Stand with Ukraine Through Darkness

As temperatures in Kyiv plunged to -20°C (-4°F), Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leaving millions in total darkness and biting cold. Though Russia has tried this strategy before, this winter is different. The scale and relentlessness of these attacks have reached unprecedented levels. Many Ukrainians are now forced to survive winter without steady heat, without light, without the basic infrastructure that makes normal life possible.

• “As Russia tries to freeze Ukrainians to submission, families try everything to stay warm”
• “‘The situation now is the worst’ — Kyiv’s energy crisis deepens after Russia pounds power grid”

The reality behind the headlines

While this crisis unfolds, international coverage has been limited. We want you to see what’s actually happening on the ground.

Our journalists are reporting these stories while living them — and so is everyone else in Kyiv, rushing to charge phones during brief power windows, cooking on camping stoves in their kitchens, huddling under blankets in apartments that feel like freezers. For the elderly, it’s worse. When elevators stop working, they are stuck in their own homes, unable to reach food or medical care. What was occasional last winter is now constant.

To light the darkness

Building on our “I Stand with Ukraine” T-shirt, we’re launching I Stand with Ukraine Through Darkness — available as a T-shirt and hoodie.

From January 20 through February 3, all proceeds from this collection go to supporting the charitable organization Starenki, which helps older people living in vulnerable situations.

This winter Starenki’s volunteers provide a lifeline by:

Delivering essentials — Food and hygiene kits for older people, especially those who are physically unable to navigate stairs to reach shops. When high-rise buildings are left without power, elevators become inoperable — effectively trapping seniors in their apartments.

Providing emotional aid — Companionship and conversation to combat the profound isolation that comes with darkness.

SHOP I STAND WITH UKRAINE THROUGH DARKNESS

Why this matters now

As Ukraine enters its fourth winter of war, international attention is fading. The reality of these freezing blackouts is slipping from the headlines.

By wearing this design, you do more than help support the elderly in Ukraine — you raise awareness of the situation and keep Ukraine from slipping from the world’s attention.

Share this. Wear this. Spread the word.

Source: The Kyiv Independent Store email newsletter, 20 January 2026. I have purchased one of these t-shirts and would urge you to do so as well. ||||| TRR

[Editor’s note: On January 21, Kyiv’s Mayor, Vitali Klitschko, urged the city’s inhabitants to “leave if you can.” 600,000 have already left these last two weeks since Russia intensified its attack on the city’s energy infrastructure. The mayor says that the constant Russian attacks are pushing the city towards “a humanitarian catastrophe.” Temperatures are plunging to as low as –18°C (0°F). According to Klitschko, “the situation is critical with basic services – heating, water, electricity. Right now, 5,600 apartment buildings are without heating.” This morning, President Zelenskiy said that one million people in Kyiv are now without power. The city’s authorities have now have been forced to drain the city’s central heating and water system to prevent pipes from freezing and bursting. A couple of days ago, Ukraine’s Minister of Energy, Denys Shmyhal, said that “there is not a single power plant in Ukraine that has not been hit by the enemy during the war.”]

Today we received this from a dear, long-term friend in Kyiv:

BY OLEKSIY KURKA, resident of Kyiv, works in diplomacy and policymaking

I’ve written about Russian attacks so many times that the words no longer convey any new meaning, muted by repetition. But friends abroad cared to check in with me after last night, so here is an update.

As of this hour, only a fraction of the capital has electricity. I’ve been without power for about 24 hours now; others for much longer. It isn’t clear when it might return.

The heating is also off. The building is gradually cooling down. Soon I’ll be breathing out vapour, like some of my friends. Those living through ‘no-heat’ situations for longer – such as those near the front lines – are now camping out in their flats. It’s 5-7°C warmer inside a tent inside your flat.

The attack caused massive disruptions to public transport. Segments of the Metro I use to commute were closed due to electricity shortages. Many, myself included, had to stay and work from home.

My portable power station is gradually running out. Not having a predictable source of power is beginning to worry me more. I can predict one thing: our foes will stop at nothing to inflict more suffering on Ukrainians – while they can.

On a brighter note, I found and successfully installed a solution to the lack of internet at home. It’s an external antenna that catches and amplifies signals from nearby towers. Even during prolonged outages, I have about 15-20 Mbps, which is brilliant.

As for the power, I was inspired by my neighbour who took a mini petrol generator out to the courtyard and recharged his upper-floor flat via an extension lead. Now I fancy having the same system – and solar panels, for when there’s more daylight. Anything that minimises energy dependence is a win.

I went for a walk on the slippery, ice-clad streets of my district in an off-grid darkness that once again revealed the starred heavens. Most businesses and shops are running off generators, their light bulbs making up for the absence of proper street lights, coupled with the headlights from cars. This is how we see. That, and the torches in our hands.

Earlier today, we chatted with a visiting colleague who asked many questions about life these days. I made the point that a war of attrition forces things upon you that you’d otherwise never have thought you’d need.

But when it happens a few times, you spot the trend and start thinking even more creatively about what is yet to come. Do I need to consider satellite internet now, or are the mobile towers maintained well enough for me to avoid rushed decisions and unnecessary costs? Thinking ahead and learning from others makes the unpredictability a tiny bit more predictable, as it were.

Do I plan to leave Kyiv because of these ‘inconveniences’? I said a long time ago that there are two conditions for me to make such a significant decision: when there is no drinking water, and when the prospect of Russian occupation looms larger.

The first is not yet a reality for Kyiv, and I hope it never will be. The latter is no longer a reality, thanks to the Ukrainian army and our partners who provide Ukraine with air defence, long-range, and other weapon systems.

One more thing: Even if I leave the place, it’s only to come back.

Source: “#blackoutnotes [Ukraine],” Two Grumpy Old Men on Ukraine, 21 January 2026

The sun floods the room like a Christmas postcard: snow-covered trees, silence, a fairy tale.

But it ends at the windowpane.

I stand in the middle of the room in two sweaters and a robe, clutching a cup of hot tea as if it could save me. The thermometer indoors reads +9°C (48°F). It’s the third day without heat, and every hour the cold settles deeper into the walls.

In my arms is my six-month-old son, Ustym. I hold him tighter than I should, trying to give him my warmth. And suddenly it hits me: I don’t know how to protect him from the cold.

I can endure it. He can’t.

I cry quietly so he won’t hear. The tears on my sleeve are warmer than the air in the room.

I pack to leave the city.

There, the power may go out—but there is warmth. What a strange word now. A luxury. A reason to flee your own home.

I thought this fear was mine alone. But when I wrote to my colleague Nastia, I realized the cold does not discriminate. She has no child, but the same thermometer, the same сold walls, and made the same decision to leave.

As a result of Russia’s prolonged strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including power plants and substations, large parts of Kyiv were left without heating for several days as temperatures dropped to –15°C — the lowest in recent years. During the January 9 attacks, damage to the power grid led to heating outages in approximately 6,000 apartment buildings, nearly half of the city, demonstrating how winter has become yet another front in the war.

Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko called the situation the most difficult for the capital since the start of the full-scale invasion and urged residents to temporarily leave the city, despite the opening of hundreds of heating centers. 600,000 Kyivans have fled the capital since January 9. For many, leaving the city is no longer a matter of comfort but one of survival.

It is a reminder that in times of war, even a major city can turn perilous overnight, and true security depends not only on the absence of missiles but on access to basic needs like heat, electricity, and water.

Our apartments turned into cold traps we had to escape. We came together to share this strange, frightening feeling, when every minute at home feels like a test, and survival becomes a daily struggle.

Nastia: On the night before the major strike that left us without heat, January 8, I took a hot shower for the first time in a week and had uninterrupted electricity for the whole evening.

Restoration work on hot water and heating had been underway in my building before, we always had problems with heating and water.

I felt like a human being again — someone who, after work, can properly warm up in the shower, instead of heating up a kettle 5 times.

After the attack, I was back to not having water, heating and electricity. When I woke up under two blankets I felt powerless again: I already knew I would cancel the plans I had that evening because of how exhausted I felt.

I didn’t even try to catch the internet in my apartment, because I knew I’d fail. I just washed my face under freezing water and went to the cafe nearby to work.

Later I was riding the metro and barely held back tears. Not even because of the cold, but because I would yet again have to spend my evening in a dark apartment all alone. Such evenings just gnaw at me, creating a deep sense of isolation. I know that when I set foot in the apartment nothing will be waiting for me there, except darkness, silence, and piercing cold.

“Please, come home. Don’t be there alone in the cold,” my parents told me. My dad suggested I go with his friend, who was also planning to leave Kyiv on January 9. I was hesitant at first: I had friends, plans, and work to do. But if I had been able to find ways to function with blackouts and distract myself before, this time I just couldn’t find the strength to bear it.

Myroslava: During the latest Russian attack on Friday, January 9, we immediately lost both electricity and heat. The boiler in the building runs on electricity, so it was clear that if there’s no power, there won’t be heat either.

At first I was calm; this was not the first time, and we’d get through it. But then Mayor Klitschko urged people to leave the city for the weekend, and that was alarming. The apartment was getting colder and colder.

My husband and I decided to go to his parents’ village to wait it out for the weekend, hoping that heat would return soon. On Sunday evening, we returned to Kyiv: heating had already come back in parts of the city. But not in ours. In the morning I took Ustym to my parents, where it was warmer, and went to work.

I dressed him in layers and held him close to share my warmth.

He seemed fine. It was I and even more so his grandparents who were truly scared.

I knew that we would only leave the Kyiv apartment at the most critical moment, when we had no strength left to endure. That’s exactly what happened on the last two nights–not only because my son woke up frequently, but also because of the cold, in which it was impossible to sleep. I was in warm pajamas, under a duvet and three blankets, surrounded by cats – and it still didn’t help.

I left for the Kyiv region on January 13th for my in-laws’ house, which has its own heating. The situation was so bad I couldn’t even wait for my husband to finish work. The frost had turned the roads into solid ice, and with darkness falling early, driving was dangerous. So my father-in-law drove out to pick up Ustym and me.

Nastia: As I was leaving Kyiv it was darker than usual – the blackouts had taken over the capital. Sorrow and the shame of leaving my own home kept me quiet and bitter in the taxi, but it changed when I met with my dad’s army friend; he cheered me up with conversations about life. The roads were covered with ice and snow.

That evening I got a message from my friend.

“I’ve never regretted more… the day I moved to Kyiv,” she said with an exhausted voice.

I often thought the same, but with the same thoughts I realized it was the best decision – it’s the city where I met most of my great friends, found work I love, and made plenty of great memories I want to keep until my last day.

For now I have to witness it from social media and news, or from my friends’ messages.

Energy workers are active around the clock. And they have been working under tremendous pressure for months. The brutal weather makes it much more difficult – just imagine working in the frost night and day, breaking through snow and ice to repair something, while Russia continues destroying more and more facilities.

DTEK, the country’s biggest private energy firm, posted on Threads: “It’s really difficult for us now. The damage from new big shellings is very serious. This was compounded by the severe weather we could all see outside our windows — the harshest winter in many years.”

Myroslava: The thought that we had to leave Kyiv hurts the most; it breaks me from the inside. I always saw the capital as a fortress, a place that must hold out under any conditions. In 2022, many Ukrainians stayed here even when the Russians stood on the outskirts of the city, because they believed Kyiv would be defended to the end. Now people are leaving not because of a military offensive, but because of the weather.

This is exactly what Russia wants – to make Kyiv unlivable, to break Ukrainians’ morale and force concessions. And they’re partially succeeding: home has stopped being a safe place.

That’s why visiting stores have become one of the most painful things for me. Supermarkets are a kind of marker of stability, an indication that tomorrow will still come. When they are open, it feels like life is still holding on.

But a few days ago, I saw a message that supermarkets in Kyiv were starting to close, including one near my home.

*The store is closed, and a sign to that effect hangs on the entrance, Kyiv, January 13th, 2026*

It stayed open at the start of the war, through heat, cold, and the blackouts of 2023.

And this time, it didn’t survive.

Nastіa: Leaving was difficult not only because it carried a sense of shame for giving up and escaping, while my friends and lots of other people had to stay and endure the cold.

But also it was hard to walk away from the places I love, not knowing how soon I’d be able to return. I don’t know how my apartment is now, or my favorite cafés and stores where I could go from my dark apartment to recharge my phone a bit.

I didn’t spend much time in the cold and blackouts after the latest attack, but it didn’t take long to feel its full effects. I was barely able to get myself out of bed; the indoor temperature had already plunged to about +10°C / 50°F.

And the rest of the time I spent dragging bottled water from the shop to clean up and take a shower before I could leave. At that point, I had no running water at all.

Myroslava: I miss my husband terribly, as he stayed in our Kyiv apartment. He works in Kyiv, and with this weather, regular trips aren’t realistic.

We’ve always done everything together, and now it feels like I’m without my main support. We text each other constantly. I send him photos of Ustym, and we wish each other good morning every day, trying to keep that closeness alive.

He has to keep the bathroom warm so the pipes don’t burst, otherwise the whole building could lose heat for the rest of winter. At –15°C outside, it’s frightening. He uses whatever he can: an oil radiator when there’s electricity, a gas heater when there isn’t.

Our cats, Stuhna and Sherri, stayed in the apartment. I constantly worry that they are cold, curling up and searching for any bit of warmth. They need to be fed and given water, and the rooms need to be kept warm. Every time I think about them, my heart tightens, because I left and they stayed behind.

The war has torn families apart on so many levels, and not just on the front lines. This winter brings a painful new wave of uncertainty and separation – endured not because people are giving up, but because they are forced to protect what matters most.

Editor’s note: The Counteroffensive team will continue to report from Kyiv, but we support any member of their team that wants to go back to their hometowns to be with their families. We also offered to take any member of the team to Warsaw for a week, at least until this blows over. They all refused to leave their country. I hope this shows, in some small sense, the grit, determination and courage of the small team I’m privileged to lead.

Source: Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova and Anatasiia Kryvoruchenko, “Why Myroslava, Nastia left Kyiv,” The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak, 21 January 2026. I am a paid subscriber to this publication and I would suggest that you subscribe to it too. ||||| TRR

(Anti)Fascism Today

Good morning,

My name is Brandon Siguenza, and I am a US citizen from Minneapolis. Yesterday, while doing legal observation, ICE stopped their cars to harass my friend and me. They sprayed pepper spray into the vent of our vehicle. We held our hands in the air and told them we were not obstructing, that the car was in park and they were free to drive forward and away. There was no active immigration raid. They returned to their cars, and drove forward a bit, then decided to stop again. They surrounded us, smashed the windows of our car, opened the doors (they were unlocked), ripped my friend and I out of the car and arrested us on charges of obstruction.

I was put in an unmarked SUV, separated from my friend. As I was put in the back seat an ICE agent tore the whistle off my neck and said “I’ll be taking this, I might need it later.” My phone was knocked out of my hand while being arrested. As we drove away I asked the driver and the passenger if they wouldn’t mind buckling my seatbelt, as they were driving erratically. I was ignored. I asked them if I could have the handcuffs loosened, as I was losing circulation, and was told no. At one point the passenger realized his own driver’s license was in the backseat next to mine, and tried to surreptitiously grab it without me seeing it.

We were taken to the Whipple federal building, where I saw dozens of brown people being processed in an unheated garage. I was frisked, told of my charges, and saw buses and vans being prepped. I later learned that these were being filled with detainees and driven to the airport for deportation. As we were led in, I noticed that the building was very busy. I got the impression that one of the 2 agents bringing me around was being trained. At multiple points throughout my stay, government agents were unable to open doors, not sure where they were meant to be going, and overall confused and overwhelmed. They couldn’t figure out how to use the building phones, or complained about a lack of cell service preventing them from checking the internet or making calls.

The people in the cells were extremely scared. We heard people screaming “let me out!”, crying, wailing and terrified screams. There were cells with as many as 8 people. I have no way of knowing how long they have been there, if they were allowed any contact with the outside world, or if they were being brought food or water. Most people were staring at the ground with almost no energy. I was not allowed to talk to anyone imprisoned. I distinctly remember seeing a desperate woman. She was staring at the ground with her head in her hands crying, hopeless, while her friend or family member sat on a bathroom seat observed by 3 men.

My friend and I were put in an area for “USCs,” which we eventually learned meant US citizens, separated by gender. We were imprisoned for 8 hours, during which my friend was never allowed a phone call. I was allowed to call my wife and tell her where I was. During my interview with Special Agent William and Special Agent Garcia, they asked me to empty my pockets. When I pulled out gloves, Agent William said those were meant to be taken when I was processed, and complained about having to fill out the form again. He frisked me once more, where he found glass in my pocket from when our car window was shattered. He filled out the form listing my personal items again, but put the wrong date. I was read my rights, I pleaded the fifth and was led back to my cell.

Food, water, and bathroom breaks were extremely difficult to acquire. I would ask over the intercom provided in the cell for a bathroom break, be told someone was on their way, then ask again 20 minutes later, be told someone was on their way, wait another 20 minutes, etc. Eventually they either turned off the intercom or it stopped working, because no one would respond. I could get water and bathroom breaks by pounding on the glass when someone happened to walk by and beg them directly. Hours would go by without anyone checking on us. I am vegan and the only food they offered were turkey sandwiches, fruit snacks with gelatin, and granola bars with honey. I eventually ate a granola bar out of hunger.

I was in the cell alone for between 1 and 2 hours, then another man was put into my cell, whose shirt was ripped open from his arrest, and an injured toe, who was carried aggressively into an unmarked car during his arrest. After about 4-5 hours, another man was brought in who had a cut on his head from his arrest. He told me he was tackled by 4 or 5 agents during his arrest. At no point was he offered medical assistance.

Later I was told that a lawyer was here to see me, and I was able to speak with him in a visitation room. The special agent told me that the door could not be closed all the way, so it was cracked during my interaction with my lawyer. I got the impression that they were not used to having lawyers present, and were trying to follow procedure as best they could. I asked an agent if the other detainees were allowed lawyers and was not answered.

At one point, 3 men from the department of Homeland Security Investigations brought me into a cell. They insinuated that they could help me out. After inquiring several times what exactly they meant they finally told me that they could offer undocumented family members of mine legal protection if I have any (I don’t), or money, in exchange for giving them the names of protest organizers, or undocumented persons. I was shocked, and told them no.

Finally, after hours of detention, I was told to follow an agent. At no point was I told whether or not I was being charged, or where I was going, but I was led out of the building. I asked if I could use a phone to call my wife to pick me up, and was told I could not. After pleading for several minutes eventually Special Agent William let me use his phone to call my wife. As I was escorted off the property by government agents, I was told to turn right. I was escorted to the protest area, where 5 minutes later, tear gas was deployed and I was struck by a paint ball gun. I was not protesting, I was simply being released without charges after an 8 hour detention. I was on the other side of the street, as instructed by the agents that released me and the agents shouting orders over a bullhorn. A passerby who was tear gassed was panicking and having an asthma attack, so I helped her find a medic to get her an inhaler. I used a stranger’s phone to co-ordinate pickup, and was picked up by my wife.

During my detention I knew that I was being released. I knew that as a citizen of the United States I have legal protection. The hundred or so other people being detained had no such protection. At this time I don’t need your help, it is the families that are being separated, abused, terrorized, harassed and killed that need your help. If this is happening to me, an American citizen born in the United States, then what is happening to the people in here that have no one calling lawyers on their behalf? That have no constitutional rights to due process? What is happening to the people that they will never be released to see their families, go to their jobs, or walk through their city ever again?

Please take care of yourselves, your family, and your community. I am safe and healthy, if you feel compelled to help, please offer your help to the Immigrant Defense Network at https://immigrantdefensenetwork.org/. If you know someone detained by ICE, call or text CAIR-MN at 612-206-3360 for 24/7 legal intake.

Source: Brandon Siguenza (Facebook), 12 January 2025. Thanks to KFK for the heads-up.

KARE 11, “Taken by ICE & Detained | Breaking the News Plus”

What is it like in the Minneapolis ICE Detention Center? Patty O’Keefe & Brandon Siguenza join Jana to discuss their experience being detained for over 9 hours.

Source: KARE 11 (YouTube), 12 January 2026

In this week’s bulletin: Trade Union Confederation statement after January 9^th Russian attacks; statement by Ukraine Social Movement on Venezuela; captivity and oppression in the Russian-occupied territories; problems of the Russian economy; anti-war messages in Russian cities.

News from the territories occupied by Russia:

Ukrainian, abducted as a teenager from occupied Donbas in 2019, sentenced by Russian court to 22 years (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 9^th)

Ex-military and Ukrainian: No more needed for Russian ‘treason trials’ and massive sentences (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 9th)

The Face of Resistance: The Story of Crimean Tatar Political Prisoner Ismet Ibrahimov (Crimea Platform, January 9th)

‘Russian world’ in occupied Luhansk oblast: no heating and deliberately cut off from mobile telephones and Internet (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 8th)

Desperate plea from Russian prison: Ukrainian political prisoners need to be freed now, not after ‘peace deal’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 7th)

Crimean Political Prisoner Tofik Abdulgaziev in Critical Condition (Crimea Platform, January 7th)

The Woman Who Didn’t Break. Part Two (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 6th)

Monstrous 27-year sentence against Ukrainian civilian abducted from Russian-occupied Melitopol (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 6th)

Weekly update on the situation in occupied Crimea on January 6, 2026 (Crimea Platform, January 6th)

Even Putin supporter debunks Russia’s lies about a ‘Ukrainian drone attack on civilians’ in occupied Khorly (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 5th)

No answers & questions to Red Cross after Russia holds 64-year-old Melitopol journalist prisoner for third year (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 5th)

“You must not show that you are afraid”: Tales of captivity in the Kremlin-controlled “People’s Republics” (The Insider, January 5^th)

News from Ukraine:

Fire Point’s large missiles and contracts: the story of Ukraine’s most enigmatic defence company (Ukrainska Pravda, January 9^th)

More artists killed in Ukraine (The Artist, January 9^th)

Statement of the KVPU on the critical situation in Ukraine after January 9 Russian attacks (Ukraine Solidarity EU, January 9th)

‘Bro-wolfieʼ: The story of a soldier who survived in Mariupol and rebuilt his life (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 8th)

All change: why Zelensky needs to reshuffle Budanov, Fedorov, Shmyhal, Maliuk and other top officials (Ukrainska Pravda, January 5^th)

Engineers, missile strikes and high technology: can Ukraine produce more weapons in 2026? (Ukrainska Pravda, January 4^th)

Denys, a unionised railway worker on the front line (International Labour Network of Solidarity and Struggle, January 1^st)

War-related news from Russia:

Alexander Krichevsky of Izhevsk: Six Years in Prison for a Comment (Russian Reader, January 8^th)

The rise and fall of the “Heroes of the Surgut Land”. How the Russian state works with memory of soldiers who died in the war with Ukraine (Mediazona, January 7^th)

The streets speak. Anti-war messages in Russian cities (Mediazona, January 6^th)

Timofey Anufriev Dies Fighting for Ukraine (Russian Reader, January 6th)

On thinning ice: After almost four years of war, Russia’s central bankers are running out of tricks to keep the economy afloat (The Insider, January 6^th)

The Story of Gordey Nikitin: 17 Years for “High Treason” (Russian Reader, December 31st)

Analysis and comment:

Cedos held a discussion on the impact of research on policy change (Cedos, January 9^th)

Behind the Contact Line: How would the 20-point peace plan impact the millions of Ukrainians living under Russian occupation? (Meduza, January 9^th)

When Information Starts Working on Its Own (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, January 8th)

From master spy to lead negotiator: what does Zelensky’s new chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, bring to the peace talks? (Meduza, January 8^th)

Women’s Careers in STEM: Barriers and Motivations (Cedos, January 7th)

The Non-Peaceful Atom (Posle Media, January 7^th)

Key challenges related to possible holding of an all-Ukrainian referendum on changes to Ukraine’s territory (Opora, January 5^th)

Social Movement: What’s wrong with US aggression against Venezuela? (Ukraine Solidarity EU, January 3rd)

International solidarity:

Ukrainian leaders in UK call for Kemi Badenoch to sack David Wolfson, Russian assets to be used to aid Ukraine (USC, January 8th)

Upcoming events:

Thursday 15^th January, at 7pm, Russia’s War On Ukraine, Us Strategy Review – Stopping The Authoritarians, organised by Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland, register here.

Thursday 5th February, at 6.30pm. Try Me For Treason reading and discussion event at Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck College Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL. Details here.

This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. To receive it by email each Monday, email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.

Source: News from Ukraine Bulletin no. 178, 11 January 2026

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”

Notes:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=armytalks

War Department, “Army Talk 64: FASCISM!” March 24, 1945, at https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up

Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 9 January 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can support Alexander by writing him a letter.

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

You can also send letters through the online service Zonatelecom.

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

Timofey Anufriev Dies Fighting for Ukraine

The name of the beautiful young woman in this photo, taken a month ago in Odessa, is Katya, and she is the mother of a wonderful young man, Timofey Anufriev, a Russian passport holder who went to war to defend Ukraine. Today we received news that he has been killed. You can learn more about him in the film to which I’ve linked in the comments. And try to think hard about [the difference between mere] words and real actions… May the memory of the heroes live forever!

Source: Vitaliy Manski (Facebook), 6 January 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

The Insider, “‘War is like playing chess with death’: Confessions of a philosophy student from the RVC” (in Russian, no subtitles)

Until recently, 21-year-old Timofey Anufriev (son of the renowned artist Sergei Anufriev) was an ordinary university student in Petersburg. For over a year, though, he has been fighting for Ukraine in the ranks of RVC (Russian Volunteer Corps). Our film crew met with him in Kiev. Timofey talks about why he made this decision and about war and death in this report by The Insider.

Source: The Insider (YouTube), 20 March 2025. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader. There is an egregiously machine-translated and machine-dubbed version of this same film which can be viewed here. |||| TRR

[The] 22-year-old Russian-Ukrainian fighter Timofey ‘Aeneas‘ Anufriev was kіlled in action while defending his second homeland.

“Timofey participated in many of the Corps‘ operations: assaults, cleanups, and capturing prisoners. He lived and dіеd like a true knight and poet, in a blaze of fiery glory! <…> Forever in the RVC, forever in the ranks!” the Corps wrote on its Telegram channel.

Anufriev served as a stormtrooper and had the call sign ‘Enei’ [Aeneas]. He was awarded the medal ‘For Assistance to Military Intelligence of Ukraine.’

“The son of a well-known conceptual artist [Sergei Anufriev], born in Moscow and raised in Odesa, Enei regarded both Ukraine and Russia as countries close to him. Highly intelligent and well-educated, open and kind, he sought to contribute to the Corps not only in combat but also beyond the battlefield.

From an early age, Enei was familiar with the cultural circles of two capitals. Unlike the detached, insular segment of the artistic elite that exists removed from reality, he was deeply concerned about the fate of his people.

The outbreak of the war coincided with his first year at university in Saint Petersburg, where he studied philosophy and planned to become a public intellectual. He was disturbed by the way many around him in Russia pretended that nothing was happening. As a result, he decided first to leave the country and later to join the Russian Volunteer Corps.

“There is always a choice,” Enei believed—and he made one guided by his sense of honor. Throughout his combat service, he served as an assault infantryman, one of the most dangerous roles in war.

He took part in numerous operations, including assaults, clearing operations, and the capture of enemy personnel. He lived—and died—in accordance with his convictions.” wrote RVC on its nocturnal post.

Source: ukrainciaga.international (Instagram), 6 January 2025

The son of a famous conceptual artist, he was born in Moscow and grew up in Odessa. Aeneas considered Ukraine and Russia to be his home countries. An exceptionally intelligent and educated, open and kind person, he sought to benefit the Corps not only in battle, but also beyond it.

From childhood, Aeneas was familiar with the cultural bohemian scene of the two capitals, but he was not part of the abstract and “airy” artistic elite that exists detached from reality. On the contrary, he was deeply concerned about the fate of his people.

The war began during his first year at university in St. Petersburg, where he studied philosophy and planned to become a public philosopher. He was disgusted by the fact that many of his peers in the Russian Federation pretended that nothing was happening. Therefore, he decided to first leave Russia and then join the Russian Volunteer Corps.

“There is always a choice,” Eney believed, and he made a choice dictated by honor. He spent his entire military career as an assault soldier — the most dangerous job in the war.

He participated in many operations of the Corps: he stormed, cleared, and took prisoners. He lived and died like a true knight and poet, in the rays of fiery glory!

He was awarded the medal “For Assistance to Military Intelligence of Ukraine.”

Timofey “Aeneas” Anufriev

Forever in the RVC!
Forever in the ranks!

Source: Russian Volunteer Corps Eng (Telegram), 6 January 2026

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

“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”.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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