing makes price-conscious Americans reach for their pitchforks like spiking energy prices.
But I think that the turning point in Trump 2.0 actually came a little earlier. The thing that convinced Trump he needed to beat a retreat on a core part of his domestic agenda was his fiasco in Minneapolis.
It’s only been a year, but it’s already easy to forget just how big a part large-scale state violence against Democratic protesters played in Trump’s plans in 2025. Over and over, the White House launched remarkable provocations against blue cities and states, from Los Angeles to Portland to Washington, D.C. These actions weren’t just intended to cow Democratic leaders. They were intended to stoke deliberate conflict between militarized agents of the state and people on the ground—conflict that Trump and MAGA could then repackage as content for their base.
Amid Trump’s many simultaneous assaults on the norms and laws that restrain the presidency, this content served a specific rhetorical purpose. In videos of riots and clashes with protesters, Trump’s government represented the forces of order, while those who opposed him were the forces of chaos. The law, Trump’s violence argued, wasn’t some bunch of buzzkill rules dorks and eggheads used to rein in great men like him. The law was pepper spray in an angry protester’s face.
Trump goes out of his way to start conflicts. He wildly exaggerates the horrors of daily life in blue cities. He sends the National Guard in a shock-and-awe show of force into those same places. In the protests and clashes that result, he tells them the only way they can err is by pulling their punches. You’ve got to teach these criminals, he says, the only way they understand. They spit, you hit. And “criminals” are whoever Trump says they are.
When he ordered ICE into Minneapolis, Trump was just following the natural progression of this plan. But the plan quickly met disaster. ICE’s clownishly brutal occupation of the city spurred ever-increasing organized resistance from locals, who tracked ICE vehicles and made their job consistently irritating and difficult—blowing their cover by following them with blaring horns and shrieking blowing whistles, organizing deliveries of groceries and other materials to terrified immigrants wouldn’t have to risk leaving their homes, and so on. And videos of irritated agents lashing out at annoying but law-abiding and peaceful protesters started to turn public sentiment against the occupiers—even before things went catastrophically wrong.
And then came the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. More than anything else, these two instances of shocking police violence against peaceful protesters turned the tide. Trump and Co. wanted a constant feed of videos of police administering street justice to hooligans; instead, Americans’ social platforms were suddenly full of videos of deadly violence dealt against—in Pretti’s case—a man who had literally tried to peacefully place his body between an agent of the state and the woman he was roughing up.
MAGA’s propaganda machine tried feverishly to smear these two dead Americans as domestic terrorists and would-be cop killers. But no one was buying it, and soon even they had to admit it. Not long after, the White House announced an about-face: They were heading out of Minneapolis. From now on, federal immigration enforcement would focus on the red cities and states that would cooperate with less fuss. The blue-city occupation strategy was at an end.
I don’t mean to oversell this. It isn’t as though Trump et al. have gotten significantly more careful about the violence the state wields: Others have died at the hands of DHS agents this year, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine this summer. And, as our Adrian Carrasquillo reported last week, Good and Pretti’s families have never gotten accountability from the officers who killed them.
But Minneapolis’s resistance still achieved something extraordinary: At a time when Trump seemed at his strongest and they seemed at their weakest, they managed to throw him off his violent agenda simply by standing up nobly as individuals and as a community against his designs. Maybe—probably?—voters will put Democrats back in power today, and Trump will never again achieve the level of unilateral state authority that he enjoyed last year. But even if they don’t—even if Republicans beat the odds and give Trump back more or less united control of Washington—Minneapolis still gives us the model: You resist with whatever you’ve got.
The Network Case defendants, during their trial in Penza. Photo courtesy of Yan Shenkman
Around this time nine years ago, the so-called Network Case kicked off in Penza. It was a harrowing case concocted by the FSB against antifascists, whom they tortured. Eleven young men were convicted and sent to prison. Some have already served their time and been released. The key defendant, Dima Pchelintsev, has served half of his sentence and remains in prison. He was sentenced to a total of eighteen years.
While in custody, Pchelintsev has written a book entitled Shooting Fireworks (Strelba iz feierverka). I highly recommend it, since it provides a detailed account of the entire story.
A lot has happened since then: covid, war, exile. Criminal cases based on confessions obtained by torture have become routine, commonplace. People are imprisoned in large numbers, for any reason at all.
It is important to remember that if the sadists at the FSB had been stopped in their tracks back then, in 2017, we would be breathing easier today.
Evil must be battled before it’s too late. Its victims must have our backs when it matters.
You hesitated, you harbored doubts, you were too busy, and before you knew it, you were living under a dictatorship, missiles were raining down on civilians, and you were forced to flee the whole mess.
Back then, public opinion still meant something. Now, it means nothing at all.
All you have to do is show concern when it counts.
SOURCE: Yan Shenkman (Facebook), 20 October 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader. For a list of all the articles on the Network Case that I have published since January 2018, go here. |||||trr
According to Mediazona, [o]n October 16, 38-year-old Vasily Kuksov was released from Penal Colony No. 16 in the Nizhny Novgorod region. [On the] 17th of October he arrived by train in Serdobsk, in the Penza region, where he [was] reunited with his family.
In 2020, Kuksov, a musician and design engineer, was sentenced in Penza to nine years in a penal colony in the case of the “Network organization” (the defendants in this case received sentences of up to 18 years in prison).
The criminal case was opened in October 2017. At the time, FSB officers accused anti-fascists and anarchists, many of whom shared an interest in airsoft, of creating a “terrorist organization” and planning to “mobilize the masses to further destabilize the political situation in the country.”
Over the course of that month, security forces detained Kuksov, as well as Ilya Shakursky, Dmitry Pchelintsev, Andrey Chernov, Arman Sagynbayev, and Yegor Zorin. The formal grounds for initiating the criminal prosecution were Zorin’s confession. The young man had been detained with drugs and gave testimony about a terrorist organization. The case against him was subsequently dropped. In January 2018, Viktor Filinkov and Igor Shishkin were detained in St. Petersburg in connection with the same case. On April 11, another St. Petersburg resident, Yuly Boyarshinov, was also charged.
Initially, most of the defendants made confessions, but later retracted them, stating that they had been tortured. Viktor Filinkov, Dmitry Pchelintsev, Ilya Shakursky, Arman Sagynbayev, and Andrey Chernov reported violence and electric shocks inflicted by security officers. The Investigative Committee did not open a criminal investigation into any of the defendants’ allegations of torture. Five witnesses in the case also reported torture and pressure from security forces.
Vasily Kuksov told the court that FSB officers beat him during his arrest, saying, “You’re screwed, your life is over,” and threatened to cut off his finger. Despite this, he never made a confession.
During the investigation, while being held in Penza’s Pre-Trial Detention Centre No. 1, he was diagnosed with active tuberculosis shortly before his sentencing. He was not hospitalized and continued to be held together with other defendants in the case.
After the verdict in the Network case came into force, Kuksov was transferred in November 2020 to Medical Correctional Institution No. 3 (LIU-3) for tuberculosis patients in Nizhny Novgorod. He was discharged from the medical facility in January 2022. After that, at Penal Colony No. 16 in the Nizhny Novgorod region, he was repeatedly placed in a punishment cell.
Anarchist Black Cross Moscow
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So now, after more than a decade of pretending that he is not associated with Russia and that he would honor the U.S. national security position of support for Ukraine and our European allies, Trump is openly backing Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
Asked today by a reporter about concerns that his dropping of sanctions against Russian oil yesterday would funnel money to Putin’s war on Ukraine, Trump blamed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for prolonging the war:
“Zelensky could have settled this war many times. Many, many times,” Trump said, “And he chooses not to.” Trump blamed Zelensky for the high cost of diesel because Ukrainian forces have targeted Russian oil refineries, although since Russian oil was sanctioned, the actual chokepoint for diesel prices is the Strait of Hormuz, largely closed because of Trump’s war on Iran.
Trump accused Zelensky of wanting “to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Ukrainians have hit Russian oil refineries to stop the flow of money into Russia as it evades sanctions and sells oil through its so-called shadow fleet. Russia, in contrast, has been striking civilian targets in violation of the laws of war.
Trump continued with a warning to Zelensky, saying “he’d better damn well stop.”
Ukraine continues to fight against Russia because Russia has invaded Ukraine and is trying to occupy Ukraine’s eastern industrial area in violation of the United Nations charter that vows no country will use threats or force against another’s territorial integrity. Until Trump took office, the United States was the key guarantor of this principle.
The U.S. has stood against Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine not only because of the principle of territorial sovereignty, but also because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.
Then Russian leader Vladimir Putin worked to bring Ukraine under the sway of the Russian oligarchs who rose to replace the region’s communist leaders, monopolizing formerly publicly held industries as those industries were privatized. American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered in 2004 after calling attention to what the oligarchs were doing.
In that same year, a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, appeared to be elected president of Ukraine. But the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on an American political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media: Paul Manafort.
For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. Then, in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. He fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in the United States and in its territories. These sanctions hurt Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs, including Putin.
Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to allies of Yanukovych and Putin, especially Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and Manafort was happy to step in to help. He did not take a salary. He began as an advisor in March 2016 and became the campaign chairman in late June, after meeting on June 9 with Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Russian operatives.
It turned out that Russia was looking for a way to grab the Ukrainian land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the exact opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.
According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote: “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Kilimnik further suggested that Manafort “could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals,” and that “once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Trump could not make it happen during his first term, although his operatives spent a great deal of time messing around in Ukraine and trying to smear Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden from there, and after Biden took office, Putin invaded Ukraine again in 2022.
As Jim Rutenberg wrote in his coverage of the Mariupol Plan in the New York Times Magazine, once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.
Biden pulled together countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), along with other allies and partners, to stop Russia’s attack and to support Ukraine’s heroic efforts to repel the Russian invasion. Russia’s troops, meanwhile, have committed atrocities and are attacking civilians. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted several Russian officials and commanders, including Putin himself, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But once Trump was back in office in 2025, he promptly tried to swing the U.S. behind Russia. His appointees insisted that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russia’s support for Trump, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Repeatedly, Trump has threatened Zelensky and tried to cajole him into surrendering the territory Russia wants.
After the ICC indictment, Trump welcomed Putin to American soil in Alaska in August 2025, ordering U.S. soldiers to roll out a red carpet for him, and he has invited Putin to a gathering of the Group of 20 nations with advanced economies at Mar-a-Lago in December. Yesterday, the U.S. announced sanctions on the ICC itself, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has vowed to take the organization apart “brick by brick.”
Meanwhile, Putin has behaved like someone who has a strong hand over Trump. In August 2025, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up at the Alaska meeting wearing a sweatshirt with the Cyrillic letters “CCCP,” which translates to USSR, suggesting that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War after all.
On Friday, despite the fact that Russia is backing Iran, whose military is killing U.S. soldiers, Trump proudly announced he was removing sanctions to let Russia sell its oil on global markets. Ukrainian attacks have curtailed Russian production, so the amount it has available to help the diesel squeeze in the U.S. is negligible, but the ability to rake in cash as the world’s current oil shortage has driven up prices is invaluable to Putin for his desperate war effort.
Also yesterday, Trump asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on a lawsuit over the 2016 election that he brought in 2022 against Hillary Clinton and former members of the Department of Justice, including former director of the FBI James Comey, Clinton’s campaign chair, and a grab bag of others. Trump sued them for conspiring to tie him to Russia in order to undermine his campaign.
As John Fritze of CNN reported yesterday, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit as “frivolous” and ruled that Trump’s attorneys were liable for nearly $1 million in sanctions. The 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld most of that decision last year. “This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida wrote. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.” Now Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.
But at this point, how much more evidence is necessary to assess that Trump has undermined U.S. national security and is working for Russia? And how much longer will Republicans in Congress continue to protect him as he does it?
First, the big news on U.S. foreign policy was that Trump announced that he was buying 300,000 tons of Russian diesel. He’s not allowed to do this: Sanctions preventing purchase of Russian oil are law, not a choice on Trump’s part. But under Trump laws are suggestions at most, so it might happen anyway. In any case, the main lesson here, as Phillips O’Brien explains, is that Trump isn’t even hiding the fact that he is supporting Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
But being a nerdy economist, my first printable reaction to the announcement was, 300,000 tons??? That’s a bit over 2 million barrels. America consumes approximately 4 million barrels of distillates — diesel (mostly) and heating oil — every day.
So Trump is betraying an embattled democracy, demonstrating our faithlessness to the whole world, seriously damaging whatever is left of America’s leadership in the world, for the sake of maybe 12 hours’ worth of diesel. Really?
Of course, Trump and those around him don’t care about the national interest. But I would strongly guess that they didn’t do the math, that 300,000 tons sounded like a lot to them and that they had no idea that it was trivial for an economy the size of America’s. I might add that this is general issue with Trump: he often touts trivial policies as major achievement, and it often seems obvious that he has no idea how big America and the world are.
Arithmetic, I guess, suffers from Trump derangement syndrome.
A bipartisan group of six senators on Sunday called for President Donald Trump’s administration to “immediately reverse course” on a plan to purchase diesel from Russia as part of an effort to lower high fuel prices.
Trump shocked lawmakers when he announced on social media Friday that he struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call. He said Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel to the American and global market, followed by an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons “immediately thereafter.” Russia will deliver an additional 3 million tons “within a short period of time” after that, he wrote.
Four Republican senators and two Democratic senators signed onto the statement released Sunday in protesting the deal. They said the administration failed to consult with Congress or submit any explanation to justify its decision as required by statute.
“The United States should not provide Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians. The Administration must immediately reverse course,” they wrote.
The Republican senators who signed onto the statement are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Curtis of Utah. The Democratic senators are Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
Tillis, in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said there’s a legitimate case for saying the president is not following the law if the administration goes through with its diesel purchase plan.
“We were very clear that Russia is the aggressor. Russia is the one who can end this war by backing out of territory that they occupied,” Tillis said.
Trump’s announcement came just a few weeks after Congress passed legislation that directed Trump to impose substantial tariffs on the top importers of Russian oil or natural gas, with an exception for countries that import less than 15% of Russia’s natural gas exports and have taken significant steps to reduce those imports.
The congressional effort was aimed at cutting the flow of money Russia receives from oil and gas sales to finance its war against Ukraine.
The lawmakers also noted that Congress explicitly banned Russia energy imports in 2022 to prevent the United States from financing the war.
“Congress was clear: the U.S. should not import oil from Russia until it ends its aggression against Ukraine and ceases threats against our NATO Allies,” the six lawmakers wrote in their statement. “President Trump’s decision to allow Russian diesel imports to the U.S. runs directly counter to that law.”
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Trump is focused on reducing the cost of energy when asked whether the president’s action would be in violation of U.S. law.
“The president is balancing and has to make tough decisions,” Barrasso said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
He also encouraged Trump to enforce the sanctions law that Congress passed last month.
“This is just another point of leverage for the president to use against Putin in an effort to get a long-term solution in that part of the world,” Barrasso said.
Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, noted that the total amount of diesel appears to be less than what the U.S. uses in a day.
Nephew argued that Iran and Russia might benefit more than the U.S.
“The Iranians are probably very excited because it shows that there’s a lot of pressure still on the U.S. And the Russians are excited because it puts a big hole in the sanctions regime,” he said.
Trump has recently sought to blame record U.S. diesel prices on Ukraine rather than the U.S.-led war in Iran, which has elevated world energy prices.
I just saw NAZA at the New York Film Festival. There were a dozen cops outside the theater checking people’s bags. Protesters were anticipated but there were no protests—just a car with the message “NO PROOF” plastered on its door, circling the block.
Several people spoke briefly before the screening. One of them was Harry Davies, an investigative reporter at the Guardian, which co-produced the film. Harry reminded the audience that investigative reporting is based on information obtained from sources whose anonymity is a vital institution. He also said the Guardian’s investigations department (that is, he and his colleagues) had fact-checked all the assertions made by interviewees in the film and had corroborated all of them. Many of the things recounted in the film had been previously published in the Israeli-Palestinian online magazine +972 (whose journalists I know personally). The film itself was the result of nearly three years of work by this team.
As for the film, I can’t say whether it’s great or not. It is staggering. People talk about the work they do with Tel Aviv in the background: we see people in the windows and imagine other people in other windows sixty kilometers down the coast. The interviewees describe a well-oiled machine for murdering people, not a one-off totally fucked-up incident amidst the war. Many of the film’s critics have overlooked the Israeli army’s use of AI to select its targets for murder. According to their own estimates, the system is now approximately eighty-five percent effective, meaning that a minimum of fifteen percent of its targets had nothing to do with Hamas. Moreover, a target doesn’t equated to a victim, hence the term NAZA itself, which is an acronym for “collateral damage” [in Hebrew]. The [IDF] officers in the film explain that a NAZA value of twenty is the threshold of hesitation. Killing twenty bystanders to take out a single alleged insurgent could be problematic, but any number below twenty is a-okay. And yet the officers recall instances where NAZA values of 500 and 200 were green-lighted. Why such [high] numbers? Because alleged or genuine members of Hamas are killed at night, in residential buildings, along with everyone in their vicinity. The estimate of potential victims can be made quite accurately due to the total system of surveillance [used by the IDF]. They can hack a telephone and use it as a microphone. Do you hear a baby crying in the background? The baby is only a single NAZA.
There are many other harrowing details in the film.
The Israeli secret services will have a tough time identifying the interviewees. We don’t see their faces, and sometimes even their heads are hard to make out; their voices have been altered, and their handwriting has been blurred. Many of the interviews draw and caption on paper what they saw on their [computer] screens. Many of them are involved in combat remotely. One of the interviewees had been in Gaza itself, burning down houses.
There was no ovation [when the screening ended]: no one applauded at all, so the credits rolled down the screen in profound silence. I could hear several people crying, and the person to my left intoned, “Oh Jesus, Jesus.”
Something else that struck me as vital is the extent to which war is no longer waged blindly, the extent to which every decision, every step in this war, and in all contemporary wars, is weighed and documented, and yet people continue to make those decisions nonetheless.
Some of the interviewees describe their role as a technical one, while others speak of the prestige of working in reconnaissance, about their mission, about [being part of] the speartip pointed at the enemy. One person talks about having “fun.” Judging by what they say, nearly none of them feels hatred. Hatred isn’t obligatory for committing murder, nor is ignorance. Remember the parable about the smoke constantly streaming from the crematorium and how “we were looking the other way”? You can’t say that anymore.
The film will soon be viewable on the Guardian’s website. I heartily recommend that everyone see it. Don’t be in a hurry to sound off now [about this post]: you might feel like an idiot only a couple of weeks later. Wait and see the film, and then we’ll talk.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) is preparing a new case, for high treason, against Ruslan Siddiqi, the Russian-Italian anarchist serving a 29-year sentence for sabotaging a train carrying munitions to the Ukrainian front.
Siddiqi wasconvictedin May last year, and the Military Court of Appealupheldthe sentence on 1 July this year. In 2023 he blew up railway tracks in the Ryazan region, derailing a freight train carrying munitions, and organised a drone attack on the Dyagilevo military airfield.
Ruslan Siddiqi in court last year
Siddiqi confessed to these actions and told the court he sees himself as a partisan, opposing Russia’s war on Ukraine. He denied a further charge of preparing another attack. He was tortured extensively during questioning, but the authorities have refused to investigate.
Fires of Freedom, who give legal and other support to Siddiqi,saidthat, although he should have been transferred to prison after conviction, he is being held at a pre-trial detention centre (SIZO) in Ryazan. Transfer has now been delayed because of the new case.
Here isa Facebook postabout the new charges by Ivan Astashin, who campaigns in defence of political prisoners, translated by Giuliano Vivaldi:
“Isn’t that enough for them?” is the first thought that automatically springs to mind upon hearing the news of a new criminal case against anarchist Ruslan Siddiqi, who has already been sentenced to 29 years in prison for two anti-war acts of sabotage and has now also been charged with treason.
And yet for the security forces, everything is much more mundane, has a more practical raison d’etre. The sentence itself plays no role here.
It was the Investigative Committee [a federal agency answerable directly to the Kremlin] who took on the first case against Ruslan. And not just some district department, but the central bureau of the Investigative Committee — or, to be precise, the department for investigating war crimes, genocide, and the rehabilitation of Nazism, which [Investigative Committee chairman Aleksandr] Bastrykin established in 2022.
At the same time, under the Code of Criminal Procedure, only the Federal Security Service (FSB) can investigate cases of high treason. So if the Investigative Committee had “discovered” signs of high treason in Ruslan’s actions, it would have had to hand the case over to the security services.
Naturally, the Investigative Committee did not want to give such a juicy case to anyone else, so they “didn’t discover” high treason, but only terrorism, terrorism, and once again terrorism … which the Investigative Committee has the right to investigate on an equal footing with the FSB.
At the same time, the version that Ruslan was cooperating with Ukrainian military intelligence, which has now become the basis of the treason charge, was always foregrounded. Indeed, it was one of the central elements of the prosecution’s case.
The investigation explicitly proceeded on the assumption that Siddiqi coordinated his actions with representatives of Ukraine’s Chief Directorate of Intelligence. It was precisely through this framework that his actions were classified, among other things, as having been committed by an “organised group”.
So the evidence on which the FSB is now building a new treason case was already there in the materials of the first case. But turning this evidence into a separate charge based on the violation of Article 275 [on high treason] would have meant transferring the case to another agency, the FSB.
The central office of the Investigative Committee took on a high-profile case, “investigated” it itself, gathered the “evidence” itself, brought nine (!) criminal charges, and saw the case through to a conviction. There was absolutely no reason for it to hand such a case over to another agency.
Now the Investigative Committee’s work is finished. The verdict has been handed down; the appeal has been heard. And this is where the baton is already passed to the FSB Directorate for the Ryazan region.
For them, it’s a perfect case. The accused is already in custody. The skeleton of the case has been assembled by colleagues from another agency. All that remains is to rewrite the Investigative Committee’s material to fit the structure of the article of the criminal code on treason, and receive a ready-made crime against state security that has already been “solved”.
I have already told a similar story about Aleksander Leleko: he was convicted as a teenager for setting fire to railway relay cabinets, and several years later the FSB began reworking those same events into a new treason case. [Leleko, from the small Siberian town of Sharypovo, was arrested in 2023, then aged 16, and sentenced to six-and-a-half years. In April this year it was reported that he was in prison hospital, and being administered psychtropic drugs, while investigators sought to put together the new case.]
Therefore, the question “Really, is 29 years not enough for them?” hardly makes sense here. It’s not about the sentence, but about the crime-solving rate, which our investigative authorities so badly need to improve. Especially now, when generals are being blown up and shot at home.
This situation illustrates my point very well that a repressive system has rules. It can produce an utterly monstrous result, but internally it still remains a bureaucratic machine with jurisdictional boundaries, departmental interests, reporting requirements, and its own rules.
An all-powerful security official cannot simply take any desirable article of the Criminal Code and put it into his casework. Even when the decision to imprison someone has already been taken, you still have to properly document who exactly is supposed to imprison them and under which article.
Perhaps, in Ruslan’s case, there also exists a more personal motivation on the part of the Ryazan security services officers. They could not find Ruslan after the first action, caught him only three weeks after the second, and subjected him to brutal torture.
But a much more mundane and so perhaps more frightening mechanism is quite enough to explain the emergence of a new case: the agency needed a criminal case of its own; a ready-made defendant was available with a “body of evidence” already sitting on their desk.
For the security agencies, the people involved in these cases are primarily numbers in a report, not human beings.
□ Fires of Freedom, which supports Ruslan, is on Telegram (Russian only). In English, there are reports on Ruslan Siddiqi’s case, and information about how to give support, on the Autonomous Action site e.g. here, here and here. Ivan Astashin was interviewed here.
□ Ruslan Siddiqi’s final statement in court, and letters describing his anti-war action and arrest, are included in the book Voices Against Putin’s War, free to download here. The letters were published by the Russian Reader here.
Georgy Pirogov. Photo: FSB Public Relations Centre/TASS/ZUMA Press/Scanpix/LETA via Novaya Gazeta Europe
Two years ago, Georgy Pirogov, a Russian man who had moved abroad after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, disappeared in Uzbekistan. He later resurfaced in a Moscow pre-trial detention centre. In July 2026, he was convicted of treason, and last week, the Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that the verdict had entered into force. The agency accused Pirogov of spying for Polish military intelligence and providing financial support to Ukraine’s military. According to the human rights group Department One, Pirogov says he was injected with an unknown substance before his removal from Uzbekistan. Novaya Gazeta Europe examines what we know about the case.
In early July, the Moscow City Court sentenced Georgy Pirogov to 23 years in prison followed by two more years of movement restrictions and a fine of 800,000 rubles (€8,100). Pirogov had left Russia via the United Arab Emirates after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and settled in Georgia, where he worked as an industrial climber before travelling to Uzbekistan for work. His relatives lost contact with him on 6 July 2024, and his abandoned car was later found in the Uzbek city of Nukus. Just two days later, on 8 July 2024, a Moscow district court sent him to pre-trial detention.
According to an FSB press release, Pirogov “independently established contact” in April 2022 with a representative of Polish military intelligence and was tasked with gathering classified information about advanced weapons systems used by Russian forces against Ukraine. Russian investigators allege he obtained data on missile systems, as well as personal details of individuals with access to state secrets, through defence industry contacts. Prosecutors also claim he transferred cryptocurrency to fund Ukraine’s military, purchased military equipment, and arranged its delivery from Poland to Ukraine.
Information about Pirogov’s life is hard to come by. Two videos of him are publicly available: one from 2024, filmed in Uzbekistan, in which he describes the harsh conditions of his work, and another, undated, that shows him after his arrest ”confirming” to FSB interrogators that he had gathered information.
Novaya Gazeta Europe reviewed the social media profiles of several of Pirogov’s relatives and found no political posts, aside from a petition his sister shared five years ago on Change.org concerning a small-scale land dispute near Moscow. Records from Georgia’s National Statistics Office indicate that, until 2024, a man named Georgy Pirogov served as director and co-owner of the Namaste Hostel in Tbilisi. The hostel’s Facebook and Instagram pages feature photos and videos of a man closely resembling the Pirogov convicted in Moscow, and the accounts stopped updating around the time of his disappearance, though the hostel itself continues to operate. Its representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Novaya Gazeta Europe found three documents connected to Pirogov’s case in a public legal database: two attempts by his lawyer to appeal his pre-trial detention order before the Moscow City Court, and a separate appeal against the seizure of his property. None of the motions succeeded.
Court documents show that Pirogov has elderly parents, holds a university degree, is unmarried, and had no prior criminal record. His lawyer said that Pirogov had “actively assisted in uncovering and investigating the crime” and had confessed, and that, contrary to the prosecution’s portrayal of him as a Polish spy stealing data for Ukraine’s armed forces, “no socially dangerous consequences” had resulted from his actions.
“The entire case behind the accusation [that he was working for Polish intelligence] was built on an FSB sting operation. Agents posed as one of his acquaintances and communicated with Pirogov under that person’s identity; the authorities later classified those exchanges as treason,” Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with Department One, told Novaya Gazeta Europe. He said it remains unknown to what extent the FSB coordinated Pirogov’s abduction in Uzbekistan with the country’s own security services.
“They took him the simplest way possible — FSB officers flew in, detained him, injected him with some substance, and brought him to Moscow,” Smirnov said, adding that this account came from Pirogov himself, who gave it to explain how he ended up back in Russia after his arrest. The account raises questions: the substance would presumably have been meant to make Pirogov compliant with his abductors’ instructions, yet he would also have needed to appear sufficiently lucid to avoid arousing the suspicion of Uzbek border guards as he boarded the plane.
Smirnov noted that the charge brought against Pirogov has become commonplace in Russia. “[Charges of] treason in the form of espionage are extremely widespread right now — photographing military sites, sending data about military personnel, these things are now classified as treason,” he said.
The legal framework inside Russia has undergone a fundamental shift since the expansion of wartime legislation.
Charges of high treason and espionage, once rare, are now systematically deployed as standard instruments of domestic policy. The handling of these cases by the Russian judiciary is characterised by near-total secrecy, with the vast majority of trials held behind closed doors and resulting in lengthy penal colony sentences.
This data compiled by @one_dept documents the accelerating rate of these convictions. While the individual metrics are detailed in the slides, the broader picture reflects a judicial system restructured to neutralise dissent.
Lida Moniava, a prominent advocate for critically ill children’s care, has been charged with spreading false information about the military, her attorney told Russian media on Wednesday.
Moniava was arrested following a police search of her home in Moscow earlier in the day and questioned by officials from the Investigative Committee, Russia’s top investigative body.
Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court is expected to rule on pre-trial detention measures, her attorney told the news outlet RBC.
The charge of spreading false information about the military carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Moniava is the founder of the Moscow-based charity Lighthouse, which operates hospices for seriously ill children and young adults in the Russian capital and surrounding region.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moniava created a foundation that provided shelter, medical supplies and food to people fleeing from the war. The organization also later helped Armenians fleeing from conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Russians displaced from the Kursk and Belgorod regions.
That foundation suspended operations last September due to the dwindling number of refugees arriving in Moscow and the Moscow region.
Moniava was previously detained in January and in February. She was fined 45,000 rubles ($520) after being found guilty of “discrediting” the Russian military in posts on Telegram.
Despite facing pressure from the authorities, Moniava has refused to leave Russia.
“If I leave, critically ill children will end up in nursing homes and intensive care units for longer periods. Knowing that, I doubt I could live happily in some other country,” she wrote earlier this year.
Lidia Moniava is being forced out of Russia. First, her hospice was slapped with an administrative fine. Then she was threatened with criminal prosecution. Next, a criminal case was launched against her, her home was searched, and she was interrogated. Now, the court has sentenced her to non-custodial remand. It’s the standard playbook: we’re about to lock you up, so hurry and leave; take advantage of this last chance. In unison with the punitive organs, the lucky political émigrés are chiming in, “Run, Lida, run!” Escape is the very essence of their political activism. Fleeing is their means of survival.
Forcing an undesirable person to leave is the best option for the authorities. That much is obvious. But it is also obvious that this “undesirable person” has a different set of values, different views on life and on her place in it. She cannot abandon a cause she considers important; she cannot betray the people who have placed their trust in her, the people she cares for. Personal responsibility is what Russian society so desperately lacks today.
She won’t have an easy time of it. It’s hard for a free person to live in an unfree country. But it’s a noble choice, one that only people who are free on the inside can understand.
I always thought she was exactly what a Christian should be like.
Lida Moniava, the director of Lighthouse children’s hospice, has been accused of circulating “fake news” about the army. she has been detained and faces up to ten years in prison.
It is clear who is running a country where righteous people are behind bars.
On the evening of September 3, Simonovsky Court placed Lida Moniava, founder of Dom s Mayakom (“Lighthouse Charity Foundation”), under a set of restrictions in a criminal case accusing her of spreading “fake” information about the Russian military. Moniava is one of the leading figures in contemporary Russian philanthropy: she founded the Dom s Mayakom charity and its hospices for children with severe and incurable illnesses. Dozens of people came to Simonovsky Court in Moscow to support her. The news outlet Bereg recounts what happened — and shows how Moniava’s supporters celebrated her release. Meduza is translating the report in full.
A hearing on pretrial restrictions for Lida Moniava, founder of the Lighthouse Charity Foundation, is scheduled for 5 p.m. on September 3. A full hour before the hearing, Muscovites who have come to support Moniava are already gathering outside the Simonovsky Court building.
Police searched Moniava’s home early on the morning of August 2 as part of a criminal case over spreading “fake” information about the Russian military, then arrested her. The case stems from a post Moniava published on her Telegram channel to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “For a year now, my country has been sending missiles, tanks, and soldiers into Ukraine. For a year now, innocent people have been dying because of it,” she wrote.
A short young woman named Nadezhda stands in the parking lot reserved for official vehicles directly in front of the courthouse. She is visibly nervous. She introduces herself as Moniava’s goddaughter.
“I’m waiting for justice. If someone like Lida is sent to prison, something truly terrible will happen to the world,” Nadezhda says.
A mixed crowd gradually gathers by the parking lot: young people who might be described as part of the alternative scene, middle-aged people, and elderly members of the support group. Some call themselves Moniava’s friends and acquaintances; others, like red-haired Makar, dressed all in black, learned about her from recent news coverage.
“When I read about Lida, I realized she’s just an incredibly good person — kind, with the noblest intentions,” Makar tells the independent Russian outlet Bereg. “Of course, it’s a real shame things turned out this way.”
Makar says he is trying not to get his hopes up that the charges against Moniava will be dropped or that she will be released from custody, “so I don’t end up disappointed.”
Mikhail, an acquaintance of Moniava’s, is also there to support her. He speaks about her much as dozens of others have in Facebook posts supporting her over the past day.
“I admire what she does, what she stands for, and the fact that she’s open about it. That’s genuinely brave,” Mikhail says. “You can do charity work and still be a conformist because you think charity makes up for everything. But Lida did good work without becoming a conformist just to keep doing it.”
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moniava stayed in the country and continued helping children with incurable illnesses. She also set up a fund to help refugees from Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as residents of the Kursk region’s border areas affected by the Ukrainian military’s incursion in August 2024.
While helping people affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moniava also wrote antiwar posts on Facebook. In February 2026, Russian authorities fined her 45,000 rubles for “discrediting” the Russian military over those posts. She wrote about children killed in a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih and the deaths of the Martynenko family — a father, a mother, and their 11-year-old son — in a strike on Sumy.
After the February hearing at which a judge imposed the fine, Moniava thanked her followers for their support and said in a post that she had “received a lot of advice to leave Russia”:
When Center E is banging on your apartment door, it’s scary, of course. But look at this photo — Anya and I are having such a great time on our shift [at the hospice]. She’s a girl who spent 19 years behind the walls of a residential institution. If I leave, children in palliative care will spend more time in residential institutions and intensive care units. I doubt I could live happily in some other country knowing that. So emigration isn’t in the plans.
In the same post, Moniava added: “I also can’t stay silent as if there’s no war. Trying to live honestly comes first for me.”
Natalya, who came to Simonovsky Court, does not know Moniava personally but has long followed her work. “I’m just in shock over what’s happening,” she says. “It’s probably to be expected, but it’s still very hard for me to accept. I’m an outsider looking on, and I simply respect her work, so I came here to support her. Lida is a wonderful person who helps others live and survive. That’s very important in our world. In turbulent times, we need to support each other somehow and do something.”
Others who came to support the Dom s Mayakom founder included Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov, former editor-in-chief of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta; Nyuta Federmesser, founder of the Vera Fund, which helps people with incurable illnesses; actress Tatyana Drubich, co-chair of the same fund; and Daniil Maksimov, a Vera Fund employee and founder of an inclusive magazine about sex for people with disabilities.
Maksimov, a blogger, writes on social media about living with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and the problems wheelchair users face. Several people in motorized wheelchairs gathered outside Simonovsky Court on the day of Moniava’s hearing.
The Lighthouse Charity Foundation needs support. In recent days, it has lost many donations and some of its donors. You can donate from Russia in rubles on the foundation’s website.
Shortly before 5 p.m., a prison transport van parked outside the courthouse pulls away. By now, around 200 people have gathered. Someone in the crowd says, “This one’s probably leaving now, and the next one will have Lida in it.” When another prison van drives onto the court grounds soon afterward, people start chanting, “Lida! Lida!”
The van’s barred windows make it impossible to see who is inside. The van pulls into the garage.
People line up to enter the courthouse, and the line moves very slowly. One woman in a blue jacket stands out among the crowd, holding a copy of Viktor Vilisov’s book Nas Vsekh Toshnit (We’re All Sick to Our Stomachs) with a bright orange cover. Off to one side stands Yekaterina Duntsova, head of the Rassvet (“Dawn”) party; somewhere in the same crowd are Tatyana and Valery Yashin, the parents of convicted politician Ilya Yashin, who was sent to Germany in a prisoner exchange.
“So many people showed up. This is a really high-profile case,” someone in the crowd says.
Forty minutes later, the line still has not cleared. Two young men carrying tripods come out of the courthouse toward the line. Someone in the crowd asks hopefully:
“So, any news?”
“No, nothing at all.”
It is a little after 5 p.m. when Nyuta Federmesser, who had entered the courthouse near the front of the line, comes back outside. “Lida hasn’t arrived yet,” she says. “We came down because it’s impossible to breathe in there. There’s no point in standing here anymore because they’ll start kicking everyone out soon. The court closes at 6 p.m.”
Some of those who came are in no hurry to leave, even though it is very stuffy inside. Dmitry Muratov takes a spot right by the courtroom entrance. One woman who came to support Moniava offers people postcards to write warm messages on, which will later be delivered to Moniava. A police officer comes upstairs and asks everyone to leave the building: the court has closed for the day.
Everyone heads down to the courtyard, which is packed with people. In the middle, a group shares a pie. Police soon drive everyone out of the courtyard as well, and the gates close. Now everyone waits for Moniava by the fence.
Traffic police officers watch the crowd from cars with their emergency lights on. One of them approaches the crowd. What he says is familiar from rallies and pickets:
“Citizens, do not obstruct the passage of other citizens!”
“We’ve heard that one before,” a woman over 60 says. “I’m so sick of you!”
Word eventually spreads that Moniava has been brought to the courthouse after all and that the hearing has begun. The press is not allowed to attend.
“I know Lida personally,” says Fatima, who came to Simonovsky Court to support her. “Lida is a wonderful person. She’s done a lot in our country to help children with severe and incurable illnesses, and she built a palliative care system. Of course, it’s pretty horrifying that she’s inside the Simonovsky Court building at all.”
Neither Fatima nor Mikhail, who respects Moniava for refusing to conform, expects “anything good” to come of the judge’s decision.
Half an hour later, the crowd starts to stir. The courthouse doors open, and two security officers appear in the doorway. Several people start chanting “Lida!” but she is nowhere in sight. A few men come out, followed by a woman. “The workday is over,” someone in the crowd says.
As they wait, someone starts singing, but the words are impossible to make out.
Finally, Moniava’s defense attorney, Mikhail Biryukov, says from inside the courtroom that the court is releasing Moniava from custody and placing her under a “ban on certain activities.” While the investigation continues, she is barred from going outside between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., communicating with witnesses, or using the internet.
Sometime between 8 and 9 p.m., Moniava and Biryukov emerge from the courthouse. The people waiting behind the fence chant Moniava’s name and applaud. Once outside the gates, she tells the crowd: “I thought I was going to get 10 years in prison. Some kind of miracle.”
She says investigators spent “many hours” trying to persuade her to admit guilt: “For some reason, it’s very important that the defendant say they feel guilty. I don’t feel guilty. I want the war to end as soon as possible.”
“Is there anything you want to do right now?” journalists ask Moniava.
