Category: war and peace

The Story of Gordey Nikitin: 17 Years for “High Treason”

I am going to tell you about a political prisoner who seemingly no one has written about yet. I came across information about him quite by accident.

His name is Gordey Nikitin. Thirty-two years old and a native of Ryazan, Gordey worked at an oil refinery before his arrest. According to Gordey, he has been interested in politics and held opposition views since 2014. When the full-scale war [against Ukraine] broke out, Gordey went into shock. He was in this state of shock when he wrote several comments on Telegram.

As Gordey found out when reviewing the files in his criminal case, it was precisely because of these comments that, three years later, FSB officers would come after him, calling him on Telegram and introducing themselves as Ukrainian intelligence.

A few conversations with the “GUR” (actually, with the FSB) sufficed to charge him with and convict him of high treason and sentence him to seventeen (17) years in a maximum security penitentiary facility.

Gordey did not testify at his trial and he refused to make a closing statement to the court. He also did not bother to appeal the verdict, and so he will soon be transferred to a penal colony.

Gordey is currently being held in a remand prison in the town of Ryazhsk, Ryazan Region. He writes that the worst thing about the remand prison is the library: “Mostly third-rate military science fiction.” In the eight months he has spent in the prison, Gordey has only come across six decent books—by Remarque, Dostoevsky, and Chuck Palahniuk.

You can write a letter to Gordey. And if you use a digital service, a New Year’s miracle may occur, and he will receive the letter on January 30. In the worst case, it will arrive after the holidays.

✉️ Write to Gordey at the following address:

Russian Federation 391999 Ryazhsk, Ryazan Oblast • ul. Krasnaya, d. 1a, SIZO-2 • Nikitin Gordey Andreyevich (d.o.b. 28.09.1993)

📧 You can also send letters through the online services F-Pismo, Zonatelecom, and PrisonMail.Online (the last should be used by foreign bankcard holders).

Source: Ivan Astashin (Facebook), 26 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 decently using an online machine translator like Google Translate. ||||| TRR

On 22 February [2023], scheduled tactical and drill exercises were held at Ryazhsk Remand Prison No. 2 (Ryazan Region, Russian Federal Penitentiary Service).

Remand prison staff practiced negotiating procedures, organizing combat groups, dealing with the aftermath of mass disobedience, and repelling attacks on the correctional facility.

The exercises were observed by Young Army cadets from Ryazhsk High School No. 3. Remand prison staff showed the kids their weapons and equipment. The boys and girls were able to try on bulletproof vests and hold automatic rifles and pistols. At the end of the tour, the schoolchildren were treated to hot porridge and tea.

“Today, the students got a closer look at the penal system,” said Alexei Ogurtsov, acting chief warden at Remand Prison No. 2. “Our staff demonstrated their professional skills, equipment, and weapons to the students and answered their questions. Perhaps some of them will choose to enlist in our service in the future.”

Source: “Ryazhsk Youth Army Visits Remand Prison,” Izdatelstvo “Pressa,” 24 February 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

“Try Me for Treason”: Londoners Stand in Solidarity with Imprisoned Opponents of Russia’s War in Ukraine

“Try me for treason. I betrayed your deranged state”, the Russian anti-war protester Andrei Trofimov told the Second Western District Military Court in May.

In 2023, Trofimov was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, for opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine in social media posts, and trying to join the Free Russia Legion that fights on Ukraine’s side. At that hearing, Trofimov said he hoped for Ukraine’s victory, and called president Putin “a dickhead”.

On the basis of that statement alone, he was further accused of “justifying terrorism” and defaming the Russian army. For those “crimes”, the judge at the hearing in May this year, Vadim Krasnov, added three years to Trofimov’s sentence.

Before sentencing, Trofimov told the court that he had not justified terrorism, but supported the Ukrainian armed forces’ legitimate military actions against aggression, and had not defamed the Russian army whose actions were unconstitutional and illegal. He told the court that he considered himself guilty of a much more serious crime: treason – taking the enemy’s side in war.

Excerpts from the speeches by Trofimov and three other anti-war protesters were read out in London last month, at a launch event for the book Voices Against Putin’s War: Protesters’ Defiant Speeches in Russian Courts. I said a few words about the book, which I edited.

Here’s a film of the event.

Ukraine Information Group, “Try Me For Treason (readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts),” 7 December 2025

And there will be another chance to hear these powerful readings in London – on Thursday 5 February 2026, 6:30 p.m., at Birkbeck College. Here are the details.

You can order copies of Voices Against Putin’s War, or download a free pdf, here.

We published the book against the background of repeated claims that a peace agreement is about to be signed between Russia and Ukraine. These are louder than ever after this week’s talks in Berlin. At the time of writing this, it is not clear to me that the Kremlin is really interested in stopping the war, or what the “security guarantees” being offered to Ukraine actually mean.

I would recommend following the excellent arguments made about the peace process by Oleksandr Kyselov (most recently here, also here and here), Hanna Perekhoda (who writes on Facebook here), and other Ukrainian socialist writers.

If you want to know why the 20% of Donbas that Ukraine still controls matters so much, this comment by the Institute for the Study of War is worth reading. This speech by Valery Zaluzhny helps us understand what the Ukrainian political elite thinks.

Whatever the outcome of the talks now in progress, if any, the defence of victims of Russia’s military occupation of Ukrainian territory, and domestic political repression, will remain a central issue for our movement, right across Europe.

Source: Simon Pirani, “Try Me for Treason,” People and Nature, 21 December 2025

Delete All the Messages on Your Phone Before Going to Russia: The Treason Case Against Mikhail Loshchinin

Mikhail Loshchinin and his mother, Olga. Courtesy of RFE/RL

More and more Russians face trumped-up charges of “high treason.” Anything whatsoever—from commenting on a banned organization’s social media post to wiring a paltry sum of money to a relative or acquaintance in Ukraine—can occasion these charges. Foreign nationals who have retained their Russian citizenship have also faced prosecution. It has become ever more dangerous for them to travel to Russia to visit loved ones.

This past summer, Mikhail Loshchinin, a 48-year-old dual Belgian-Russian national, decided to visit his father, who had suffered a heart attack, and headed to Petersburg.

In recent years, Loshchinin had been living in Germany while working as a database manager in Luxembourg. On 1 July 2025, he crossed the Latvian border on a motorcycle with a German license plate and stopped at the Ubylinka border-crossing station, in the Pytalovo District of Russia’s Pskov Region. He was carrying a Russian federal passport, which he presented to the Russian border guards.

“They staged a provocation at the border”

“Sometime around 2020, before the war, Misha traveled to Russia by motorcycle. He made it there and back just fine. He had good memories [of the trip], and so he decided to repeat his ‘feat,'” says Loshchinin’s mother Olga, who now liveas in Poland. “The goal was to visit his father, who had undergone heart surgeries and had been feeling quite poorly after a heart attack; there was a risk the visit would be their last. [Mikhail] decided to travel with his Russian passport so as not to have bother getting a visa. (As a Russian national, Loshchinin does not need a visa to enter Russia—Sever.Realii.) He’d spent the last twenty-five years in Europe: his mindset had changed, he’d been Europeanized. He’d come to rely on the system’s accountability, on the fact that laws were obeyed.”

According to Olga, the border guards asked to check Mikhail’s telephone, on which they apparently found numerous Ukrainian contacts. Before his trip, Mikhail had not deleted anything from his WhatsApp account, as he did not consider corresponding with friends in Ukraine to be a crime.

“There were no grounds to detain him, so they staged a provocation at the border,” says Olga. “He had been waiting there for a long time for the inspection to end when he asked where he could buy some water. They told him to follow them on his motorcycle to the local store, that they would show him the way. He followed them, but they suddenly made a funny turn and detained him for crossing the border. In other words, they had deliberately lured him there to have a legal reason to detain him.”

Mikhail grew up in a large family: the four Loschinin children were born in the Soviet Union but later moved away. Mikhail had been living in Europe since 1999. His sister became a citizen of Ukraine, and he often visited her. He had many friends and acquaintances in Ukraine. Their contact details were stored in his phone, naturally.

Mikhail had always been apolitical, and his arrest has no connection with his work, says Olga.

“It is, rather, a matter of his being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the police investigator admitted as much to him. . . . Misha has always had an excellent reputation, and his employers have valued him. He’s also a well-rounded fellow: he’s a biker, plays the guitar, and sings and does the lighting for productions by small Russian-language theaters. He bought the [lighting] equipment with his own money and promotes Russian culture among his western friends and acquaintances any way he can: he hasn’t lost his connections with his roots. . . . He falls in love easily, and has had several marriages, but now he’s a bachelor. He has a daughter from his second marriage.”

After Mikhail set off for Russia, he constantly telephoned with his sister and mother, who now live in Poland, but they lost touch with him on July first. Three days later, he called from someone else’s phone and told them he had been detained.

“At 10:27 a.m. on July fourth, there was a call from an unknown Russian number. It was our Misha. He said that Dmitry, an FSB officer, had given him a phone to make the call, that he was under guard at the Hotel Dubrava in the border town of Pytalovo, that they’d confiscated his papers and the keys to his motorcycle, and that the motorcycle itself was parked outside the hotel,” Olga recalls.

Mikhail told his loved ones that he had been given a choice: either he would be sent to a basement somewhere, where he would sit and wait until they decided what to do with him and his papers, or he could go to a hotel and wait there, at his own expense.

“No one wants to sit in a basement, naturally,” Olga continues. “He had some money, and since the rooms were inexpensive, he chose the hotel. They confiscated his telephone, his passport, and the papers for his motorcycle, and they posted guards without whom he wasn’t allowed to leave his room. They had to get the go-ahead for every trip outside the hotel. They escorted him when he would go out to the store and the post office.”

Mikhail spent nearly a month at the Dubrava Hotel.

“Misha’s money was running out. We were by then terribly anxious and contacted a lawyer, who arrived at the hotel on the evening of August first and was able to see Misha and speak with him. On August second, a group of persons unknown took him to an undisclosed location. Those were the roughest days for us. As later transpired, he had been transported from Pytalovo to Stary Oskol, in Belgorod Region, and the journey had taken several days. Misha later told us that along the way they had passed through Smolensk; he had managed to catch sight of that. It turns out that, in his correspondence for 2022, an ex-girlfriend of Mikhail’s had asked him for financial help. Her profile picture now has a Ukrainian symbol on it, but it wasn’t there in 2022.”

The lawyer traveled to Stary Oskol, Olga recounts, but at the local pretrial detention center he was told that they had “no such person” in custody. The lawyer then filed a formal appeal with the prosecutor’s office, the FSB, and the Investigative Committee, asking them to figure out what had become of Mikhail. On 21 August 2025, Mikhail telephoned Olga himself—from Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 in Pskov. The call was again made from an unknown number.

“Judging by how his voice sounded, he wasn’t himself. He was clearly under duress and kept asking whether it was alright to talk now, meaning that the call was made in someone else’s presence,” says Olga. “He said that he had been accused of ‘high treason’ per Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code: ‘financing representatives of a foreign state hostile to the Russian Federation.’ We got a call from someone named Denis, who introduced himself as Misha’s attorney. He called us again and warned us not to hire anyone else, claiming our own attorney wouldn’t even be admitted to the remand hearing. We recorded the call but of course we didn’t do what he asked; he had no right to say that to us, and our own attorney did attend the hearing. Since then, Misha has been in custody at the Pskov detention center. He’s under investigation.”

Later, Mikhail said that, in Stary Oskol, he had been placed in a specialized facility for Ukrainian prisoners of war.

“He was tortured and abused, both mentally and physically, there” says Olga. “First of all, they took away his glasses. He has terribly poor eyesight, minus eight, and he practically lost his sight. He could only walk with his head down, bent over. They stripped him naked and beat him. He told his lawyer about all of it. He was completely crushed, and of course this was done deliberately to squash any hope that he might be released and to make him agree to sign whatever papers they put in front of him. They forced him to sign a paper stating that he had been gallivanting freely around Russia until August twenty-first. He told us this recently. But we have a document stating that he was in Stary Oskol, and it is unlikely that he could have traveled freely around Russia without papers or a means of transport and without informing his relatives. There are many inconsistencies in their ‘body of evidence.'”

“I am horrified by what has happened to my son”

On 10 November, Mikhail Loshchinin celebrated his forty-eighth birthday in the Pskov detention center.

“I am horrified by what has happened to my son,” says Mikhail’s mother. “I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching, since I didn’t expect the authorities to behave as they have behaved. And yet I didn’t have full faith in Russian law enforcement. My grandfather was in prison in 1937. He had been an officer in the White Army. The family was then living in Grozny, and my mom was small. Several former [White] officers lived in the vicinity. They would get together for readings and go on picnics; they were cultured folk. The entire group was arrested. Grandfather was the only one of them to survive because he didn’t sign anything [i.e., a confession]; the rest of them were shot. He never told anyone what price he had paid for this. My mom, still a kid then, brought care packages to him in prison.”

Olga has carefully researched Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code and argues that it has simply been “misapplied to a completely peaceful, innocent man.”

“We have a really good, tight-knit family. Although [Mikhail’s] dad lives in Petersburg, and we’re divorced, we have a decent relationship, and we’ve even started conversing more often now. And all the kids are tight-knit. Misha was always quite kind; we even wanted him to become a doctor, since kindness is quite valuable in a doctor. But he chose a different path in life. He wanted to be a programmer, and he’s been successful at it,” says Olga.

According to her, many of Mikhail’s friends in Luxembourg, where he had worked in recent years, are now deeply concerned about him.

“He always had a good head on his shoulders, and he became quite well known in Russian diaspora theatrical and cultural circles, and not only in those circles. He even did the sound for the Orthodox Church of Luxembourg,” says Olga. “There are videos on YouTube of him playing ‘Under the Blue Sky’ on the guitar in concert and his boss, a Frenchman, singing it in Russian. It is an ironic twist of fate that a person like can be destroyed so simply. . . . Summer is the time when theaters get ready for the high theatrical season, and right then Misha vanished. A support group has emerged, all of his friends. I honestly had no idea that there were so many of them.”

Mikhail’s friends have been writing petitions requesting his release from police custody, which his relatives have been passing on to his lawyer.

“Although Mikhail lived in Luxembourg, he visited us quite often recently. He has a girlfriend in Slovakia, and when he went to see her, he found ways to come through [Poland] and see us,” says Olga.

According to Loshchinin’s family, Mikhail has begun to suffer from retinal detachment while in custody.

“In 2024, he visited an ophthalmologist, who informed him that surgery was not necessary at the time, but that it would have to be performed immediately if he began seeing flashes in his line of sight. Now he has been seeing those flashes,” Olga explains. “It is hard to get proper medical care in prison, and I’m afraid that he may simply go blind in there. I can’t imagine that my son, who has done nothing nasty in his life, is now being treated as one of the most dangerous criminals, and all because he hadn’t cut off his ties with Russia. If you take someone’s phone and check their messages, every other person could be under suspicion.”

“Thousands of people across the country are being held without charge”

Loshchinin’s defense attorney declined to comment for this article because he is bound by a non-disclosure agreement.

Attorney Yevgeny Smirnov, who works for the human rights project Department One, says that there have been many such treason cases, and that there have even been prisoner exchanges involving people convicted of treason.

According to our count, at least 148 people in Russia faced criminal charges of treason, espionage, and clandestine collaboration with foreigners in 2023, and at least 88 such cases were brought before the courts. The trend continued in 2024 and 2025. According to statistics on court rulings for the first half of 2025, as published by the Judicial Department of the [Russian] Supreme Court, 115 high treason cases were instigated, which was twice as many as in the first half of 2024. At the same time, according to data from Department One, the Supreme Court has underestimated the number of convictions in such cases by at least threefold.

“Mikhail Loshchinin wired money to a private individual in Ukraine,” explains Smirnov. “According to the security forces, this is a form of high treason, and it has existed for over ten years: providing financial assistance for activities contrary to the security of the Russian Federation. The FSB often takes advantage of this. They might have claimed, for example, that the young woman to whom Mikhail wired money works for the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] or is involved in the Territorial Defense Forces. Something like that. And that wiring her money was thus a criminal offense.”

The attorney is not surprised that Mikhail was detained in Pytalovo for a month without charges, staying in a hotel at his own expense and under guard.

“There are thousands of people across the country being held without charge. Some are under administrative arrest, while others are in former hotels refitted as [detention] centers, or in actual hotel rooms. Most often, police investigators need the time to get the go-ahead to file criminal charges. Moscow gives the go-ahead for such cases.”

“There is no good outcome in these situations,” Smirnov notes.

“They might sentence him up to thirteen years in prison. The only hope for release is through a prisoner exchange, and that would involve a political decision,” argues Smirnov. “How many people in Russia have been released in the last ten years via prisoner exchanges? A couple dozen, probably. And how many political prisoners are there in the country currently? Ten to fifteen thousand. [Mikhail’s] chances are a bit greater since he’s a Belgian national, of course. There are not so many Belgian nationals [in Russian prisons], and if Belgian politicians get involved in the campaign to secure his release, the chances will grow for sure.”

Olga, Mikhail’s mother, says that Belgian consular officers have tried on several occasions to get permission to visit him in the detention center but were turned down.

“He’s a Russian national, but Russia doesn’t recognize his Belgian citizenship,” says Smirnov. “Most countries don’t recognize dual citizenships: it’s a normal practice. So, Belgian consuls aren’t being allowed to see him. It’s been the usual practice for decades.”

Smirnov argues that people living abroad should not travel to Russia unless absolutely necessary “because it’s a big risk.” If travel is unavoidable, you should prepare in advance by purchasing a separate telephone, planning your itinerary with care, seeking advice from those in the know, and being ready for the fact that the border guards will question you and search all your devices.

Source: “‘The goal was to visit his father’: dual Belgian-Russian national detained and charged with treason,”Sever.Realii (RFE/RL), 3 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

A Documentary Film about Pavel Kushnir

Kushnir (2025), a film about the late pianist and antiwar protester Pavel Kushnir (in Russian and English, with subtitles)

Pavel Kushnir was a virtuoso pianist, a writer, and a courageous man whom the world discovered only too late. He died on July 27, 2024, in a Birobidzhan detention center following a dry hunger strike. The formal pretext for his arrest was a series of anti-war videos posted on a YouTube channel that had only 5 subscribers.

This film is an attempt to understand the man who played Rachmaninoff until his fingers bled, who dreamed of flying to Mars, who idolized Kurt Cobain, and who called the war by its true name while living in complete isolation.

We have gathered archival footage, previously unknown recordings of Pavel, fragments of his poignant cut-up novel, and memories from close friends and colleagues, including Clean Bandit soloist Grace Chatto, music expert Mikhail Kazinik, and publisher Dmitry Volchek. This is a story not just about a death in prison, but about an extraordinary life that became an act of art and resistance.

In this video:

Unique footage of Kushnir’s performances and artistic actions.

The story of an unmade avant-garde film and friendships with global stars.

The Birobidzhan Diary: a chronicle of loneliness and the fight against fascism.

Why a brilliant musician went unnoticed by the cultural establishment, but not by the prison system.

Source: VotVot (YouTube), 12 December 2025

Our film about the pianist Pavel Kushnir has dropped. […] Honestly, the film was ready to go in late April, but we spent a long while navigating the legal maze around the music, copyrights, and permissions. That was not even the main reason for the delay, though. I wanted to wait until the media hype had subsided and we could take a look at Pavel’s legacy from a certain historical distance, to talk about him not as a victim (although that viewpoint is legitimate, of course) but as a rebel whose choice was deliberate. Similarly, if you will, there are different takes on Christ: some view him as a needless victim who arouses pity, and the more maudlin that pity, paradoxically, the stronger their hatred for his crucifiers; while others see him as a rebel whose heroism was deliberate.

In my opinion, seeing Pavel as a pure “victim” robs him of agency, turning him into an extra in someone else’s play, in which the crucifiers have all the starring roles.

The film is based on Pavel’s own diaries. In terms of composition, I reprised the structure of his screenplay for the unmade film The Six Weary Ones. Three states of madness—prophetic madness, creative madness, and the madness of protest—figure as the three aspects of his personality. As in Joyce, each of Kushnir’s chapters has its own color and symbol. We have added music to these chapters. The music for the red chapter, “Prophet,” is by Rachmaninoff. Bach supplies the music for the blue chapter, “Creator”: blue stands for the heavens and the cosmos, and fugues are cosmic in nature. The third, black-and-white chapter, dealing with rebellion and Birobidzhan, is set to Scriabin’s Prometheus, a [tone] poem about the first rebel in history. Camus writes, in The Rebel, that rebellion confers agency on us, turning us from beasts into human beings. Again, it’s all in the eye of the beholder: some feel pity for Prometheus, chained and tortured by the eagle, while others see in him the power of the unbroken human spirit. And Scriabin’s idea of transforming all of humanity meshes perfectly with the cosmic utopia begun in the previous chapter. Prometheus: The Poem of Fire is a mystery play; as [Russian poet Konstantin] Balmont put it, it is “a vision of singing, falling moons, of musical stardoms, arabesques, hieroglyphs, and stones sculpted from sound.”

The film is chockablock with musical, literary and philosophical allusions which I won’t burden you with now. But if you’re interested, I’ll set up a cozy stream on my tiny Telegram channel where we’ll discuss the film and unpack its hidden layers, and I’ll answer your questions. You can write in the comments about whether this idea seems viable, and I’ll decide what to do based on your feedback.

Once again I want to thank everyone who did their part and helped commemorate a major artist. Thanks to you, we raised 1,185 euros and 533,954.51 rubles [approx. 5,800 euros], which is not just a large sum but a phenomenally large sum, considering that the major media practically ignored our fundraising campaign. That being said, many friends and former colleagues supported us by reposting [our fundraising appealing], which is eloquent testimony to the fact that a person and his reputation are more vital than any institution, and for this I am endlessly grateful to them.

The money we raised was enough for several full-fledged scouting trips and location shoots. Considering the geographical scope of our shoots, which included traveling to Birobidzhan itself, our grassroots war chest was emptied at some point. It became clear that without outside help we wouldn’t be able to complete the project properly, avoid devolving into a Skype interview format, and pay all the courageous artists, editors, and cameramen who had agreed to shoot a film in Russia at their own peril. I understood that asking folks for money again was not a good plan. So, after consulting with our small team, I accepted an offer from the online platform Votvot. They covered our remaining expenses and, most importantly, agreed to our condition that the film would be freely available. Our promises to our donors have not been broken: this grassroots film is being released in a way that is accessible to the grassroots—on YouTube.

I want to thank my friend and colleague Alexander Urzhanov from the bottom of my heart: he was quite emotionally invested in this film and provided us with his fabulous production resources. I would also like to thank all the folks at Narra: they have asked me not to name them, but you know who you are. Misha, Dasha, Ira, and Nastya, I couldn’t have done it without you and by myself! Particular thanks go to Boris Barabanov and Darina Lukutina from Votvot, without whom this film would scarcely have been possible.

I would like to thank Pavel’s relatives for permitting us to use his voice to read his diaries. Getting ahead of myself, I should say that this is the only digitally generated thing in the film. Everything else was filmed or recorded using analog methods: the diaries, the posters, and the drawings of a certain incomparable artists were all done without synthetics or computer glitz. All you see is life’s pleasant graininess.

I thank Pavel’s friends for sharing their archives and letters, as well as everyone who appears in this film.

I have one final request to you. Watch this film tomorrow. More to the point, share this film. I’m afraid that the film will get lost in the ruthless algorithmic desert without your reposts. May this film find everyone who needs it.

Source: Sergey Erzhenkov (Facebook), 12 December 2025. Thanks to Giuliano Vivaldi for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Pavel Kushnir was a classical pianist. But according to Russian authorities, he was also a dangerous dissident. In July 2024, he died on hunger strike in a remote prison in Far East Russia. Who was Pavel Kushnir, and why did he end up in jail? Liza Fokht from BBC Russian has been trying to piece together Pavel Kushnir’s story.

Source: Spotify

Give Them Want They Want

Putin: “Give me what I want!” Trump: “Hang on!”

Trump: “There’s a better way!” Trump: “Give him what he wants!”

Source: Moscow Times Russian Service weekly newsletter, 30 November 2025. Original by Michael de Adder. Translated by the Russian Reader

Following the shooting that claimed the life of a National Guard member last Wednesday in Washington, the Trump administration has announced it will be halting all asylum decisions and paused issuing visas for people travelling on Afghan passports. The suspect in Wednesday’s shooting that killed Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and critically wounded Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, is Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who worked with the CIA during the Afghanistan War and had been living in the U.S. since 2021. He applied for asylum during the Biden administration under a program that resettled Afghans after the U.S. withdrawal from the country, and was granted it this year under President Trump.

As seen in our infographic, based on data released by the U.S. Department of Justice, Afghanistan was not one of the 10 most common countries of origin for people who received asylum in the U.S. in the fiscal year 2024. Only 508 Afghans were granted asylum in the country that year, while 61 were refused. By comparison, the U.S. granted asylum to 3,605 Russian nationals, making Russia the most common nationality to get asylum in the country during that time period. This was followed by China, with 2,998 Chinese nationals receiving asylum, and Venezuela, with 2,656 successful asylum applications.

Source: Valentine Fourreau, “Who Is Granted Asylum in the United States?” Statista, 1 December 2025

The Intensifying Crackdown in Russia

Varvara Volkova

“My friends died at the hands of Russian soldiers. Why can’t I talk about it?” 

This question will cost Varvara Volkova 7 years in a Russian penal colony. Here’s her story.

Varvara was a flight attendant, not an impassioned political activist. In a neighbourhood chat, she stated the obvious: Russian forces are killing civilians in Ukraine. The prosecution framed it as “fake news” motivated by hatred toward the armed forces, and the court accepted it.

The mechanism used to go after her relies on a Soviet-style culture of snitching: a Russian tank driver complained about her comments, then a professional informer, who intentionally hunts dissidents, amplified the case and demanded she be jailed.

In fact, there’s a whole network of these informers — they call themselves “SMERSH.” For those who don’t know Russian history, it is a reference to Stalin’s WWII counter-intelligence service. It means “Death to Spies” — a direct revival of the terror methods of the 1930s. They published screenshots of her messages everywhere trying to ruin her life; claimed she called the soldier a “fascist”; said she offered to make tea for Ukrainian soldiers if they reached the Moscow region. For words spoken in anger, the system decided to smash her life to pieces.

There is a grim irony in this tragedy: the regime destroyed Varvara to protect the “honor” of the military and her accuser. But the tank driver who reported her is already dead: he was killed in the war earlier this March. 

Observers abroad often underestimate the price of resistance in today’s Russia. It is not just a fine anymore, but years and years of one’s life. Varvara Volkova shows us the true bill — and it is devastating. 

I track the consequences of speech in modern-day Russia, make sure to follow for more updates.

Source: Khodorkovsky Communications Center (Facebook), 25 November 2025

Preface by the Editorial Board: Below we publish the translation of an article of our Russian comrades about state repression in their country. The article reports, among others, about the situation of comrade Felix Eliseev. He has been in prison for 2.5 years as part of a 14-year prison term. Felix was sentenced for “treason” as he was accused of making propaganda against Putin’s imperialist war against Ukraine and sending money to Ukraine to buy weapons. While the prison authorities do everything to break him, Felix does not lose his spirit and endures his imprisonment stoically. (See https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/felix-eliseev-a-revolutionary-communist-in-russian-prison/)

We call readers to support Felix by spreading this information about a communist and anti-fascist serving an unjust sentence!

You can also support Felix financially at www.paypal.me/irinablackbook, with the note “for Felix”.

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According to the human rights organization Memorial, there are currently over 1,000 political prisoners in Russia, while other groups estimate the number could be as high as 2,500. This number is three times higher than in 2020, more than twice as high as in 2022, and continues to grow. In 2025, there was a sharp increase in criminal cases under articles on “justification of terrorism,” “sponsoring terrorist activity,” and “treason.” This is not due to increased terrorism, but to the fact that the security forces, having perfected their repression mechanisms, have begun to intensify their crackdown on “sponsorship” cases, such as those of the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation, recognized as an extremist organization in Russia) or cases related to money transfers to the Ukrainian army, which occurred back in 2022. The term “terrorism” itself has become so vague that even the average person doesn’t always understand what it actually means.

Among political prisoners are many individuals with progressive leftist views, serving time for anti-war activities or “inaccurate” public statements online. The “Foundation for Support of Left-Wing Political Prisoners” provides support to at least some of these individuals. Among them are: defendants in the “Tyumen Case”; defendants in the “Chita Case”; Anton Orlov, a trade union and leftist activist, coordinator of the independent medical workers’ union “Action” in Bashkortostan; Daria Kozyreva, an activist from St. Petersburg known for her anti-war protests and criticism of the Russian army; Gagik Grigoryan, a young activist imprisoned in 2023 at the age of 17; Azat Miftakhov is a Russian mathematician and anarchist, sentenced in 2021 to six years in prison for allegedly setting fire to the United Russia office in 2018. After serving this sentence, he was arrested again in 2023 on charges of “justifying terrorism” in a private conversation with a prison cellmate and sentenced to four years in prison; defendants in the “Kansk teenagers case”; defendants in the “Network case”; Boris Kagarlitsky is a left-wing publicist known in many parts of the world; Ruslan Ushakov is the author of articles published on opposition Telegram channels, sentenced to eight years in prison for posts in a public chat.

The case of the communist Felix Eliseev

Another political prisoner is Felix Eliseev, a Russian communist, blogger, and administrator of the Telegram channels “She Fell Apart” and “Kolkhoznoye Madness.” He was arrested in December 2022 and charged with justifying terrorism. According to investigators, Eliseev posted two anti-war posts on his Telegram channel, one of which endorsed a Ukrainian Armed Forces helicopter strike on an oil depot in Belgorod. The charges were later upgraded, and Eliseev was charged with “treason”. The court alleges that he transferred funds through a cryptocurrency account to a “curator,” who used the funds to purchase equipment and weapons for Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers.

Felix, like many other political prisoners convicted of “terrorist and extremist” offenses, is serving his sentence under intense pressure from the prison administration. He is regularly placed in solitary confinement cells, where they do everything they can to break him mentally and physically.

However, political repression in Russia involves more than just horrific criminal cases of “terrorism,” “treason,” and other “betrayals of the nation.” It also includes the persecution of undesirable and dissenting youth who dare publicly speak out against the war and the ruling elite, thereby gathering many other concerned young people around them.

The “Stop Time” case

One example of such government abuse is the “Stop Time” case. The “Stop Time” case concerns the persecution by Russian authorities of members of the St. Petersburg street music group “Stop Time” – Diana Loginova (pseudonym Naoko), Alexander Orlov, and Vladislav Leontyev – for their participation in impromptu concerts, including one near the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station, where they performed anti-war songs by artists designated by the authorities as “foreign agents.” On October 16, 2025, Loginova was arrested and sentenced to 13 days of administrative arrest for performing a song by an artist unpopular with the authorities. The other members of the band were also arrested and sentenced to 12-13 days. These events resonated in the media (both pro-government and opposition) and society, becoming a topic of discussion in the context of artistic freedom and the tightening of censorship in modern Russia.

On October 29-30, the musicians received another 12-13 days of arrest, and on November 11, two of them were arrested for another 13 days. On November 23, the musicians were released from arrest. The lead singer and one of the band members left Russia that same day.

In many Russian cities, street bands followed “Stop Time’s” example and performed opposition songs by artists-foreign agents to large audiences in public squares. They also faced pressure from the authorities and harassment from Z-Neanderthals.

Also, recently, spiders in a jar have started eating each other. Criminal cases have been brought against several well-known military Z-bloggers for discrediting the army! More than two years after Strelkov’s imprisonment and Prigozhin’s murder, a new steamroller of repression is purging those loyalists who are too undesirable.

All of the above demonstrates that Russian society has no legal means to publicly express its attitude toward the events unfolding around it. For any word “against,” the sword of Damocles of Russian justice hangs over every citizen. Despite this, concerned Russians, especially young people, are finding ways to rally together and show the world that not all is lost in this country.

Meanwhile, cowardly security officials and government officials tremble at the mere thought that the masses will sooner or later awaken from their slumber and rise to deliver justice to the imperialist oppressors in the Kremlin. In Russia, literal punishments are being introduced for thought crimes. Thus, in September of this year, an administrative law punishing “searching for extremist materials” came into force. This law allows the FSB to view any citizen’s internet search history, and if it contains views of materials deemed extremist or terrorist, the user faces a visit from masked officers and a fine. The first cases under this law have already been filed.

Furthermore, the country is introducing a so-called “white list” for the internet—only those websites approved by Roskomnadzor are permitted to be accessed; others are inaccessible, and VPNs cannot be connected. So far, in the spirit of Russian tradition, this system is poorly functioning and flawed, but the day is not far off when Russian society will find itself locked in a “cheburnet.” (*)

Freedom for political prisoners!

For freedom of speech, conscience, and the internet!

Down with political repression!

Radical democratization of the country, not the fascist regime of a dictator!

All power to the working class and the working masses, not to a handful of oligarchic monopolists!

(*) Cheburnet is a mixture of two words: Чебурашка (Cheburashka) and internet. Cheburashka is a character from Soviet cartoon for children. Despite it is kind and helpful, in modern mass consciousness it is associated with Soviet censorship. So cheburnet basicaly means internet under the censorship of Russian government and intelligence agencies.

Source: Communist Tendency (RCIT Section in Russia), “Political Repression in Russia,” Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, 25 November 2025

An appeal from Elena, mother of Ilya Shakursky:

My name is Elena Nikolaevna Bogatova, and I am the mother of political prisoner Ilya Alexandrovich Shakursky. I am crying out for help to save my son so that he does not rot away in solitary confinement.

They took my only son away when he was twenty-one years old. He is now twenty-nine. He has been tortured. He has serious health problems that we still cannot solve. He still has eight years to serve, and they could turn him into a disabled person. I cannot help him on my own, so I am asking all caring people to help us.

It is impossible for a mother to know that her child is being destroyed, and that she cannot save him!

Although he committed no crime, he is in prison under the harsh Article 205 [of the Russian Criminal Code; Article 205 proscribes “terrorist acts”], enduring all the hardships of prison life, without ever receiving any encouragement; we cannot even hope for parole. Right now, [the prison authorities] want to turn him into repeat offender so that he cannot have any visits, phone calls, letters, or packages. They want to take everything away from him.

I ask you to write an appeal. I understand that there are many of us now, and everyone is exhausted. But we must stand together for the sake of our loved ones, for the sake of the younger generation, which is currently being destroyed. Hear the cry of a mother who cannot bear the pain for her son and for all those behind bars. If we push with our shoulders, the walls will collapse….

https://t.me/ilyashakursky

Source: Elena Shakurskaya (Facebook), 28 November 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

OVD-Info Faces a Critical Situation: We Have Lost All Our Ruble Donations

26.11.2025

Russian payment services have refused to continue working with us, without providing any explanation, and have cut off our ability to accept one-time and recurring donations. This has severed our connection to our main source of support—the 12,000 individuals who regularly transfer money to OVD-Info.

The services’ refusal to cooperate with us is one of the many manifestations of state pressure on human rights organizations and independent media. Some of them even had to close due to the loss of donations in rubles.

This is a severe blow to our work. With these donations we were able to pay for the work of defense lawyers and legal experts, travel to the regions, maintain our free hotline, and help those who are politically persecuted in Russia. Furthermore, regular donations allowed us to plan our long-term work and development.

We do not plan to close or reduce the scope of our work, because repression is not diminishing. Any political activity, expressing a view against the invasion of Ukraine, or criticism of Putin instantly becomes grounds for persecution. We simply cannot abandon Russians to face this brutal, repressive system alone. We are defending over 90 defendants in criminal cases, almost every day we send lawyers to police stations, courts, searches, penal colonies, and pre-trial detention centers. We answer dozens of messages and calls daily—and we want to continue doing this.

However, now everything depends on whether we can find another 12,000 people who will regularly support OVD-Info.

You can support us here.

Source: OVD Info

Yulia Lemeshchenko. Photo from the Memorial website

The Second Western Military District court in Moscow last week sentenced Yulia Lemeshchenko to 19 years’ imprisonment for high treason, sabotage, and preparing and training for an act of terrorism.

Yulia, 42, is a Russian citizen, born in Staryi Oskol, in Belgorod region. She lived in Voronezh in southern Russia, until 2014. Then she moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine, with her son and her husband, who had found work there. Later on the couple separated.

Yulia took up powerlifting and in 2021 was named Ukrainian women’s champion.

In 2024 Yulia did military training in Kyiv – firearms, explosives and flying drones – and returned to Russia, via a third country. She sabotaged power transmission infrastructure near St Petersburg, and in Voronezh conducted surveillance on Aleksei Lobodoi, an air force commander responsible for bombing Kharkiv.

Yulia was arrested in January this year. She did not deny the facts outlined in the prosecution case, but told the court that “from a moral standpoint” she considered herself not guilty. This is a translation of her final statement to the court, published by Mediazona.

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Ukrainian Champion in a Russian Court: Yulia Lemeshchenko’s Final Statement

As you see, I don’t have any sheets of paper and I haven’t especially prepared, but I think I will improvise. I will now probably say a few things that were already said during this hearing, but let this be a sort of summing-up, in a monologue.

So I already spoke here about the fact that, in any war, two sides clash, and each side insists that it is right and that its cause is just. I took one of these sides. I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but, all the same, for me, Ukraine is home. I love that country. And I love Kharkiv, with all my heart.

There is a district in Kharkiv called Severnaya Saltovka. About 500,000 people lived there. Half a million. A few people I knew lived there. My hairdresser lived there. After the Russian shelling and bombing, not a single house in that district was left undamaged. Not a single one. And I am not just talking about a few broken windows. I am talking about whole blocks of flats in ruins.

Right next to the block where I lived, there were explosions. In my block, on the ground floor, my neighbour Anya lived with her four-year-old son Nikita. A shell exploded right under their window. Their apartment was completely destroyed. What has happened to Anya and her son I don’t know. I don’t know whether they are still alive.

Friends of mine have died in this war, one relative – my second cousin – and colleagues of mine. War is monstrous. I could not stand aside. When war comes, people who are affected can either try somehow to fight, or they can flee. People flee – I don’t know – maybe because they are cowardly or weak. I don’t consider myself to be a cowardly or weak person. So I decided to fight back – to fight against Russian military aggression.

It is possible that, by saying these things, I am getting myself still deeper into trouble. But my honour, and my conscience, are important to me. I did what I believed to be necessary. I did what I could. To regret, to repent – who knows, maybe I will do that on my deathbed. But for now, what will be, will be. I have nothing further to say.

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When the court hearing began, Mediazona reported that the judge, Vadim Krasnov, read out evidence that Yulia gave after being arrested in January. After the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Yulia at first moved to Germany. In 2023 she returned to Ukraine and made contact with the “Free Russia” legion, but did not join.

In 2024, when she did her military training, the instructors – who did not answer questions about which part of the armed forces they served in – said that, by way of payment for her work, she could receive Ukrainian citizenship.

The judge asked if she had done so, to which she replied, with a smile, “not yet”.

During the hearing, Judge Krasnov asked Yulia why she had chosen such a radical method of struggle, rather than, for example, providing medical help to the wounded.

“I can only answer that question with another, rhetorical question”, she replied. “Why did Russia decide to use violent methods to destroy Ukrainian cities? A war had started. Do you understand?”

The judge responded that, by 2022, the war had already been underway for eight years. Yes, but it had become frozen, Lemeshchenko said. After the invasion, she wanted to help Ukraine however she could, and was invited to become a saboteur.

“How far were you prepared to go?” asked the judge. “I did not want to do anything that would take human lives”, Lemeshchenko replied. “They accepted that point. On that we had an agreement.”

The judge said that the sabotage Lemeshchenko carried out near St Petersburg left hospitals without electric light. She replied that the aim had been to paralyse a drone factory, that she was sincerely sorry if anyone in Petersburg had suffered. And that she and her son had many times sat in their apartment, without light, when Kharkiv was being bombed.

Lemeshchenko also told the court that, during interrogation, agents of the federal security service (FSB) had threatened to murder her, and pushed her head against a wall. She had tried to tell them the truth. She said that she did not retract her evidence – and nor would she complain about her treatment, as she did not believe that those responsible would be punished.

□ Here is Yulia’s statement in court, recorded with English interpretation. Yulia is recognised as a political prisoner by Memorial, and her case was reported by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.

□ The last word in court by Anton Khozhaev, a trainee officer accused of desertion to the Ukrainian side, and more on Russian anti-war protesters

□ Voices Against Putin’s War, just published by Resistance Books, includes 12 statements by anti-war protesters and associated material. The livestream of a launch event is here. 27 November 2025.

Source: “‘I decided to fight back. Ukraine is my home.’ Yulia Lemeshchenko’s final word in court,” People and Nature, 27 November 2025

Peace for Our Time

Trump didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he’s a lock for the Kremlin’s Employee of the Month.

Source: Andy Borowitz (Facebook), 22 November 2025

The 28-point Russia–Ukraine peace plan—put on the table this week by Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s emissary, and Kirill Dmitriev, a Kremlin aide equally inexperienced at diplomacy—grants Kyiv two favors but otherwise amounts to a Moscow wish list.

It is worth noting that neither Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky nor any European leader was consulted in the backroom drafting. Spokesmen for Russian President Vladimir Putin say, a bit improbably, that they haven’t seen the deal either. Even if its outlines were acceptable to both sides, several of its planks are ambiguous, requiring extensive negotiation. Still, Trump has demanded that Ukraine accept the plan before Thanksgiving.

This timetable seems unlikely, as does the notion that peace is now at hand.

The plan allows Ukraine to apply for membership to the European Union—a significant point, given that, in some ways, the war began back in 2014, when Putin deposed a Ukrainian president who was on the verge of striking a deal with the EU. The plan also commits $100 billion in seized Russian assets to rebuild war-torn areas of Ukraine.

However, the rest is a shambles. It hands much of Ukrainian territory to Russia—including Crimea and the eastern Donbas districts of Luhansk and Donetsk. It reduces the size of the Ukrainian army to 600,000 troops (it currently has about 880,000), while putting no cap on the number of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders. It demands that Ukraine revise its constitution to prohibit membership in NATO, bars NATO troops from being stationed in Ukraine, and forbids Ukraine from attacking Moscow or St. Petersburg with missiles (a peculiar clause—as Lawrence Freedman asks, “But [attacking] Rostov is OK?”), without barring Russia from firing missiles at cities in Ukraine.

Finally, Ukraine must hold elections within 100 days (nothing about how security might be kept at polling stations in areas still under dispute), all combatants and politicians are granted amnesty (so much for war-crimes trials), and Russia “will be reintegrated into the global community,” complete with restored membership in the G8 and the dropping of sanctions.

A few other articles seem to favor Ukraine at first glance, but not so much upon scrutiny. For instance, “Russia is expected not to invade neighboring countries” (italics added), which sounds like a courteous request, not a legal demand. (By contrast, the same plank—in fact, the same sentence—states, “NATO will not expand further.”)

Another: “Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees,” but there isn’t a hint on what Moscow would find acceptable in this department. Similarly, “Russia will codify a non-aggression policy toward Europe and Ukraine,” thus allowing Putin to load the codification with whatever loose language and loopholes he’d like.

The plan calls for the creation of a “humanitarian committee” to oversee an “all for all” exchange of prisoners, detainees, and kidnapped children. That’s good, but there’s nothing about who appoints the committee members or how the trades are enforced; for instance, who sends police into Moscow homes to retrieve Ukrainian babies and adolescents? Even assuming the best of intentions (a dubious assumption), this will take a while to formalize.

Similarly, the plan says that Donetsk will be turned into a “demilitarized zone,” with no Ukrainian or Russian troops allowed to enter. Again, fine, but who supplies the armed peacekeepers to enforce this rule—and why should Moscow accept it, given that the deal recognizes Donetsk as Russian territory?

These are not small points. Article 28, the plan’s final plank, states, “Once all parties accept this memorandum, a ceasefire will take effect immediately after both sides withdraw to the agreed points for the start of the agreement’s implementation.” In other words, all of the plan’s ambiguities, loose ends, and remaining disputes have to be settled—and then troop withdrawals have to be completed, not merely started—before a ceasefire takes hold.

This is the opposite of the 20-point peace plan that Trump helped impose on Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It shrewdly demanded a ceasefire and hostage exchange as the deal’s first steps. It is not at all clear that details about the remaining points will ever be negotiated, much less implemented (in fact, most of those points seem politically dead on arrival), but the important thing—Trump and his Arab partners realized—was to stop the killing and to keep it stopped for as long as possible.

The Russia–Ukraine plan does the opposite: It imposes a ceasefire after agreement and action on all the other steps toward a peace—and an unjust peace at that.

The main problem with the plan is that, like its American authors, it fails to recognize the true nature of the war: namely, that Ukrainians are fighting for their sovereignty as an independent nation, while Putin is fighting for the restoration of the old Russian empire, which entails, among other things, the total subjugation of Ukraine.

A Kremlin spokesman said as much on Friday, when he said that any peace deal must address the war’s “root causes.” Putin has made clear a number of times that he regards, as the war’s main root cause, the insistence by the government in Kyiv—which he denounces as an illegitimate “neo-Nazi dictatorship”—that Ukraine exists as a nation with its own history, culture, and language.

The best way to end the war is for Trump to realize this fact—and to convince Putin that the West will not let this imperial dream come true. Short of that, all the rest, including the 28-point peace plan, is at best a distraction and at worst a recipe for democratic Ukraine’s surrender.

Source: Fred Kaplan, “The Closer You Look at Trump’s Ukraine Peace Plan, the Worse It Looks for Ukraine,” Slate, 21 November 2025

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Ukrainian people today. The current moment, he said, is “one of the most difficult” for the country. “Ukraine may soon face an extremely difficult choice. Either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner. Either 28 complicated points or the hardest winter yet—and the risks that follow,” Zelensky said.

Zelensky’s use of the word “dignity” recalled Ukraine’s 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Russian-aligned president Viktor Yanukovych and turned the country toward Europe.

Zelensky was responding to a 28-point “peace” plan President Donald J. Trump is pressuring him to sign before Thanksgiving, November 27. The plan appears to have been leaked to Barak Ravid of Axios by Kirill Dmitriev, a top ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and reports say it was worked out by Dmitriev and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff. Ukrainian representatives and representatives from Europe were not included. Laura Kelly of The Hill reported on Wednesday that Congress was blindsided by the proposal, which Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet of The Hill suggest Russia may be pushing now to take advantage of a corruption scandal roiling Ukraine’s government.

Luke Harding of The Guardian noted that the plan appears to have been translated from Russian, as many of the phrases in the text read naturally in that language but are awkward and clunky in English.

The plan is a Russian wish list. It begins by confirming Ukraine’s sovereignty, a promise Russia gave Ukraine in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons but then broke when it invaded Ukraine in 2014.

The plan gives Crimea and most of the territory in Ukraine’s four eastern oblasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk to Russia, and it limits the size of the Ukrainian military.

It erases any and all accountability for the Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, including well-documented rape, torture, and murder. It says: “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.”

It calls for $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be invested in rebuilding and developing Ukraine. Since the regions that need reconstruction are the ones Russia would be taking, this means that Russian assets would go back to Russia. The deal says that Europe, which was not consulted, will unfreeze Russian assets and itself add another $100 billion to the reconstruction fund. The plan says the U.S. “will receive 50 percent of the profits from this venture,” which appears to mean that Europe will foot the bill for the reconstruction of Ukraine—Russia, if the plan goes through—and the U.S. and Russia will split the proceeds.

The plan asserts that “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy,” with sanctions lifted and an invitation to rejoin the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of countries with advanced economies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union—that meets every year to discuss global issues. Russia was excluded from the group after it invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Putin has wanted back in.

According to the plan, Russia and “[t]he US will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”

The plan requires Ukraine to amend its constitution to reject membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It says “[a] dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the US, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.”

Not only does this agreement sell out Ukraine and Europe for the benefit of Russia—which attacked Ukraine—it explicitly separates the U.S. from NATO, a long-time goal of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

NATO grew out of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. They agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, communism backed by the Soviet Union began to push west into Europe. In 1949, France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a military and economic alliance, the Western Union, to work together, but nations understood that resisting Soviet aggression, preventing the revival of European militarism, and guaranteeing international cooperation would require a transatlantic security agreement.

In 1949 the countries of the Western Union joined with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”

They did so in the face of Russian aggression.

Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 after Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, earning economic sanctions and expulsion from what was then the G8. But Crimea wasn’t enough: he wanted Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, the country’s industrial heartland. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the U.S. presidency against Donald Trump in 2016, would never stand for that land grab. But Trump was a different story.

According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in summer 2016, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort discussed with his business partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, “a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, the plan was for Trump to say he wanted peace in Ukraine and for him to appoint Manafort to be a “special representative” to manage the process. With the cooperation of Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian officials, Manafort would help create “an autonomous republic” in Ukraine’s industrialized eastern region and would work to have Russian-backed Yanukovych, for whom Manafort had worked previously, “elected to head that republic.”

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Putin has been determined to control that land ever since. And now it appears Russia is pushing Trump to deliver it.

This plan, complete with its suggestion that the U.S. is no longer truly a part of NATO but can broker between NATO and Russia, would replace the post–World War II rules-based international order with a new version of an older order. In the world before NATO and the other international institutions that were created after World War II, powerful countries dominated smaller countries, which had to do as their powerful neighbors demanded in order to survive.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Notes of an American, 21 November 2025

Donald Trump’s “peace plan” for Ukraine has caused an international firestorm—perhaps because its origins are surrounded by mystery.

We know the plan is the love child of Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin’s emissary, financier Kirill Dmitriev. But what did Trump know about it? (Apparently not much.) Where does Marco Rubio stand? Did Vladimir Putin greenlight this plan on the Russian side? Does he want it implemented? Can it be implemented? What exactly is in it, and how is it being revised? It’s the proverbial Winston Churchill line about Kremlin politics as a “bulldog fight under a rug”—only now with Jared Kushner under there, holding a leash.

There is widespread agreement that the 28-point proposal is devastating for Ukraine: it would lose the entirety of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces (including the roughly 15 percent of these territories currently in Ukrainian hands) and the occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhia provinces. The part of the Donetsk province currently controlled by Ukraine is to be converted, after Ukrainian withdrawal, into a “neutral demilitarized buffer zone” de facto recognized as Russian but off-limits to Russian troops. What does that mean? Who will police that zone, especially considering that the proposal rules out NATO troops in Ukraine? Those details are, we imagine, currently being filled in.

The plan also includes a proposed cap on the Ukrainian military that is outrageous in principle since it infringes on Ukrainian sovereignty. The one positive spin may be that the 600,000 cap does not include the National Guard and many other types of troops. And while it’s a substantial reduction from the current 900,000 troop size of the Ukrainian armed forces, that number is elevated precisely because the country is currently at war. Moreover, in their spring 2022 peace talk proposal, the Russians had demanded an 85,000 cap.

Still, many other provisions of the plan are infuriating not only for Ukraine but for the civilized world in general. There is, among other things, the failure to name Russia as the aggressor even once, and Russia’s proposed reintegration into the G-7 and other international structures. And yet some strongly pro-Ukraine analysts, such as expatriate Russian journalist Michael Nacke, argue that the proposal has some equally unacceptable elements for Vladimir Putin. Most notably, it stipulates a guarantee of Ukrainian security similar to NATO’s Article 5: an attack on Ukraine would be treated as an attack on the entire transatlantic structure.

Maybe Russia regards this clause as meaningless and believes NATO will never go to war with Russia over Ukraine. It is also worth noting that Putin has continued to insist that Russia intends to achieve all the goals of the “special military operation”—which would include the demilitarization of Ukraine and its de facto relegation to a Russian satellite. Nacke, like a number of other commentators, believe that whatever Ukraine does, Putin will not sign the Trump peace plan.

So the plan may not be a Kremlin wish list. But it does have a distinct Russian flavor. It’s possible that, as investigative journalist Christo Grozev has suggested, the Russian side of the plan comes not from Putin but from the “dovish” Kremlin faction concerned primarily with trade and improved relations with the West.

In this interpretation, the plan represents not so much a proposal for Ukrainian surrender as Trump administration amateur hour: a plan that was cooked up by a real estate developer and a financier that won’t be acceptable to either side. Will current attempts to revise it yield a better version? They’re happening as we hit send on this email. So stay tuned.

Source: Cathy Young, “Moscow’s Mule,” The Bulwark, 24 November 2025

“Do I understand correctly that there is now a dispute within the administration about whether this ‘peace plan’ was written by Russians or Americans?” foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum asked last night on social media.

Applebaum was referring to confusion over a 28-point plan for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine reported by Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios last week. After the plan was leaked, apparently to Ravid by Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions, Vice President J.D. Vance came out strongly in support of it.

But as scholar of strategic studies Phillips P. OBrien noted in Phillips’s Newsletter, once it became widely known that the plan was written by the Russians, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to back away from it, posting on social media on Wednesday that “[e]nding a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas. And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.”

And yet, by Friday, Trump said he expected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving: next Thursday, November 27. Former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests.”

Yesterday a group of senators, foreign affairs specialists gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the Halifax International Security Forum, told reporters they had spoken to Rubio about the plan. Senator Angus King (I-ME) said Rubio had told them that the document “was not the administration’s position” but rather “a wish list of the Russians.” Senator Mike Rounds (R-SC) said: “This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form.” He added: “I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” Rounds said. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”

But then a spokesperson for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, called the senators’ account of the origins of the plan “blatantly false,” and Rubio abruptly switched course, posting on social media that in fact the U.S. had written the plan.

Anton La Guardia, diplomatic editor at The Economist, posted: “State Department is backpedalling on Rubio’s backpedal. If for a moment you thought the grown-ups were back in charge, think again. We’re still in the circus. ‘Unbelievable,’ mutters one [of the] disbelieving senators.”

Later that day, Erin Banco and Gram Slattery of Reuters reported that the proposal had come out of a meeting in Miami between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Dmitriev, who leads one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. They reported that senior officials in the State Department and on the National Security Council were not briefed about the plan.

This morning, Bill Kristol of The Bulwark reported rumors that Vice President J.D. Vance was “key to US embrace of Russia plan on Ukraine, Rubio (and even Trump) out of the loop.” He posted that relations between Vance and Rubio are “awful” and that Rubio did, in fact, tell the senators what they said he did.

Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, posted: “Foreign nations now have to deal with rival factions of the U.S. government who keep major policy initiatives secret from each other and some of which work with foreign powers as the succession battle for 2028 begins, is how one diplomat put it.”

[…]

Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 23 November 2025

This!

Source: Andy Borowitz (Facebook), 24 November 2025

“We Wanted to Show the Whole Range of Anti-War Resistance in Russia”

Thursday 20 November, 7:00 p.m. UK time: TRY ME FOR TREASON – Readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, and book launch for Voices Against Putin’s War.

You are welcome to attend in person at Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, London E1. Or watch the livestream here on Facebook, or on Youtube.

Source: Ukraine Information Group (Facebook), 18 November 2025

What can courtroom speeches by imprisoned protesters tell us about the breadth of anti-war resistance in Russia? British historian Simon Pirani discusses his new book Voices Against Putin’s War with independent Russian journalist Ivan Rechnoy.

Simon Pirani is a British researcher and author who has written about energy and ecology, the history of the Russian Revolution, the labor movement, and post-Soviet Russia. His recent book Voices Against Putin’s War: Protesters’ Defiant Speeches in Russian Courts compiles and analyzes the courtroom speeches of twelve prisoners who were sentenced for resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine. 

— Today in Russia, hundreds of people are serving prison sentences for criticizing the invasion of Ukraine. Twelve of those people are the subjects of your book. How did you select them?

— We wanted to show that opposition to Putin’s war is widespread. What is striking about these people is their diversity. They come from different generations, have different life experiences, and hold different political views. This diversity demonstrates that, despite the absence of public demonstrations and the lack of any real possibility of organizing an open anti-war movement in Russia, an anti-war movement does exist there. It encompasses a very broad spectrum of Russian society as well as people from the occupied territories. For example, the book features the courtroom speech of Bohdan Ziza from Crimea.

We decided not to include some of the most well-known opponents of the war in the book — people who made brave and principled speeches in court, like Ilya Yashin, for example. Their statements had already been widely publicized in the media here. Instead our goal was to draw the attention of English-speaking readers to lesser-known figures. 

On the one hand, there are those who simply said something or posted statements on social media. For example, Darya Kozyreva, the youngest person featured in the book, was arrested for laying flowers at the Taras Shevchenko monument in Saint Petersburg. On the other hand, these are those who did something, such as throwing firebombs — not with the intention of hurting anyone, but to draw attention to the injustice of the war. Igor Paskar and Alexei Rozhkov are among them. These are people who live in smaller towns far from Moscow or Saint Petersburg, where young men are much more likely to receive draft notices from the conscription service. 

We also included the statement by Ruslan Siddiqi, who sabotaged a railway line to stop munitions from reaching Ukraine. 

The texts for the book were put together by a group of friends who, since the February 2022 invasion, had been translating the courtroom statements and some of the posts from the media or social networks. When we were already well into that process, a lot of new material appeared on the website Poslednee Slovo [author’s note: the project’s name translates as “the final statement”]. It’s a terrific project that does an excellent job of collecting and publishing a much broader range of cases than we could cover. 

We limited ourselves to people who have made explicit anti-war statements about the war in Ukraine. However, as you know, there are many other political prisoners who have appeared in court since the 2022 invasion, as well as many more from before that, especially among the Crimean Tatar political prisoners. They are all represented on the Poslednee Slovo website. Another remarkable thing about the website is that it goes back all the way to the Soviet period. They’ve included the 1966 speeches by Andrei Sinyavsky and Yulii Daniel, perhaps the first examples since Stalin’s time of people using the right for a final statement in court as a form of propaganda. 

Our book includes a chapter that lists seventeen additional cases of people who delivered anti-war speeches, beyond the twelve protagonists whose complete statements we published. We hope that either I or my colleagues will eventually translate all of those speeches as well. 

Unfortunately, the final courtroom speech has become something like a literary genre in its own right. This tells us a lot about the difficult and fearful times we are living through.

— How do you envision the audience for this book? Are they people in the West and elsewhere who already have some understanding of the situation in Russia and want to learn more? Or are they readers to whom you want to convey a political message — perhaps even to persuade them of something?

— The book is in English and is therefore intended for English-speaking readers rather than Russian-speaking readers. Only a small percentage of people in the UK, the US, and Europe can read Russian. Since 2022, many of us have been aware of the fate of the anti-war movement in Russia. As you know, it began with large demonstrations, but protesting soon became difficult and then almost impossible. Next came the firebomb attacks on military recruitment centers — actions not meant to harm people, but to draw attention to the anti-war cause. We then started reading, in Russia’s opposition media, the final statements of opposition figures — the courtroom having become, in effect, the last public forum in Russia where protest is still possible. 

However, I think that many people in English-speaking countries remain unaware of all this. 

So, to answer your question, our aim is to reach a wider audience in Western societies: not only those who have closely followed Russia’s attack on Ukraine and its consequences, but also those whose understanding of it comes only from what they have picked up incidentally through the media.

— One of the central figures in your book is Alexander Skobov. One might say he bridges two eras. He was a dissident in the Soviet Union and is once again among the persecuted today. There is another similar example that is not included in the book: Boris Kagarlitsky. How do people in the West perceive the difference between current repressions and the dissident movement during the Cold War? Also, how do they see the difference between the Russian and Western situations now?

— First, I would like to say a few words about Skobov. As someone who regularly travelled to Russia between 1990 and 2019, I was deeply affected by these courtroom speeches. The first one I came across was by Igor Paskar. I thought, “My God, these are such young people — not the youngest, but still much younger than me — who have entered this fight.” Alexander Skobov’s speech also affected me emotionally, perhaps because he is about my age — a year or two younger — and, as you said, he bridges two eras. 

I was particularly touched by the letter that he wrote to his partner, Olga Shcheglova. It was published in Novaya Gazeta Europe, and we also included it in the book. In the letter, Skobov explains that some of his friends and comrades urged him to leave Russia, but he refused. This made it inevitable that he would eventually face trial and imprisonment. In the letter, he explains that he wanted to communicate to the younger generation that the small group of dissidents he once belonged to — the socialist wing of the Soviet dissident movement — stands in solidarity with them in these difficult times. He wanted this message to be recorded in history. 

I think that is a very important statement, and we all owe Alexander Skobov gratitude for linking these two historical periods through his sacrifice. I hope that including his statements in our book will help people in the West understand this continuity more clearly. 

I will try to answer your question about how these movements are perceived. During the Soviet era, people in the West generally considered the dissident movement to be very small and marginal. Given how communication worked back then, it was very difficult for information to break through. Of course, there were large revolts against Soviet power, beginning with the Novocherkassk uprising in the 1960s and other violent revolts in the 1970s and 1980s. I have a friend in Ukraine who studied the major revolt that took place in Dniprodzerzhynsk. These movements were very short-lived, and we hardly knew about them in the West, even those of us who were interested in what was going on in the Soviet Union. 

Today, Russians — and Ukrainians, of course — have a much greater opportunity to have real conversations with people in Western Europe. I think the powers of that time really succeeded in dividing Europe; there really was an iron curtain. But that’s gone now. Millions of Ukrainians and Russians live in Western Europe, the UK, and the US. People are learning to communicate with each other and work together in new ways. 

We can already see examples of this in Germany, in the UK, and elsewhere. I think this conversation must continue — and our book, I think, is part of that ongoing dialogue. 

Of course, it’s not easy to communicate with someone who is literally in a Russian prison. However, through the friends, comrades, and families of the central figures in our book, I hope this conversation will begin and continue over a long period of time. 

‍— I wanted to ask specifically about the possibility of connecting the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian agendas. We are, of course, impressed by the huge mobilization in support of Palestine. At the same time, many on the left are frustrated that active support for Ukraine — a country in a situation in some ways similar to that of Palestine — is far less widespread in Europe and the West. Have there been any positive developments in this regard recently? 

— Since October 2023, we have all watched with horror as Israel’s assault on Gaza has unfolded. It has been widely recognized as a genocide, and we now see a larger and more enduring anti-war movement in Western countries than we have seen in decades — comparable perhaps only to the protests against the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, or even the movement against the Vietnam War in the 1970s. 

One of the reasons I felt it was important to translate these texts into English was to show Western audiences how much the Russian anti-war movement has in common with movements here. Of course, their enemies are different, standing on opposite sides of the geopolitical divide, and there are many other differences as well. Yet the similarities are striking — and deeply significant. The motivations of some of those who gave these courtroom speeches — whose statements we have translated — are very similar to those of activists in the UK who have been arrested for supporting Palestine Action, or of those who joined the flotilla recently stopped by Israeli forces as it attempted to reach Gaza. 

I spent much of last year attending the large British demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. Together with friends, we carried a banner stating: “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” Our group wanted to show our fellow demonstrators that Ukraine’s struggle for national self-determination and the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation share something essential — the right to decide their futures, free from foreign interference and military threats. 

We received a very interesting response from other marchers. Those familiar with the politics of the so-called left and socialist movements will recognize the reaction we encountered from a small minority, mostly older people, who said things like: “Why are you siding with Ukraine? Ukraine is just a plaything of the Western powers, a puppet of NATO. Why even talk about this issue?” Yet the overwhelming majority — more than ninety percent — of those who approached us said, “Ah, yes, we hadn’t thought about it that way before, but there really is something in common between these struggles.”

Another major obstacle to unity comes not only from the “campism” of certain leftists — those who focus exclusively on American and British imperialism while downplaying or excusing Russian imperialism — but also from the state, the mainstream press, and government propaganda. The official narrative is consistently supportive of Ukraine and entirely condemnatory of Palestinian resistance. Ordinary people sense this imbalance — the racism and discrimination directed at the Palestinian cause, alongside the establishment’s favoritism toward Ukraine. There is some truth in that: the propaganda machinery of our ruling class here is largely sympathetic to Ukraine. Working-class people in the UK and across Europe notice this and grow suspicious. However, I believe that is a suspicion we can overcome — and that has been our experience. 

All of this is my personal opinion. The purpose of the book, however, is to bring to English-speaking readers the voices of our friends and comrades in Russia — those brave people who have found themselves in court and who, in some cases at the risk of additional years in prison, have chosen to exercise their constitutional right (though not always respected by judges) to deliver a final statement before the court. It is a remarkably courageous and difficult decision. 

‍— I wanted to thank you for the book, and I also wanted to ask you, since you have been interested in this topic for a long time: how did your interest in it arise, and why has Russia become so important to you?

— My connection with Russia began through the labour movement. I first went to Russia in 1990 — to Prokopyevsk, in western Siberia, where the miners’ strikes of 1989 had first broken out. At that time, I was working as a journalist for the mineworkers’ trade union here in the UK. We saw an opportunity to develop links of solidarity between Soviet miners and British miners. And we had some success. Our friends in the British miners’ union established a very close relationship with the Independent Miners’ Union of Western Donbas, based in Pavlograd. This friendship continues even today.

In those days, I was a member of a Trotskyist organisation, and in August 1990, we organised a meeting in Moscow to mark the 40th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination. This, too, was part of a conversation between Western socialists and people in Russia and Ukraine that had been practically impossible during the “Cold War.”

I continued to follow what’s going on in Russia and Ukraine, and to write about it, and between 2007 and 2021, I worked at a research institute, writing about the energy sectors of those countries. 

Since the pandemic, I haven’t been back to Russia. On February 24th, 2022, when the invasion began, I was at home and was shocked. We were all shocked. The invasion has changed everything, both in Ukraine and Russia, for many years to come. Together with friends, we began translating these courtroom speeches and posting them online. Gradually, that work grew into the idea of making a book.

I hope your readers will read it. Later this year, we’re going to make the book freely available as a PDF, so that everyone can access it. 

If we do make any money — and I should say it is a very cheap book — all proceeds will go to Memorial and political prisoners. Nobody is making a profit from this project. The whole point is to share these voices with a much wider audience.

Source: Ivan Rechnoy, “We Wanted to Show the Whole Range of Anti-War Resistance in Russia,” Posle, 22 October 2025

 Sale! £15.00 £12.00

VOICES AGAINST PUTIN’S WAR
Protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts

Speeches by Alexei Gorinov, Igor Paskar, Bohdan Ziza, Mikhail Kriger, Andrei Trofimov, Sasha Skochilenko, Aleksandr Skobov, Darya Kozyreva, Alexei Rozhkov, Ruslan Siddiqi, Kirill Butylin and Savelii Morozov.

Foreword by John McDonnell, Member of UK Parliament

Edited by Simon Pirani

ISBN: 978-1-872242-45-3 (paperback)
e-ISBN: 978-1-872242-47-7 (e-book)
RRP: £15 (pbk)
e-RRP: £7 (Ebook)
196 pages; 140x216mm.
Publication date: September 2025

The E-book can be purchased at the usual online retailers
Any profits will be donated to Memorial: Support for Political Prisoners https://memohrc.org/en

Source: Resistance Books

Reclaiming Whiteness: In Search of the “Good Russians”

As racial boundaries are constantly negotiated in Europe and across the globe, this book explores how Russian migrant workers navigate racial capitalism in the Nordic region.

Challenging the idea of a ‘race-neutral’ Eastern Europe, the book reveals how Russian migrants actively claim whiteness, often finding themselves on the margins of acceptability. Uniquely combining postsocialist and postcolonial perspectives, the author examines how these migrants, seeking recognition as European, reinforce economic and racial divides shaped by global capitalism.

This timely work offers fresh insights into race, migration and the boundaries of whiteness across Europe’s borders.

Source: Bristol University Press. Thanks to Sergey Abashin for the heads-up.

Before the age of budget airlines and Instagram wanderlust, Russians journeyed west not for leisure but for enlightenment. In March 1697 Peter the Great set off from Moscow to take in the sights of Amsterdam, London and Vienna, among others. Travelling under a pseudonym, but much recognised thanks to his towering height and posse of over 200 hangers-on, the tsar’s odyssey included the expected museum visits and posh balls. But the point of the trip was to experience something that could not be found in 17th-century Russia: modernity. The incognito emperor spent time working as a ship’s carpenter in Holland, took stock of the latest naval warfare tactics in Portsmouth, then studied democracy in action in Westminster. Alas, news of insurrection back home brought the escapade to a close after a mere 18 months. Having experienced modernity on his sojourn, Peter sought to impose it on his people. He promptly decreed facial hair to be “superfluous” and imposed a tax on beards. On the rest of Europe he soon imposed a grimmer fate: the Great Northern war, which embroiled bits of Scandinavia and the Baltics for two decades.

Three centuries after Peter’s odyssey, and three years after his wannabe successor Vladimir Putin launched his own protracted war in Ukraine, Russian tourism is still alive and well in Europe. What it lacks in ambition—the grand tour of yesteryear has been replaced by the more modest Mykonos beach jaunt, Milan shopping spree or week’s skiing in Courchevel—it makes up for in numbers. Over 500,000 Russians were granted visas to the European Union’s Schengen zone in 2024, nearly half of which allow for multiple entry over many years. The visitor numbers are down by 90% compared with 2019. But that is still far too many for those Europeans who wonder how citizens from a country whose army is raining missiles on Ukrainian cities can cavort in its beaches and boutiques. On November 7th the EU announced Russians would no longer be granted multiple-entry visas in a bid to get the number nearer to zero. What seems commonsensical to some is decried as deeply misguided by others—including Mr Putin’s foes.

The ostensible cause for the tightening is security. Beyond invading Ukraine, Russia is needling Europe with subtler forms of aggression. Drones circling airports, Baltic ships dredging cables, cyber-attacks and other forms of mischief have set nerves jangling in Europe. Even if security services there struggle to pin such “grey zone” attacks on Russian operators, to them it makes sense to view every visitor from there as a potential spy, saboteur or propagandist. Ending multiple-entry visas is a way to ensure vetting happens before each visit, a sensible precaution.

But the driving force for the visa ban is moral outrage. “Starting a war and expecting to move freely in Europe is hard to justify,” said Kaja Kallas, the hawkish Estonian who serves as the EU’s foreign-policy chief. Along with others hailing from the bloc’s eastern fringe, she has long lobbied for Europeans to equate all Russians with the regime they live under. Whether oligarchs or mere members of the upper-middle classes, those Muscovites who can afford a jolly in Ibiza are tacitly propping up Putinism. They are our enemy, too, unless proved otherwise. Exemptions to the visa ban will be made for relatives of EU citizens, as well as dissidents and others who can prove their “integrity”.

The security argument seems hard to quibble with, even if GRU goons have plenty of fake Western passports in their double-bottomed attaché cases (and are said to hire locals to do their dirty work, often via social-media platforms). But the all-Russians-are-Putinists argument is trickier. Your columnist has felt the discomfiting “ick” of sharing a Parisian café terrace or Alpine chairlift with Russian visitors, enjoying a carefree interlude before (probably) returning to well-paid jobs back home that will generate tax revenue for Mr Putin’s war. Is this wretched invasion not, at least in part, theirs as well? How dare they enjoy themselves?

But just as discomfiting is to apply the sins of a dictatorship to all 144m citizens who live in it—some of the first victims of Putinism. Not so long ago, Europe promoted the idea that everyday Russians should be separated from the regime that patently does not represent them. Oligarchs and those close to the regime were to be sanctioned, but ordinary Russians were potential allies againstMr Putin. Why not welcome them to Europe? Every rouble spaffed in Milan boutiques drains Russia of resources.

From Russia with visas

With the war in Ukraine dragging on, a more hawkish line has prevailed. In EU circles it is now expected that Russia’s middle class should somehow “do more” to unseat Mr Putin, and that failure to do so amounts to collaboration. Yet for ordinary Russians to be held collectively responsible for “their” leader’s actions is to assume they have the agency to turf him out. Tell that to the thousands languishing in gulags for even the merest of protests. Indeed, some with intimate experience of gulagdom have opposed the EU’s move. Yulia Navalnaya, whose husband Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony, has argued the visa ban would isolate Russia from Europe in precisely the way Mr Putin has in mind.

As with sanctions designed to target the regime and not the people, it may be that anti-Putinists end up as collateral damage of an otherwise sensible policy. How could it be otherwise? Europeans are being told to expect a frontal confrontation with Russia, perhaps soon. It is one thing to feel no animus towards ordinary Russians, another to host them for a mini-break just as defence spending in Europe is surging to take on a threat from their backyard. To curtail Russians visiting Europe may be to lump the oppressed with their oppressor. But with apologies to (some) Russians, any other outcome would make Europeans appear hopelessly naive. Let’s have you all over when the war ends. 

Source: “Charlemagne: Europe is cracking down on Russian tourists,” Economist, 13 November 2025

Join us for a discussion of Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian–Russian Case with author Svitlana Biedarieva, in conversation with two prominent thinkers on issues of coloniality and Ukraine/Russia, Oksana Yakushko and Mykola Riabchuk.

Biedarieva’s book introduces the concept of “ambicoloniality” to describe the complex relationship between Ukraine and Russia, one in which Russia’s imperial desire to dominate Ukraine has paradoxically placed it under Ukraine’s symbolic influence. The work offers a fresh framework for understanding how colonial and decolonial dynamics have unfolded across shared borders rather than distant colonies, exploring the intertwined histories and cultural hybridities that continue to shape both nations.

Together, the author and discussants will examine how this new model redefines understandings of power, identity, and resistance in the post-Soviet space.

Source: GW Events Calendar

[…]

War-related news from Russia:

Russian man found guilty – posthumously – under LGBT law (Mediazona, 14 November) 

Twenty years on: Timur Kacharava’s murder remembered (The Russian Reader, 14 November)

First arrest under new Russian law over an Internet search for Ukraine’s Azov Regiment (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 14th)

Russia feels the heat from oil sanctions (Meduza, 13 November)

Migrant women and the war: new discriminatory laws (Posle.Media, 12 November)

Russian anti-war prisoner: ‘I just did not want to murder Ukrainian people who have done me no ill’ (People & Nature, 12 November) 

The carousel: Russia’s system for re-arresting protesters (Meduza, 12 November)

To force deserters back to war, Russia’s military tortures their families (Meduza, 12 November)

“Thou shalt not idolize your motherland”: Russian Orthodox priests on the war in Ukraine and the degradation of their church (The Insider, November 10th)

Tracked down, coerced, threatened: How Russia hunts down deserters and forces them back to the front lines in Ukraine (The Insider, November 10th)

Source: News from Ukraine Bulletin 171 (17 November 2025)

The August sun was already warming Westlake Village when Anton Perevalov dressed in athletic shorts and decided to take an early morning stroll with his miniature pinscher, Ben, while his wife slept.

As he turned right onto Hillcrest Drive — a route he’d taken so many mornings before — an unmarked car stopped in front of him and a man he’d never met emerged and peppered him with questions: “Are you Anton Perevalov?” “Are you a citizen of Russia?”

When Perevalov, 43, answered in the affirmative, two other men exited the car and approached him. One took his phone and the other slapped handcuffs on him, ushering him and Ben into the car. As they drove toward his home, they instructed Perevalov to call his wife so she could come out and get the dog.

Perevalov pleaded with the men, saying that there had to be a mistake. He had documents proving he was legal to live and work in the United States. It didn’t matter, one of the men told him.

“You overstayed your visa,” he said. “You are under arrest and coming with us.”

Tatiana Zaiko sprinted out of the house in her pajamas and slippers, telling her 17-year-old son that his dad had been arrested and to lock the door. She’d be right back, she recalled telling him.

She wasn’t. Friends would later find the boy huddled under his parents’ bed, fearful that immigration agents may return for him too.

“I never imagined that something like this could happen in this country,” Zaiko, 43, said.

For years, Russian nationals and others seeking asylum in the United States were allowed to live and work here while their cases were being decided. That began to change in 2024 under the Biden administration and has been completely upended in the wake of President Trump’s efforts to boost deportation numbers, experts say.

Under Trump, those with a pending asylum claim aren’t exempt from being detained and deported. In fact, targeting asylum seekers in the United States makes it easier for immigration agents to carry out Trump’s stated plans of deporting at least 1 million people annually because they’re known to the government and easier to find, said Dara Lind, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council.

“People who have done everything right are arguably easier for this administration to go after and more of a target than people who are actively trying to evade the law,” Lind said.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin introduced war censorship laws to make criticism of the war an offense punishable by significant jail time. Those who have been critical of the war and sought asylum in the United States are at risk of having property seized, being fined and spending significant time in prison if they were to return to Russia.

It was for this reason that Perevalov and Zaiko sought protection in the United States.

The couple applied for asylum in 2023 during what was initially a family vacation to New York City over Christmas. The trip was a longtime dream of their son’s, who grew up watching the movie “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York”, and wanted to spend the season taking in the sights of the Big Apple just like Kevin McCallister, the film’s lead character. Trump makes a brief cameo in the movie as himself.

But during the trip, the family received word from back home that the Russian police were looking to interrogate Perevalov about his opposition to the war in Ukraine. Perevalov hadn’t been shy about sharing his disapproval and had donated funds in support of Ukraine.

In schools, Perevalov said, they had introduced lessons of “military-patriotic education,” teaching children that Western countries wanted to take over Russia. At one point, their son’s teacher brought an AK-47 rifle to class and forced students to disassemble and reassemble it. The couple voiced their disapproval.

More than a week after arriving, the family decided returning to Russia would be too dangerous, so they contacted an attorney to help them apply for political asylum in the U.S. They filled out the application, Form I-589, and three weeks later received confirmation that their form had been accepted and they were scheduled for fingerprinting.

The document they received stated they were authorized to remain in the United States while their application was pending. They got work permits, settled in the San Fernando Valley and found jobs — Perevalov at a detailing studio and Zaiko as a house manager. They paid taxes and settled into the rhythm of life in America.

When immigration raids began ramping up across Southern California over the summer, the couple figured they had nothing to worry about since the Trump administration had emphasized it sought to deport dangerous criminals.

“We don’t understand,” Zaiko said. “We did everything right. We’re not criminals. We have documents. I thought it was a mistake, but it’s not a mistake.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not answer questions from The Times about the status of the couple’s immigration case.

“Perevalov and Zaiko will receive full due process and all their claims will be heard by an immigration judge,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an email. “For the record: a pending asylum claim does NOT protect illegal aliens from arrest or detention.”

The couple’s arrest — along with examples of others in similar circumstances being detained by federal officials — has spread fear through the Russian immigrant community in Southern California.

A Russian national living in Southern California who declined to provide his name for fear he could be targeted for deportation said he rarely goes out anymore. When he does leave his house, he scrutinizes every car that passes, wondering if it’s agents looking to detain him and his family.

His child has spent most of her life in the United States and doesn’t know what it was like in their home country. A return to Russia for him would probably mean death, he said.

“America was like a lighthouse of liberty for us,” the man said. “But it doesn’t feel that way right now.”

Despite the federal government’s assertion that it is targeting dangerous criminals, many of the Russian asylum seekers who have been placed in detention have no criminal records. Some have been victims of crimes, said Dmitry Valuev, president of the nonprofit group Russian America for Democracy in Russia.

Russian asylum applications to the United States rose sharply in the years since the country invaded Ukraine, as many Russians seek to leave for fear of political persecution or being conscripted into the military. This contributed to a growing backlog in immigration courts.

As of 2024 — the most recent data available — more than 14,600 asylum cases from Russia were pending in California, up from 1,771 in 2021, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which publishes immigration data.

In 2024, asylum applicants began landing in long-term detention while their cases were pending, a change that Valuev attributes to concerns about spies from post-Soviet countries infiltrating the United States and creating a national security risk.

After Trump’s inauguration, he declared a state of emergency at the southern border, where many asylum seekers including Russians showed up, allowing the federal government to deny them asylum and deport them back to their country of origin.

“Now they use any excuse, any reason to detain an individual whose immigration situation is pending,” Valuev said.

In June and August, two flights out of the United States involved the transfer of detained Russian nationals to Egyptian government custody. Those individuals were forcibly returned to Russia, including people who had been detained in the United States for more than a year after seeking asylum, according to Human Rights First, which tracks immigration flights out of the United States.

When they arrived at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Los Angeles, Perevalov and Zaiko were again fingerprinted, had their belongings confiscated and were taken to roughly 1,000-square-foot holding cells separated by gender. On the men’s side, about 50 men were packed into the windowless cell. It felt like the air conditioning was always on and the concrete floor detainees slept on was freezing, the couple said.

They were given foil emergency blankets, which did little to warm them. Zaiko was given a thin mat to sleep on, a luxury not afforded to the men. The lights never went off. They dimmed only slightly at midnight, which was the only way to tell a new day had begun.

Meals were given at random times, sometimes at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. When Perevalov asked for a toothbrush or other basic hygiene items, an officer told him it wasn’t “a hotel.” Zaiko, who takes medicine daily, had to have friends bring her pills from her home to the facility.

When the men flushed the toilet, the waste would back up into the women’s plumbing, creating a stench that Zaiko said was “unbearable.”

They were both questioned and given deportation documents, which they didn’t fully understand and refused to sign. They said their requests for translators were ignored.

After five days, they were shackled and transferred to separate detention centers — Zaiko to Adelanto and Perevalov to a center in San Diego — where they spent nearly a month before their attorney could get them released on bond.

Perevalov and Zaiko shared their story during a Los Angeles City Council meeting last month, a decision they made so that people could better understand the risks even asylum seekers face as immigration sweeps continue in Southern California, they said.

Standing at the lectern, Zaiko broke down in tears describing being handcuffed by immigration officers, then retreated into her husband’s arms.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield called the immigration raids a “crisis” for America during the meeting.

“There are many Russian couples who are here who would potentially be killed if they were sent back to Russia and they’re in this situation,” he said. “This administration is harming our communities and seem to be throwing our constitutional rights out of the window. This is America. This is not Russia.”

As of Friday, Perevalov and Zaiko were still waiting to hear what’s next for them in the immigration process.

In the meantime, they’re focusing on their son, who is still struggling with what happened even after his parents returned home. Zaiko will never forget the first thing he said to her when she arrived from detention — a simple plea that said so much.

“Please don’t leave me alone again.”

Source: Hannah Fry, “A Russian couple were living their L.A. dream. Then immigration grabbed them off the street,” Los Angeles Times, 14 November 2025

The European Union has added new restrictions on issuing multi-entry visas to Russians who live in Russia as a response to the continuing war in Ukraine. Most will now only be able to obtain a single-entry Schengen visa. The decision is not only reasonable, but also a very mild measure considering that there are many exceptions, including family members of EU citizens and Russians residing in the EU, transport workers, and “persons whose reliability and integrity is without doubt,” including dissidents, independent journalists, human rights defenders and representatives of civil society organisations. Nevertheless, prominent Russian opposition activists have responded by condemning the move, which only casts doubt on their claims to genuinely care about the crimes their country is committing.

“You can’t blame a whole country for the actions of its government,” exiled Russian activist Ilya Yashin told the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Meanwhile exiled Russian journalist Sergei Parkhomenko called the EU decision “extraordinary in its idiocy, ineffectiveness and demonstrative helplessness”. Former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on X “Progress” in response to the news of the visa restrictions, to which exiled Russian journalist Leonid Ragozin responded, “The man who is trying to make even most pro-Western Russians hate the West because this half-witted policy results in thousands of personal tragedies, ruined families and relationships, people unable to see their elderly parents as well as additional risks and headaches for opposition activists. Not even because he means it, but because he is a vain, unreflective, incompetent ignoramus, a typical representative of the community that handled Russian affairs for the US government over the last 30 years.”

The noise the exiled Russians are making about visas for frequent trips to the EU contrasts starkly with their silence about Russia’s latest attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Last night Russia launched a massive attack on Kyiv, striking blocks of flats with missiles and drones, killing at least six people and injuring 35 others. The Azerbaijani embassy in the Ukrainian capital was also damaged by Iskander missile fragments, which may or may not have been coincidental considering the poor relations between Russia and Azerbaijan in recent months.

“This was the bedroom. If we had been sleeping here we would have been crushed. All of this would have fallen onto the bed,” a young woman in Kyiv told a reporter, pointing to a pile of rubble and broken windows in the bedroom of her flat. “Everything will be fine, because despair is a sin,” her mother said. “Everyone is alive. But we hate Russians.” Last Friday night Russia also struck a block of flat in Dnipro with a drone, killing two people and injuring 12 others.

“Ukraine is responding to these strikes with long-range strength, and the world must stop these attacks on life with sanctions,” Volodymyr Zelensky posted on X in response to the latest attacks. “Russia is still able to sell oil and build its schemes. All of this must end. A great deal of work is underway with partners to strengthen our air defense, but it is not enough. We need reinforcement with additional systems and interceptor missiles. Europe and the United States can help. We are counting on real decisions. Thank you to everyone who helps.”

It is very hard to see why the EU or any other democratic countries should welcome Russians for holidays when so many of them are participating in the war against Ukraine. In the case of Russia, the whole country really can be blamed. And the EU has gone out of its way to help the Russian complainers who are living in freedom while demanding greater leniency and sympathy for their compatriots. If anything, more countries should follow the EU’s example, and the measures taken should be even stricter.

Two sentenced for murder of Kherson Oblast man who criticised war

A court in occupied Kherson Oblast has sentenced two Ukrainians for the murder of a man who criticised the war and Russia. 58-year-old Petr Martynchuk was abducted and strangled in March 2023 because he openly supported Ukraine and spoke out against the occupation of his village. Oleksiy Yansevich and Mikola Antonenkov, described as Ukrainian collaborators, were arrested for the murder, along with Russian citizen Andrei Timchenko. After drinking alcohol the three got into an argument with Martynchuk about the war, took him to a field and strangled him with a wire. When the wire broke they finished the job with a shoelace. Yansevich was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security prison and Antonenkov to 12 years. Timchenko, who watched the murder, helped to hide the body and burned the victim’s Ukrainian passport, was given no sentence due to the “statute of limitations”.

Stoptime buskers jailed for third time

Singer from the group Stoptime Naoko (Diana Loginova) and her fiancé Alexander Orlov, the group’s guitarist, were arrested for a third time on Tuesday after serving their second consecutive jail sentences and given third sentences of 13 days for performing the banned music of “foreign agents” in front of a crowd on the streets of St. Petersburg. The group’s drummer, Vladislav Leontyev, was released after serving two consecutive jail sentences. Meanwhile in Perm musician Katya Romanova, who performed in solidarity with Stoptime, was given a seven-day sentence followed by a 15-day sentence. Courts have used the excuse that the musicians organised an unlawful gathering.

More people sentenced for anti-regime activities

A military court has sentenced 56-year-old IT specialist Sergei Pravdeyuk from Irkutsk Oblast to 6 ½ years in prison for justifying terrorism for Telegram posts that supported Ukraine and criticised the Russian government. The same military court sentenced Mark Orlan from Irkutsk Oblast to five years in prison for justifying terrorism for a WhatsApp status that the FSB considered supportive of the ISIS attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall in March last year in which 149 people were killed.

A court in Kostroma Oblast has upheld an appeal by prosecutors and changed a suspended sentence to a real five-year prison sentence for bookshop owner Yan Kulikov from Soligalich for “spreading fakes about the army”. Kulikov was not in court for the sentencing because he was taking care of his sick mother, but the court ordered his immediate arrest. He was given the five-year suspended sentence in September, having been sentenced to six months of correctional work in 2023 for two VKontakte posts about the Russian army shelling Ukrainian cities. Kulikov’s lawyer argued that the defendant was not aware that anything he had posted was false. A photograph of Kulikov showed him with handmade signs saying “Turn off the zombiebox” and “War is evil, we know,” highlighting the Z symbol for the invasion of Ukraine.

Source: Sarah Hurst, The Russia Report, 14 November 2025

“When I had decided to study Russia’s history and literature in college, my father warned me that our homeland was a country without a future,” Ioffe recalls. She returned to the United States in 2012 and is now convinced that he was right. She points out that Putin has deployed “traditional values” to consolidate control. Her conclusion is unsparingly bleak. “A new Russia had dawned, and it was a lot like the old one,” she writes. If there’s one change she notices, it’s this: Like the brief efflorescence of emancipation, all the people she loved there are gone.

Source: Jennifer Szalai, “The World’s Greatest Feminist Experiment Was Not Where You’d Think,” New York Times, 22 October 2025

In exile, Bakunina will be free to speak and write what she likes. It is a long and honourable tradition. But it seems unlikely to bother Putin. He calls it “a natural and necessary self-cleansing of society [that] will only strengthen our country.” He could scarcely be further from the truth. The ones who are leaving are the Good Russians.

Source: Quentin Peel, “Voices from the perestroika generation,” FT Weekend: Life & Arts, 15 November/16 November 2025, p. 8

The Courtroom Rebels Standing Up to Warmonger Putin

Voices Against Putin’s War: protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts is published this month by Resistance Books. Here is the Introduction to the book, by Simon Pirani, first published online by the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine.

At the heart of Voices Against Putin’s War are ten speeches made in court by people who opposed Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and were arrested and tried for doing so. Most of them are now serving long jail sentences, for “crimes” fabricated by Vladimir Putin’s repressive machine.

Along with the speeches, we include other public declarations – social media posts, letters and interviews – in which the protagonists made their case; statements by two more persecuted activists, made outside court; and a summary of 17 other anti-war speeches in court. We hope that, by publishing these translations in English, these resisters’ motivations will become known to a wider audience.

Chapters 1-10 are each devoted to one protester, arranged chronologically by the date of the protester’s first conviction. United in their opposition to the Kremlin’s war, they divide roughly into four groups.

First is Bohdan Ziza (chapter 3), who lived not in Russia but in Ukraine – in Crimea, which has been occupied by Russian forces since 2014. In 2022 Ziza filmed himself splashing paint in the colours of the Ukrainian flag on to a municipal administration building. He was tried in a Russian military court and is serving a 15-year sentence.

Second are two young women from St Petersburg, Sasha Skochilenko (chapter 6) and Darya Kozyreva (chapter 8), prosecuted for the most peaceful imaginable protests against the war. Skochilenko, who posted anti-war messages on labels in a supermarket, was freed after more than two years behind bars, in August 2024, as part of a prisoner swap between Russia, Belarus and several Western countries. Kozyreva is serving a two-and-a-half year sentence, essentially for quoting Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, in public.

Third are three young men who deliberately damaged property, but not persons, to draw their fellow Russians’ attention to the anti-war cause. Igor Paskar (chapter 2) firebombed an office of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Alexei Rozhkov (chapter 9) firebombed a military recruitment centre – a form of protest used dozens of times across Russia in 2022. He fled to Kyrgyzstan, was kidnapped, presumably by the Russian security forces, and returned to Russia for trial. Ruslan Siddiqi (chapter 10), a Russian and Italian citizen, derailed a train carrying munitions to the Ukrainian front. He has been sentenced to 29 years, and has said that he can be seen as a “partisan”, and “classified as a prisoner of war”, rather than a political prisoner.

The fourth group of protagonists, jailed for what they said rather than anything they did, have records of activism for social justice and democratic rights stretching back decades: Alexei Gorinov (chapter 1), a municipal councillor in Moscow who dared to refer to Russia’s war as a “war” in public; Mikhail Kriger, an outspoken opponent of Russia’s war on Ukraine since 2014 (chapter 4); Andrei Trofimov (chapter 5); and Aleksandr Skobov (chapter 7), who was first jailed for political dissent in 1978, in the Soviet Union, and who 47 years later in 2025 told the court: “Death to the Russian fascist invaders! Glory to Ukraine!”

Two activists prosecuted for anti-war action, who made their statements outside court, are featured in chapters 11 and 12. Kirill Butylin (chapter 11) was the first person arrested for firebombing a military recruitment office, in March 2022. No record of his court appearance is available, but his defiant message on social media is: “I will not go to kill my brothers!” Savelii Morozov (chapter 12) was fined for denouncing the war to a military recruitment commission in Stavropol, when applying to do alternative (non-military) service.

The ten anti-war speeches in court recorded in this book are by no means the only ones. Another 17 are summarised in chapter 13. These speeches, along with others by defendants who railed against the annihilation of free speech, or protested against grotesque frame-ups, have been collected and published by the “Poslednee Slovo” (“Last Word”) website.

High-profile Russian politicians jailed for standing up to the Kremlin also made anti-war speeches in court, including Ilya Yashin of the People’s Freedom Party, sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in December 2022 for denouncing the massacres of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha and Irpin, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, sentenced in April 2023 to 25 years for treason. Both of them were freed, along with Sasha Skochilenko, in the prisoner exchange of August 2024. Other prominent political figures remain in detention for opposing the war, including Boris Kagarlitsky, a sociologist and Marxist writer, sentenced in February 2024 to five years for “justifying terrorism”, and Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the Golos election monitoring group, sentenced in May 2025 to five years for working with an “undesirable organisation”. Dozens of journalists and bloggers are behind bars too.

These better-known, politically motivated people are only a fraction of the thousands persecuted by the Kremlin.

The cases recorded by human rights organisations include thousands of Ukrainians detained in the occupied territories. In many cases their fate, and whereabouts, is unknown: they may be dead or imprisoned.

Thousands more Russians who have spoken out against the war, or been caught in the merciless dragnet by accident, are behind bars. So are “railway partisans” who sabotaged military supply trains, and others who denounced their regime’s support for Putin’s war, in Belarus.

In Chapter 14, we outline the resistance to the Kremlin’s war, the repression mobilised in response to it, and the scale of the twenty-first-century gulag that has been brought into being. Notes, giving sources for all the material in the book, are at the end.

People resisting injustice have for centuries, in many countries, made use of the courts as a public platform. Irish rebels against British colonial violence began doing so at the end of the eighteenth century. In Russia, the tradition goes back at least to the 1870s, when Narodniki (Populists), speaking to judges trying them for violent protests, denounced the autocratic dictatorship. The workers’ movements that culminated in the 1917 revolutions used courtroom propaganda widely. When Stalinist repression reached its peak in the 1930s, the major purge trials were designed to eliminate it: their format was prearranged, with abject, false confessions. The practice reappeared after the post-Stalinist “thaw”, in the 1965 trial of the dissident writers Andrei Siniavsky and Yulii Daniel.[1]

Courtroom speeches have again become a powerful weapon under Putin – and the Kremlin dictatorship is finding ways to get its revenge.[2] It added three years to Andrei Trofimov’s sentence (chapter 5) – for the fantastical, false “offences” of disseminating false information about the army and “condoning terrorism” – based solely on what he said at his first trial. Other anti-war prisoners, including Alexei Gorinov (chapter 1) have had years added on to their sentences, on the basis of false “evidence” provided by prison officers, or prisoners terrorised by those officers.

Why did they do it? Why did our protagonists make protests that carried the risk of many years in the hell of the Russian prison system? Why, when brought to court, did they choose to make these statements that carried further risk? They have weighed their words and spoken for themselves; no attempt will be made here to summarise. However it is noteworthy that all of them addressed their speeches to their fellow citizens, not to the government.

Andrei Trofimov told the court in his second trial that “Ukraine is my audience”, because “Russian society is dead and it is useless to try to talk to it” – but nevertheless went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that his short, sharp message from his first trial, ending “Putin is a dickhead”, was widely circulated in Russian media.

The others had greater hopes in Russian society, including the Ukrainian Bohdan Ziza, who, in the video for which he was jailed, underlined that: “I address myself, above all, to Crimeans and Russians.” In court he said his action was “a cry from the heart” to “those who were and are afraid – just as I was afraid” to speak out, but who did not want the war.

Alexei Rozhkov had no doubt that “millions of my fellow citizens, women and men, young and old, take an anti-war position”, but were deprived of any means to express it. Kirill Butylin appealed to others to make similar protests so that “Ukrainians will know, that people in Russia are fighting for them – that not everyone is scared and not everyone is indifferent.” As for the government, “let those fuckers know that their own people hate them”.

Aleksandr Skobov, now 67 and in failing health, explicitly addressed younger generations. In an open letter from jail, he recalled how as a socialist he had been a “black sheep” among Soviet-era dissidents, most of whom had now passed away. “The blows are falling on other people, most of them much younger.” While “sceptical about ‘pompous declarations about the passing-on of traditions and experience’”, nevertheless, “I want the young people who are taking the blows now to know: those few remaining Soviet dissidents stood side-by-side with them, have stayed with them and shared their journey.”

Given this unity of purpose, of seeking however unsuccessfully to connect with the population at large, we might see the protagonists as practising the “propaganda of the deed” – not in the sense that phrase was given in the early twentieth century by politicians and policemen, as acts of violence, but in its original, broader sense: as any action, violent or not, that stirred one’s fellow citizens to a just cause. For, while some of those whose words are in this book used violence against property, and some specifically justified Ukrainian military violence against Russian aggression, none used violence against people.

Here are two further observations. First: while all the anti-war resisters shared a common purpose, they started with a diverse range of world views. A profound moral sense of duty runs through some of their statements. “Do I regret what has happened?” Igor Paskar asked his judges. “Yes, perhaps I’d wanted my life to turn out differently – but I acted according to my conscience, and my conscience remains clear.” Or, as Alexei Rozhkov put it: “I have a conscience, and I preferred to hold on to it.”

Andrei Trofimov, in a similar vein, said at his second trial that “writ large, it is a matter of self-preservation” – not “the preservation of the body per se, of its physical health” but the preservation of conscience in this difficult situation, “my ability to tell black from white, and lies from truth, and, quite importantly, my ability to say out loud what I believe to be true”.

Ruslan Siddiqi voiced his motivation differently, in terms of political ideas about changing society. In letters to Mediazona, an opposition media outlet, he described his path towards anarchism. Expressing dislike for the “rigidity” of some anarchists and communists, he nevertheless envisaged a transition “from a totalitarian state to other forms of government with greater freedoms and further evolution into communities with self-government”.

The invasion of Ukraine changed things: anyone who opposed it was declared a traitor by the government. “In such a situation, it is not surprising that some would prefer to leave the country, whereas others would take up explosives. Realising that the war was going to be a long one, at the end of 2022 I decided to act militarily.”

By contrast, Alexei Gorinov founded his defence on pacifist principles, and quoted Lev Tolstoy on the “madness and criminality of war”. Being tried “for my opinion that we need to seek an end to the war”, he could “only say that violence and aggression breed nothing but reciprocal violence. This is the true cause of our troubles, our suffering, our senseless sacrifices, the destruction of civilian and industrial infrastructure and our homes.”

Sasha Skochilenko was still more explicit: “Yes, I am a pacifist” she told the court. Pacifists “believe life to be the highest value of all”; they “believe that every conflict can be resolved by peaceful means. I can’t kill even a spider – I am scared to imagine that it is possible to take someone’s life. […] Wars don’t end thanks to warriors – they end thanks to pacifists. And when you imprison pacifists, you move the long-awaited day of the peace further away.”

Savelii Morozov told the military recruitment commission that he would not refuse to fight in all wars, but in this particular, unjust war. A war in defence of one’s homeland could be justified, but not the “crime” being perpetrated in Ukraine.

For Darya Kozyreva, the central issue is Ukraine’s right to self-determination, asserted by force of arms. The war is a “criminal intrusion on Ukraine’s sovereignty”, she told the court. While identifying herself in an interview as a Russian patriot – “a patriot in the real sense, not in the sense that the propagandists give that word” – Kozyreva justified Ukrainian military resistance. Ukraine does not need a “big brother”; it will fight anyone who tries to invade, she said. In Russia, even some of Putin’s political opponents “do not always realise that Ukraine, having paid for its sovereignty in blood, will determine its own future”. She wants to believe in “a beautiful future where Russia lets go of all imperial ambition”.

Aleksandr Skobov expressed the hope that Russia will be defeated militarily in still more categorical terms. He spelled out in court three principles of his political organisation, the Free Russia Forum: the “unconditional return to Ukraine of all its internationally recognised territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea”; support for all those fighting for this goal, including Russian citizens who joined the Ukrainian armed forces; and support for “any form of war against Putin’s tyranny inside Russia, including armed resistance”, but excluding “disgusting” terrorist attacks on civilians. 

Second: these anti-war speeches have much to tell us not only about Russia and Ukraine, but about the increasingly dangerous world we live in, in which Putin’s slide to authoritarianism has been succeeded by right-wing, authoritarian turns in the USA and some European countries. Russia’s imperial war of aggression has been followed by Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza, in which multiple war crimes – mass murder of civilians, the use of starvation as a weapon, deliberate blocking of aid, and the targeting of journalists, aid workers and international agencies – have been facilitated by the same Western powers that offer lip service to Ukraine’s national rights.

The two aggressor nations, Israel and Russia, aligned with different geopolitical camps, are subject to analogous driving forces. Nationalist ideology supercedes rational economic management; expansionist violence supercedes democracy; the decline of Western neoliberal hegemony paves the way for militarist thuggery. Capital’s need for social control underpins near-fascist methods of rule. Readers may recognise, in the Russian state’s dystopian efforts of 2022-23 to punish its dissenting citizens as “terrorists” and “traitors”, patterns that are retraced in the unhinged witch-hunts of 2024-25 in the USA and western Europe, against opponents of the Gaza slaughter.

The powers on both sides of the geopolitical divide are frightened of similar things: the defiance and resilience of the opponents of Putin’s war, and the anger that has brought millions of people on to the streets of north American and European cities, in protest at the Gaza genocide. They are frightened of beliefs that are taking shape, in varying forms, that humanity can and should strive for a better, richer life than that offered by the warmongers and dictators. Some of these beliefs are expressed in the chapters of this book.

□ You can buy Voices Against Putin’s War from the Resistance Books website.  

□ Thursday 20 November 2025, 7:00 pm. TRY ME FOR TREASON. Readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, and book launch for Voices Against Putin’s War. Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E1 5QJ. Register free on Eventbrite here. Flyer attached.

□ More about the book here: How protesters use Russia’s courts to denounce the war on Ukraine 

□ There are English-languages pages on the websites of Memorial: Support for Political Prisoners, Solidarity Zone, Mediazona and The Last Word.

[1] T.D. Sullivan, Speeches from the dock, or, Protests of Irish patriotism (P.J. Kennedy, New York, 1904); Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: a history of the populist and socialist movements in 19th century Russia (Phoenix Press, 2001), Marshall Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1980).

[2] “Vykhoda net: kak v Rossii massovo fabrikuiut novye ugolovnye dela”, The Insider, 19 June 2025

Source: Simon Pirani, “The courtroom rebels standing up to warmonger Putin,” People and Nature, 9 October 2025