The Verdict on Spring: The Vesna Case

The “Vesna” Verdict

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

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

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

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

#FreeAllPoliticalPrisoners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Vesna? What is it famous for?

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

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

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

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

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

In January 2018, Vesna staged a mock funeral for Russia’s future: people dressed in mourning attire and with sorrowful expressions on their faces carried a coffin through the streets, adorned with children’s drawings that symbolized hopes for life in a free, democratic country.

In the summer of 2018, when Russia was hosting the FIFA World Cup, Vesna activists unfurled a banner reading “This World Cup Is Filled with Blood” on Palace Bridge in Petersburg. Vesna timed another protest against [torture in police custody] to coincide with the World Cup—a young woman, doused in red paint, lay down on a pedestal beneath a replica of the tournament’s official mascot, the wolf Zabivaka.

The movement grew rapidly. Regional chapters emerged, and by 2018 there were already around a dozen of them. By the late 2010s, Vesna was the most prominent youth organization in the Russian opposition’s ecosystem. No major protest took place without its activists being present. And yet, Vesna activists emphasized their commitment to legal methods of campaigning, as stated in their charter: “The movement pursues its work in accordance with the current laws of the Russian Federation.”

Vesna during the war: the first raids and interrogations

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of political dissent in Russia skyrocketed for all opponents of the government, and Vesna activists were no exception. On 3 May 2022, the movement announced the campaign “They Didn’t Fight for This,” calling on dissenters to attend the Immortal Regiment marches on 9 May (WWII Victory Day) but to carry anti-war placards at them.

A few days later, Vesna activists Yevgeny Zateyev and Valentin Khoroshenin, of Petersburg, and Roman Maximov, of Veliky Novgorod, who had already quit the movement, were targeted with searches of their homes. All three men were taken to Moscow for questioning and held in a temporary detention center pending trial.

These were the first steps in the investigation against Vesna activists. It was then that law enforcement authorities launched a criminal case into the setting up of an NGO that infringes on the personal rights of citizens.

The same day, search warrants were executed in Petersburg at the homes of the parents of Bogdan Litvin, Vesna’s federal coordinator, who had already left Russia, and activist Polina Barabash, as well as at the homes of former movement members Alexei Bezrukov and Artem Uimanen. In Moscow, searches were conducted at the homes of Timofei Vaskin, Angelina Roshchupko, Daria Pak, and Ivan Drobotov.

On 10 and 11 May 2022, the court issued restraining orders against Vaskin, Drobotov, Angelina Roshchupko, Maximov, Zateyev, and Khoroshenin, prohibiting them from certain actions. Soon after, Litvin and Drobotov were placed on the wanted list, as they had managed to leave Russia.

This did not stop Vesna, however. In September 2022, the youth activists announced protests against the military mobilization across Russia. Less than a month later, the Justice Ministry added the movement to its list of “foreign agents,” and the Saint Petersburg City Court ruled Vesna an “extremist” organization on 6 December 2022.

The charges and the trial

On 5 June 2023, the Investigative Committee opened a new criminal case, which later came to be known simply as the “big Vesna case.”

Searches were carried out the following day in Barnaul, Novosibirsk, Petersburg, and Tver. Six people were detained and taken to Moscow: Zateyev, Pavel Sinelnikov, Anna Arkhipova, Vasily Neustroyev, Yan Ksenzhepolsky, and Khoroshenin. On 8 June, a Moscow court remanded them to pretrial detention.

During the same pretrial detention hearing, the prosecution listed five charges: organizing and participating in an extremist group, desecrating the memory of defenders of the Fatherland, spreading “fake news” about the army, and calling for actions contrary to national security.

A year later, when the Saint Petersburg City Court began hearing the case against the six activists on its merits, there were seven charges. Incitement to mass unrest and the creation of an NGO infringing on citizens’ rights (the very same charge under which the activists’ homes had initially been searched in 2022) had been added to the bill of particulars.

The investigation assigned the role of leader and ideological instigator to Vesna’s federal coordinator Bogdan Litvin, who had managed to flee the country. According to law enforcement officials, it was Litvin who had driven the movement toward “extremism.”

Most of the charges were related to posts on Vesna’s social media accounts. Entered into the recorded were ninety posts made in Vesna’s name at various times on various platforms. When presenting evidence in court, the prosecution primarily read these posts aloud, listed the names of Telegram channels, cited viewer statistics, and read out the comments.

The indictment placed particular emphasis on a comment posted by a user known as “Kanoki Nagato,” on 1 May 2022. On one of Vesna’s Telegram channels, he suggested that Russians would one day start “killing the pigs, just like the Ukrainians did at Maidan.” According to the prosecution, the appearance of such a comment proved that Vesna was inciting dangerous actions. None of the defendants knows who “Kanoki Nagato” is, and law enforcement officials have not been able to identify this person either.

They did examine the personal accounts of the six defendants, however. Some of their Instagram accounts were found to be private. Speaking in court, the prosecutor called this “an attempt to conceal information from the investigation.”

When the prosecution presented its evidence in court, some of the hearings were held in closed session at the prosecutor’s office’s request, and members of the public and journalists were not allowed in the courtroom. Those involved in the proceedings are not permitted to disclose what they heard behind closed doors, but it is known that during at least some of these sessions, the court examined the results of intelligence operations—a term used in the Code of Criminal Procedure to refer, among other things, to wiretapping, undercover operations, and the interception and vetting of correspondence.

When it was the defense attorneys’ turn to present evidence, Arkhipova’s support group issued a public appeal: “The defense now urgently needs witnesses—people who actually took part in peaceful anti-war protests between February and May 2022 and have already suffered administrative penalties for doing so.”

Witnesses who responded to this post testified in court.

“To my mind, every citizen took to the streets out of a sense of duty and conscience. It was an entirely peaceful demonstration,” said one of them.

Another witness recounted that she was detained at an Immortal Regiment rally while holding up a portrait of her great-grandfather, and an administrative charge was filed against her for “discrediting” the army.

“I came out of my own free will. I’d participated in Immortal Regiment rallies before as well. At the time I made my decision, I hadn’t seen any notices on Telegram channels,” she explained.

A placard hung in the courthouse on the day the verdict in the Vesna trial was read out: “Yes to Vesna,* / No to war*! / And the truth* about them / is not extremism. / *Vesna, war, and truth are words forbidden in Russia in 2026.” Photo: Mediazona

At nearly every hearing in the trial, the defense insisted that the prosecution had no evidence that the accused activists were involved in posting most of the messages mentioned in the case file. Moreover, some of the defendants not only did not know each other prior to their arrest, but were also not members of Vesna at the time it was classified as an “extremist” organization.

Who’s who in the Vesna case

Yevgeny Zateyev, 24 years old

A resident of Petersburg, Zateyev was charged with violating Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”) and Article 282.1.1 (“establishing an extremist community”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Zateyev to ten years in a penal colony. The actual sentence was six years and two months.

Zateyev served as the press secretary for the Vesna movement’s Petersburg branch. In court, he insisted that his duties were limited to local topics: news about life in Petersburg, announcements of lectures, and film screenings.

He viewed the outbreak of the war as a “personal tragedy.”

“Vesna tried to prevent further destruction and loss of life on both sides of the border—among both civilians and military personnel—through peaceful means. I still regard this goal in an entirely positive light,” Zateyev said in court.

He was one of the first Vesna activists to face criminal charges in the spring of 2022. Some of his comrades left Russia, but Zateyev stayed behind and wound up in a pretrial detention center a year later.

In the summer of 2023, Zateyev wrote a letter from jail explaining why he had decided against fleeing the country.

“I made a very difficult and very painful choice. Was it a painful choice? Of course it was. I find it hard to imagine, though, how I could have left everything behind, gone away, and watched as my friends and acquaintances were imprisoned. This choice was easy for some, but I don’t judge them.”

In the same letter, Zateyev asked that his family not be judged for failing to “change [his] mind.”

In November 2023, Zateyev partially admitted his guilt in the hope of having his pretrial detention conditions eased. He was concerned about his family, especially his grandmother, who was seventy-seven years old at the time of his arrest. Zateyev was not released from pretrial detention, and so he withdrew his confession.

In January 2024, Zateyev’s grandmother died. Four months later, his mother also died, from cirrhosis of the liver.

Zateyev’s pretrial detention was extended once again shortly thereafter. Addressing the court, he mentioned the deaths of his loved ones. Judge Irina Furmanova interrupted him.

“Please do not try to pressure the court by bringing up the deaths of your relatives.”

“I am not putting any pressure on the court. I am simply stating the facts of my life.”

“We are familiar with them. You can merely note what you’ve been through. There’s no need to pressure us like that.”

“Your Honor, pressure—”

“Everyone has, or some people no longer have, a mother. There’s no need to pressure us in that regard. I’ll say it again. Let’s continue.”

In his closing statement, Zateyev said that he was forgiving the investigators, prosecutors, and judges.

“I caution against the false belief that forgiveness absolves one of responsibility. It does not. I do believe, however, that through forgiveness, we can understand the reasons behind what is happening—why and for what purpose. By ridding ourselves of an age-old evil, learning to treat one another with understanding, we can finally find love. I believe that this is possible and even inevitable in Russia. Spring [vesna] is inevitable. The season, of course. What did you think I meant?”

Mailing address for letters:

Russia 196655 St. Petersburg, Kolpino
Kolpinskaya St., d. 9, str. 1
Pretrial Detention Center No. 1
Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region
Yevgeny Artemovich Zateyev, born 2001

Bank card number for donations: 2200 7009 1119 8470

Anna Arkhipova, 28 years old

A resident of Novosibirsk, Arkhipova was charged with violating Articles 282.1.1 and 282.1.2 (“organizing an extremist community”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 280.4.3 (“discrediting the Russian armed forces”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that she had violated Article 239.3 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Arkhipova to thirteen years in prison. The judge sentenced her to twelve years in prison instead.

Arkhipova joined Vesna in February 2021 to “take a civic stand, engage in publicly vital work, and meet new people.” She wrote posts for the movement’s social media accounts but quickly grew tired of “conflicts within the group” and left in May 2022.

Once the war in Ukraine had kicked off, Vesna’s work became “random and certainly not organized,” according to Arkhipova.

“Everything happened naturally,” Arkhipova said in court. “I felt the need to protest the war, as I regarded it and continue to regard it as a great catastrophe and tragedy. That is why I took part in a street protest in Novosibirsk on 24 February 2022.”

Of the ninety posts listed in the criminal indictment, she wrote one.

“I was involved in the publication dated 29 April 2022, [as charged] under Article 207.3, but I find it difficult to say exactly what role I played. [The text] was discussed at great length, and I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it at all. Either I acted as the author, after which it was heavily edited, or another person was the author, after which I heavily edited it,” the young woman explained in court.

Arkhipova’s support group runs a Telegram channel where her letters to the outside world are posted sometimes. In the “Cell Librarian” section, she talks about the books she has read in pretrial detention.

She also writes about the health problems typically experienced by prisoners. Due to poor nutrition, all women in the detention center lose their hair, and even a simple cold is dangerous.

“The worst part is that you’re not permitted to make your bed during the day, so you’re freezing and shivering, and all you have to cover yourself with is a towel. Illnesses are illnesses, but we still have to follow the prison rules!”

Arkhipova is a vegan. It is difficult to follow this diet in pretrial detention. She is very dependent on care packages, which arrive with considerable delays. Her support group secured permission to send her plant-based milk substitutes, but the detention center declined to accept them, stating, “We don’t even allow dairy products for mothers with children.”

“My motivation is simple: I oppose the war. I want a better future for Russia. I have tried to act on my conscience all my life, even though I haven’t always succeeded. When the war began, it was my conscience that wouldn’t let me stand idly by. People on both sides of the border deserve peace: soldiers should be with their families, not in foxholes, and those who were killed should have lived. I feel the same pain for everyone, regardless of their uniform,” said Arkhipova in her closing statement.

Mailing address for letters:

Russia 195009 St. Petersburg
11 Arsenalnaya St.
Pretrial Detention Center No. 5
Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region
Anna Nikolayevna Arkhipova, born 1997

Bank account numbers for donations: 2200 7008 6021 1167 (T-Bank) • 2202 2071 9921 3904 (Sberbank)

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

Vasily Neustroyev, 30 years old

A resident of Petersburg, Vasily Neustroyev was charged with violating Article 280.4.3 (“publicly threatening national security”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 282.1.1 (“organizing an extremist community”) and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that Neustroyev had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution asked the court to sentence Neustroyev to twelve years in prison, but the judge sentenced him to ten years instead.

According to the prosecution, Neustroyev was on Vesna’s federal audit commission and was one of its leaders. Neustroyev himself stated in court that he did not make any decisions within the movement. He did not even have access to social media and could not have published any of the posts ascribed to him. He met most of his “accomplices” only after his arrest. Before his arrest, he was acquainted only with Khoroshenin and Maximov, and knew Zateyev only by sight.

When asked about Litvin—whom investigators consider the leader of Vesna and under whose influence the movement allegedly turned into an “extremist organization”—Neustroyev laughed and said that the main topic of their conversations had been cats.

“Since the autumn of 2018, we’ve been the owners of cats—brothers from the same litter, which we got from the same source,” Neustroyev explained. “Since then, Bogdan Gennadyevich has left his cat with me to look after two or three times. You could say that we became something like in-laws through the cats. The cats were the main topic of our conversations in the years leading up to my arrest.”

The Petersburger did not renounce his anti-war views in court.

“I consider the actions of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin not only a crime against both Ukraine and Russia in equal measure, but also a great folly.”

And yet, Neustroyev “remained skeptical of mass street protests.” He was a member of Petersburg Yabloko’s council and was heavily involved in elections work for a long time. He coordinated election monitoring, and since 2020 had been a voting member of one of the city’s Territorial Election Commissions.

In a letter from the detention center, Neustroev voiced deep regret that he had not yet managed to finish his university education. He had just resumed his studies before his arrest, and if not for the criminal case, he might already have a degree.

“Nevertheless, I still plan to eventually obtain a formal tertiary degree and put this source of anxiety behind me.”

He spoke about Russia in his closing statement.

“Russia is strong. Russia will survive all tyrants and dictators, just as it has done before. I know that Russia will be peaceful, Russia will be happy, Russia will be free. And all of us will be peaceful, happy, and free along with her.”

Mailing address for letters:

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

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

Pavel Sinelnikov, 24 years old

A resident of Barnaul, Pavel Sinelnikov was charged with violating Articles 282.1.1 and 282.1.2 (“organizing and participating in an extremist community”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The prosecution had asked the court to send him down for ten years, but instead the judge sentenced to him to seven and a half years in prison.

Sinelnikov served as Vesna’s executive secretary for several months but left the movement in 2021, long before it had been designated “extremist.”

“The work isn’t hard: you just sit there and write. But taking all those minutes is time-consuming and quite boring. So I really feel for the court clerk,” Sinelnikov explained in court.

He was baffled how the same person could be accused of both establishing an “extremist community” and participating in it, and he made no secret of the fact that the arrest had come as a shock to him.

“I didn’t expect at all that some police investigators would actually fly all the way from Moscow to Barnaul just to get me. As far as I’m concerned, the police search itself is a form of intense coercion, especially the way it’s done. They force their way into your life while yelling and shouting, don’t even let you get dressed, push you face-down on the floor, and then turn everything upside down while cracking high-school-level jokes,” Sinelnikov recalled.

He confessed immediately after his arrest, but later recanted his testimony.

“You can’t take away people’s opinions, but it’s easy to take away their freedom of speech. That’s what happened to me, even though I’m just a binnocent eyestander.”

In court, Sinelnikov explained that he had been fascinated by science and maths at school. He often traveled to academic competitions, and became interested in politics during one such trip to Moscow. He described himself as an introvert and a loner, and his mother even called her son a “slacker” in court.

“Well, Mom knows best,” Sinelnikov replied.

Sinelnikov began his closing statement by admitting that he didn’t really have much to say. But then he called the charges politically motivated and the trial “abhorrent.”

“There was no criminal extremist group. No one planned any crimes, no socially dangerous actions were committed, and there were no socially dangerous consequences either. No harm was done either to society or the public interest. We didn’t even have any motives for or intentions of doing so. Do I deserve ten years in prison for that?”

Mailing address for letters:

Bank account number for donations: 2200 7019 7373 4749

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

Yan Ksenzhepolsky, 25 years old

A resident of Tver, Yan Ksenzhepolsky was charged with violating Article 280.4.3 (“discrediting the Russian armed forces”), Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”), Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”), Article 282.1.1 (“organizing an extremist community”), and Articles 207.3.2.b and 207.3.2.e (“disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 (“organizing an association that infringes on the personhood and rights of citizens”) was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution had asked the court to send him down for twelve years, but instead the judge sentenced to him to eleven years in prison.

Ksenzhepolsky joined Vesna’s federal coordinating council in August 2021. According to him, by October–November of that year his involvement in the council had become “nominal” due to his work commitments. He was employed as a welding production specialist at the National Welding Control Agency and served as an aide to a deputy in the Tver Regional Legislative Assembly.

“I realized that the Vesna movement made a lot of noise but didn’t accomplish anything tangible,” Ksenzhepolsky said in court. “Meanwhile, I was involved in real institutional politics at the Legislative Assembly and could actually influence things—or at least try to.”

On paper, however, Ksenzhepolsky remained a member of Vesna until the summer of 2022.

Ksenzhepolsky is accused of posting on the movement’s Telegram channels, although, according to him, he had access to only one of them, “Tver Vesna,” which had sixteen subscribers. He handed over the password to the new administrator in November 2021, when he left the organization.

In court, Ksenzepolsky reiterated that he believes street protests in Russia are ineffective.

“I believe these actions are completely pointless and do more harm than good.”

In September 2022, when Russia announced a military mobilization, Ksenzhepolsky, according to his own testimony, was on holiday in Georgia but returned home—after Vesna had been declared an “extremist” organization.

“In any case, I know that we will ultimately be vindicated in the eyes of society, history, and the Last Judgment. After all, everything was forever, until it was no more. This regime will come to an end too, and within our lifetimes, something tells me. If not, then the Kingdom of Heaven is not a bad consolation prize,” said Ksenzhepolsky in his closing statement.

Mailing address for letters:

Bank account number for donations: 2200 2479 5715 1401

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

Valentin Khoroshenin, 24 years old

A resident of Petersburg, Khoroshenin was charged with violating Article 212.1.1 (“repeatedly violating the law on public assemblies”) and Article 354.1.4 (“condoning Nazism”) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. The charge that he had violated Article 239.2 of the Criminal Code was dropped due to the statute of limitations. The prosecution asked the court to send Khoroshenin to prison for eight years, but he was sentenced to six years and two months behind bars.

A co-founder of the now-shuttered Fogel lecture bar in Petersburg, Khoroshenin was the sole defendant who not only pleaded guilty to the charges but also testified against the other defendants in the case and many other Vesna activists.

The names mentioned by Valentin Khoroshenin in his testimony: Vladimir Arzhanov, Yekaterina Alexandrova, Makar Andreyev, Nikolai Artemenko, Anna Arkhipova, Yekaterina Bushkova, Alexander Vereshchagin, Yekaterina Goncharova, Timofei Gorodilov, Anastasia Gof, Lev Gyammer, Semyon Yerkin, Yevgeny Zateyev, Semyon Zakhariev, Anastasia Kadetova, Vladimir Kazachenko, Alexander Kashevarov, Gleb Kondratyev, Semyon Kochkin, Yan Ksenzhepolsky, Ilya Kursov, Maria Lakhina, Nikita Levkin, Bogdan Litvin, Andrei Lozitsky, Alexandra Lukyanenko, Yelizaveta Lyubavina (Sofya Manevich), Ilya Lyubimov, Timofei Martynchenko, Daria Mernenko, Anzhelika Mustafina, Anna Nazarova, Vasily Neustroyev, Maxim Potemkin, Konstantin Pokhilchuk, Kira Pushkareva, Lilia Safronova, Pavel Sinelnikov, Yevgenia Fedotova, Anastasia Filippova, Artur Kharitonov, Alexei Shvarts

Khoroshenin’s testimony came as a surprise to everyone in court. He requested that the testimony be heard in closed session and asked that the public and the press be removed from the courtroom, but the judge turned down his request.

Khoroshenin did not merely agree with the charge of “extremism.” He called Vesna “a sort of incubator for Navalny.” His testimony suggested that the movement’s branches were directly linked to the opposition politician’s field offices, where distinguished young activists would then “move up the ranks.” Khoroshenin mentioned the “grant support” that Vesna received, including from “undesirable organizations,” and complained that rank-and-file activists “spent the night in a back room, while Litvin bought himself a new apartment.”

“We systematically violated the law. We held protests and placed ourselves above the law. There were also slogans about undermining the country’s defense capabilities and justifying the use of violence. We organized events that violated existing laws but looked good on the surface,” Khoroshenin said in court.

“I have always believed that everything I am involved in should bring something positive to people. The Vesna movement was perhaps the only exception to this rule,” he argued, adding that he no longer supports any of the points in Vesna’s platform except for the one regarding support for “family and motherhood.”

Toward the end of his court testimony, Khoroshenin urged the other defendants to plead guilty—“to change their stance on the charges against them and set aside ideological pretense.”

“Don’t dig your own graves, colleagues!” he said.

In a letter from the detention center, Anna Arkhipova later quoted the words Khoroshenin had spoken after the hearing: “What really matters isn’t what actually happened, but how the investigator wrote it up.”

In his final statement, Khoroshenin lamented that his former comrades in Vesna had made him look like “some kind of Luntik,” once again acknowledged his guilt, asked for forgiveness “from society and especially from his family,” and voiced his hope that the court would allow him “to return to a normal life for constructive self-realization for the benefit of society.”

Mailing address for letters:

Bank account number for donations: 4476 2461 7307 7443

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

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

Mr. Nobody and His Critics

Nobody About Nothing

Russian films don’t win Oscars every time out, so I finally made up my mind to watch the movie Mr. Nobody Against Putin. It turned out that the film wasn’t about a school, the war, Russia, or Putin—it’s Pavel Talankin’s film about himself. The film begins with him and ends with him. He’s in almost every scene in between. And it goes on like that for ninety minutes.

I don’t know if you can call a film a documentary when the vast majority of its scenes are staged. I suppose you can, but the Academy’s members know best. I’m not a film critic, and my opinions are purely those of an amateur. I’m a mere viewer.

I was amazed by how tacky the self-promotion was. I mean, it is just off the charts. Here comes the protagonist, taking what he calls a “super risk”: he tapes the letter X on the school’s windows over the letter Z. He claims that the X is a symbol of protection for Ukrainian refugees. (?) And here he is, secretly but on camera, ripping the Russian flag from the school’s roof, as witnessed by a cameraman* and Talankin himself. And there he is getting a haircut—a charming, intimate detail, certainly vital for understanding the current state of affairs Russia’s regions. When the toilets in the school’s bathroom flashed on screen, I feared that Talankin would be in the starring role there too, but that didn’t happen, thank God.

It’s funny that Talankin has arranged the books in his home by the color of their spines, and it’s even funnier that, while looking every bit the diehard undergrounder and following the orders of a mysterious overseas handler, he messes around with hard drives that must be smuggled out of the country. We’re living in the twenty-first century, so what prevents Talankin from uploading at least a few gigabytes of video footage to the cloud or transferring it via FTP, instead of lugging the hardware through customs? But I get it: that would not be cinematic, and the documentary would have suffered.

Whether the documentary suffered because Talankin filmed children and adults without informing them of his objective is a question for the Academy’s members. Perhaps this is acceptable in the American cinema, but journalists are obliged to honestly tell interviewees on whose behalf they are interviewing them and to what end.

I’m not arguing with the fact that Talankin’s film won an Oscar. If Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for the color of his skin, and Bob Dylan got a Nobel Prize in Literature for his songs, then why shouldn’t Pavel Talankin get an Oscar for a docudrama about Pavel Talankin? It’s all good.

Something else makes my blood boil. It’s not even the profanity that is liberally sprinkled throughout the film. That’s just how the characters express their folksiness. I get that. What makes my blood boil is the extraordinary ease with which Talankin switches from serving the regime as a propagandist to a new job on a new project. Before he was hired to make the film, he faithfully played the despicable role of a Putin propagandist, organizing and filming pseudo-patriotic productions on orders from his superiors. He sends reports to the Ministry of Education. He reshoots when the first take doesn’t turn out. He corrects the teacher who repeatedly fails to pronounce the word “denazification”—and again, he does take after take. Everything has to look perfect. That’s the job. He gets paid for it.

It would be fine if Talakin didn’t get it, like the moronic history teacher who garners so much screen time in the film. But no, Talankin gets it all. He films what he himself calls “show lessons.” He admits that he works in propaganda: “It wears me out.” While filming a pro-war car rally he laments, “I have to play by their rules.” Why does he have to play by their rules? Is there no other way for him to make a living? He cannot fail to realize that he’s just as much an obedient cog in the propaganda machine as the history teacher. Only Talankin’s caliber is smaller, and his threads are thinner. He doesn’t explain why he has to play by their rules. But it’s obvious anyway, and there’s a universal explanation for it: honest work pays less and demands a heavier workload. The entire propaganda machine in an authoritarian regime is based on this. There’s always a way out if you want out.

But then something clicked, Talankin’s fortunes changed, and now all the video footage he had painstakingly compiled was put to a new use. Up until that point, he had worked in the field of pro-government propaganda; now he would work to expose it. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Everything must be put to use, not a single frame should be wasted.

People sometimes do suddenly acknowledge the harmfulness of their work and make a complete U-turn. Such things do happen, thank God. But if they do it sincerely, and not for opportunistic reasons, their conscience torments them over their past deeds; they suffer, and they seek to atone for the past through their new endeavors. They don’t gloss over the mistakes they have made in life. Such people are instantly recognizable: they do not flaunt their rewards, they take no delight in newfound fame, and they often pay a heavy price for the new path they have gone down. Talankin’s is a different case entirely. His is merely an elegant segue from one cushy job to another. In that sense, we can certainly congratulate Mr. Nobody on his success.

* Podrabinek’s is the only review of Mr. Nobody Against Putin which I’ve read that mentions the mysterious second cameraman (who is clearly a consummate professional), although they were apparently on location in Karabash for months on end. In the film’s credits, they are identified only as “Anonymous,” but their palpable presence is not otherwise mentioned or explained, not even in the film itself. ||||| TRR

Source: Alexander Podrabinek (Facebook), 18 March 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

MR.NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN?

Many years ago, as a graduate student at UMICH in Ann Arbor, I took two semesters on Nabokov with the late Omri Ronen – one of the most extraordinary intellectual experiences I had there, and that’s saying something.

We spent a great deal of time on Lolita, especially its dialogue with Dostoevsky’s “cult of feelings,” and on Humbert Humbert as a “romantic” yet profoundly unreliable narrator. Ronen often emphasized that while it is natural to sympathize with a narrator who claims to be in love, Nabokov refuses to do the reader’s ethical work for them. Humbert Humbert is a criminal who destroys Lolita’s life – something she herself makes clear by the end (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”) The reader’s task is not to be disarmed by his rhetoric, but to remain morally alert and to imagine the experience of his victim.

Watching Mr. Nobody Against Putin and reading its reception, I could not help but think just how thoroughly this lesson seems to be missed by those celebrating the film and its narrator, who is every bit part and parcel of the phenomenon he set out to document.

The film centers overwhelmingly on Pavel Talankin’s feeeeeelings, granting them disproportionate narrative space, something not uncommon in Russian films about Russia. His attachment to Karabash and its people, to the textures of Russian life (the ugly Soviet prefab panel blocks that have gained a somewhat romantic vibe among the younger Russians, the harsh winters, etc.) is rendered with great sympathy. So too is the school environment. But Talankin’s commitment to “loving” the bleak, the outwardly ugly, and the brutal is not just an aesthetic quirk — it’s a moral stance. What is strikingly absent in all of it is Ukraine and its people, which is only briefly mentioned as a destination, not a society under attack. Russian children are not just being indoctrinated to volunteer, to be mobilized, and to die, they are being prepared to kill and that is what they do in Ukraine — something, which is not even once mentioned.

There is also an obvious schism between the reality Talankin documents and the way he interprets it. In his account, he appears to be the only figure with agency — the only one capable of making meaningful choices — while everyone else is stripped of agency and reduced to a passive recipient of propaganda. Even the sinister history teacher, the school’s most zealous and vicious propagandist, is described as “brainwashed.” But if that is the case, who, exactly, is doing the brainwashing? These are the very people who inculcate cynicism, cowardice, and doublethink in their students, they are actors in this process, not victims, and they do have moral choices, just like everybody else. (It is also worth noting that the community is neither visibly poor nor destitute — undercutting the familiar explanation that people volunteer to kill because poverty leaves them no choice.)

Again, this is not just an aesthetic imbalance, but also a moral one, with the focus remaining on “our” suffering, “our” losses, “our” children, not what we and these children have done to others. As a result — just as Omri Ronen warned his sophomore Nabokov students — the aggressor is sentimentalized, and his perspective eclipses that of his victims.

P.S. I also watched Ksenia Sobchak’s documentary about so-called “black widows” — women who marry Russian soldiers, often under dubious circumstances (with grooms heavily intoxicated), and later claim substantial compensation after their deaths. In contrast to Pavel Talankin’s film, it’s really hard to sympathize with any of the people on the screen. Sobchak’s role within the Kremlin’s propaganda ecosystem is well documented; what is worth briefly noting here is how thoroughly this story (and Russian “society” at large) is framed as a story about women: as caregivers, opportunists, con-artists, bereaved wives, or negligent, alcoholic mothers and grandmothers who affect the fates of men, entirely at their disposal.

Men, by contrast, are consistently infantilized, cast as troublemakers, drifters, habitual drinkers, and absent fathers with no clear purpose in life. But invariably “nice”: women say (posthumously) that they are sorry for them (again, barely a reference to what these men did to Ukrainians). In this framing, war supplies these men what their civilian lives lack: purpose, agency, a “heroic”, manly identity, a sense of belonging, and a handsome income – leaving behind, in the end, something for the women to remember them by.

Source: Ksenia Krimer (Facebook), 18 March 2026. Thanks to Alexandr Wolodarskij for the heads-up.

Hello! This week we cover how Oscar-winning documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, went down inside Russia, and why it’s caused a stir among both the Kremlin’s backers and its critics.

Russians fight over Mr. Nobody

Earlier this month, Russia won the Best Documentary Oscar for the first time in more than 80 years. Well, sort of. The statuette went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a Danish-Czech production directed by Pavel Talankin, a young teacher from a small town in the Urals, who documented pro-war propaganda inside Russia’s school system. Western critics were enthusiastic about its take on the militarization of schools amid the invasion of Ukraine. Russian officials and propaganda outlets were, unsurprisingly, not so keen on the film. But interestingly, even some anti-war campaigners have criticized the movie, accusing Talankin of making a shallow diatribe that did not advance our understanding of Russia’s wartime propaganda machine.

The documentary tells the story of educator and school videographer Talankin and his school in Karabash, a small industrial town of about 10,000 people in the Urals region of Chelyabinsk. Talankin, now 35, was a highly respected teacher in his hometown. In 2018, he won the regional “Leader of the 21st Century” competition, his students won an award at a local festival for a movie shot under his direction, and in 2021 the town’s mayor praised a virtual model of Karabash that Talankin’s students had created in Minecraft.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Talankin was assigned to film propaganda lessons in which children were taught Kremlin talking points about the war’s supposedly noble aims, and the unfairness of the West towards Russia. Talankin and US documentary filmmaker David Borenstein got in touch via an online advert in Russia seeking people whose lives had been changed by the invasion. The videographer offered to use the footage he was obtaining as part of a joint documentary. Talankin carried on working and then eventually smuggled hard drives containing two-and-a-half years of footage out of Russia.

The clips from the propaganda lessons — called “Conversations about Important Things” in Russia — were the centerpiece of the film. In one scene, a teacher, reading a propaganda script, struggles to pronounce the words “denazification” and “demilitarization”, two of the official reasons the Kremlin gave for its war. In another, a history teacher (the film’s main antagonist) tells children how in the near future France and Britain will soon face economic collapse as people there are already starving due to sanctions on Russia. Another scene shows mercenaries from the now defunct private Wagner militia advising children how to throw grenades.

What Talankin showed from one school in a provincial town is the same as what’s happening in thousands throughout Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the state embraced mass propaganda in education. Lessons with war veterans were already commonplace, as were issuing Kremlin-approved justifications for the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the seizure of Ukrainian territory. Watching the film, it’s easy to imagine how the exact same “Conversations about Important Things” are happening right across Russia on a daily basis from Moscow to Vladivostok.

The award was [a] surprise, with US film The Perfect Neighbor going into the Oscars as the favourite. According to renowned Ukrainian producer Alexander Rodnyansky, Mr. Nobody Against Putin won out for its portrayal of a “dumbing down mechanism” that could be applied in multiple countries.

However, despite winning the most prestigious documentary prize on offer, there are many who are openly critical of the film — and they are by no means limited to supporters of the war and Putin’s regime. Several recurring complaints crop up. They include that Borenstein compiled the movie “for export” — targeting foreign audiences and festival juries — and that its success closed the door for any chance of a more powerful study of what is happening in Russian schools. In Russia, everybody knows about propaganda in educational institutions (for example, we wrote about it here) and, to them, this film does not offer anything new or go deeper than what has been widely reported. Doubters also say the film suffers from artificiality — especially in Talankin’s monologues. Some scenes, such as the tearing down of a Russian flag or the posting of the “Z” symbol backing the invasion in school windows — seemed staged to many critics.

Respected fact-checker Ilya Ber published a detailed analysis with several complaints that was widely shared on Russian-language Facebook groups. The claim that UNESCO described heavily polluted Karabash as the “dirtiest town on Earth” is not backed up by any documents and is simply an urban myth circulated in the Russian press. The film portrays children being checked with metal detectors as a symbol of a military dictatorship when, in fact, it’s standard procedure in Russian schools ahead of final exams and has nothing to do with the war. Finally, Ber questioned the underlying narrative that Talankin was in danger. He worked in a school where everyone knew his views, nobody denounced him and after the Oscars, pirated copies of the movie are widely available on VK, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook that is closely watched and de facto controlled by the authorities.

The filming of children without parental consent for use in the documentary is another sore point — and the one that Russia has officially latched on to. From an ethical point of view, all subjects should provide documented consent to take part in filming, and minors cannot be filmed without the permission of their parents or guardians. This is precisely the argument the Russian authorities are using and the Presidential Human Rights Council filed a complaint with the Oscars organizers alleging violation of children’s rights.

On the other hand, Talankin was not filming secretly. Children and parents knew they were being filmed for both the local education ministry and for his own projects. “It’s funny that all these years he would come around, film us, and say we would be on the BBC. We laughed at him like he was an idiot. And now he’s going to the Oscars. I don’t think he really believed it himself,” said one graduate of the school, speaking before the awards ceremony. “I knew they were filming me because we often had conversations on camera and it was some kind of lifestyle thing. I didn’t see anything wrong with it,” said another.

Of course, the film has many fans. Movie critic Ekaterina Barabash (who fled Russia while under house arrest for criticism of the authorities) noted that it was well made and gave a unique view inside the regime. Fellow critic Anton Dolin wrote that nobody had ever depicted the workings of propaganda with such chilling clarity. Political analyst Alexander Baunov felt that the fact Talankin filmed in the town where he was born, raised and had been living and working made his testimony especially valuable.

In Karabash, they prefer not to mention the film. According to Talankin himself, “a year ago, when the film came out, FSB officers came to the school and said: ‘This man wasn’t here, this film never existed. You don’t comment on the film, you don’t talk to this man,’”. He said that he’s considered a traitor in the town — a view shared by some propaganda outfits (1,2).

Most national pro-government media outlets have simply ignored the film, which was Russia’s first documentary Oscar for more than 80 years (in 1943 the award went to Moscow Strikes Back). Russian online movie service Kinopoisk, operated by IT giant Yandex, chose not to translate the film’s title into Russian in its live coverage of the Oscars ceremony.

Why the world should care

Despite all the criticism, Talankin managed to show Western audiences something that they had not seen before: exactly how brainwashing works in Russian schools. To Russian viewers, this was no surprise. Reports of propaganda lessons still frequently appear on school social media pages and in news roundups.

Source: Denis Kasyanchuk, “Everybody Against Mr Nobody,” The Bell, 24 March 2026. Translated by Andy Potts. The Bell‘s always informative and sometimes thought-provoking biweekly newsletters used to be free and were delivered to my inbox in whole. Last year, though, they went behind an extravagantly expensive paywall ($189 for a yearly subscription), and I have ignored them. But I was already prepping this omnibus post when a sneak preview of this week’s first newsletter popped into my email, and I couldn’t resist spending one dollar on a one-month trial subscription (which will revert to $18.90 monthly at trial’s end).

The Russian Reader will never be paywalled over, although it does bleed money like a sieve and is in need of your financial support. I have exactly one active donor, NK, who has faithfully and encouragingly sent me twenty dollars every month for the last three years. Why should they keep doing all the heavy lifting on their own? ||||| TRR

Killing the Spirit of Radio

Rush, “Spirit of the Radio” (1980)

In a strongly worded decision this week, a federal judge ordered that the Voice of America — its mission to provide news for countries around the world largely shut down for the past year by the Trump administration — come roaring back to life.

Whether or not that actually happens is anybody’s guess.

The government filed notice Thursday to appeal U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s order two days earlier to put hundreds of VOA employees who have been on paid leave the past year back to work. Lamberth had ruled on March 7 that Kari Lake, who was President Donald Trump’s choice to oversee the bureaucratic parent U.S. Agency for Global Media, didn’t have the authority to reduce VOA to a skeleton.

The Voice of America was established as a news source in World War II, beaming reports to many countries that had no tradition of a free press. Before Trump took office again last year, Voice of America was operating in 49 different languages, heard by an estimated 362 million people.

Trump’s team contended that government-run news sources, which also include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, were an example of bloated government and that they wanted news reporting more favorable to the current administration. With a greatly reduced staff, it currently operates in Iran, Afghanistan, China, North Korea and in countries with a large population of Kurds.

Lamberth, in his decision, said Lake had “repeatedly thumbed her nose” at laws mandating VOA’s operation.

Time to turn the page at VOA?

VOA director Michael Abramowitz said legislators in both parties understand the need for a strong operation and have set aside enough funding for the job to be done. “It is time for all parties to come together and work to rebuild and strengthen the agency,” he said.

Don’t expect that to happen soon. “President Trump was elected to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse across the administration, including the Voice of America — and efforts to improve efficiency at USAGM have been a tremendous success,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly. “This will not be the final say on the matter.”

Patsy Widakuswara, VOA’s White House bureau chief and a plaintiff in the lawsuit to bring it back, said that “restoring the physical infrastructure is going to take a lot of money and some time but it can be done. What is more difficult is recovering from the trauma that our newsroom has gone through.”

It’s an open question whether the administration wants a real news organization or a mouthpiece, said David Ensor, a former Voice of America director between 2010 and 2014. “We don’t know — maybe no one does at the moment — what the future holds,” he said.

The administration’s efforts over the past year to bolster friendly outlets and fight coverage that displeases them offer a clue, even though Congress has required that Voice of America be an objective and unbiased news source. This week it was announced that Christopher Wallace, an executive at the conservative network Newsmax who had previously spent 15 years at Fox News Channel, will be the new deputy director at VOA. Abramowitz didn’t know he was getting a new deputy until it was announced.

Widakuswara wouldn’t comment on what Wallace’s appointment might mean. “I’m not going to pass judgment before seeing his work,” she said.

While Lamberth ordered more than a thousand employees on leave to go back to work, it’s not clear how many of them moved on to other jobs or retired in the past year. The judge also said he did not have the authority to bring back hundreds of independent contractors who were terminated.

One employee who left is Steve Herman, a former White House bureau chief and national correspondent at VOA and now executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi. Despite the court decisions, he questions whether the Trump administration would oversee a return to what the organization used to be.

“I’m a bit of a pessimist,” Herman said. “I think it’s going to be very difficult.”

An administration loath to admit defeat

Besides fighting to shut it down, Trump is loath to admit defeat. Last week, the White House nominated Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, putting it more firmly within the administration’s control. Her nomination requires Senate approval.

“Is Marco Rubio’s State Department going to allow objective journalism in 49 languages?” Herman asked. “I don’t think so. I would want that to happen, but that’s a fairy tale.”

In the budget bill passed in February, Congress set aside $200 million for Voice of America’s operation. While that represents about a 25% cut in the agency’s previous appropriation, it sent a bipartisan message of support, said Kate Neeper, VOA’s director of strategy and performance evaluation. Besides being a plaintiff with Widakuswara in the lawsuit to restore the agency, she has helped some of her colleagues deal with some of their own problems over the past year, including immigration issues.

“There is a lot of enthusiasm for going back to work,” she said. “People are eager to show up on Monday.”

The hunger for information from Voice of America in Iran when he was director was a clear example of what the organization meant, Ensor said. Surveys showed that between a quarter and a third of Iran’s households tuned in to VOA once a week, primarily on satellite television. Occasionally the government would crack down and confiscate satellite dishes, but Iranians could usually quickly find replacements, he said.

“I believe in Voice of America as a news organization and as a voice of America,” Ensor said. “It was important, and it can be again.”

Source: David Bauder, “Judge orders Voice of America be put back together again. What are the chances that will happen?” Associated Press, 20 March 2026

4’42”, a found audio piece captured in my car while listening to KSPB, 91.9 FM, Pebble Beach, on 23.03.2026

Who are we?

KSPB, Pebble Beach, 91.9 FM is a commercial-free, student-run, radio station, that has been broadcasting from Stevenson School in Pebble Beach for over 40 years.

The station is student run and includes staff positions, from webmaster to program director. Before applying for a live show on air, each student is required to take a class to learn about Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, and how to operate the station independently. The students decide the genre of music for their specific show, but the general programming is alternative rock with specialized shows featuring hip-hop and international music. However, some students prefer to run their own talk shows.

With its connection to the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) the station fills out its schedule with content from the BBC World Service, American Public Media, and other public radio producers such as WAMC (Albany) and KCRW (Santa Monica). It also obtains content from its affiliation with the Public Radio Exchange (PRX).

KSPB has listeners in five counties in California – Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Benito, Santa Clara and San Mateo – with a potential total listenership of more than 1 million. Also, with the recent addition of streaming, KSPB is now available worldwide!

Source: kspb.org

R.E.M., “Radio Free Europe” (1981)

R.E.M. disbanded back in 2011. But the seminal indie-rock group is back with new five-track EP “Radio Free Europe 2025,”containing previously unreleased tracks and a new remix of the song. Proceeds from the vinyl pressing will benefit the U.S. government’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which are under attack from the Trump administration.

The EP, coming more than four decades after the 1981 release of “Radio Free Europe” on college radio, coincides with the 75th anniversary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as well as World Press Freedom Day (which falls on May 3). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was established 75 years ago and currently broadcasts news and information in 27 languages to 23 countries where a free press is either banned by the government or under threat.

Members of R.E.M. said the mission of promoting free expression has always resonated with the band.

“Whether it’s music or a free press — censorship anywhere is a threat to the truth everywhere,” Michael Stipe, lead singer and founding member of R.E.M., said in a statement. “On World Press Freedom Day, I’m sending a shout-out to the brave journalists at Radio Free Europe.” Bassist Mike Mills added, “Radio Free Europe’s journalists have been pissing off dictators for 75 years. You know you’re doing your job when you make the right enemies. Happy World Press Freedom Day to the ‘OG’ Radio Free Europe.”

Despite the song’s name, Mills says in the liner notes to the two-disc edition of R.E.M.’s “And I Feel Fine… The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982–1987” that it has “nothing to do” with the broadcaster: “We just liked the title.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty president and CEO Stephen Capus said in a statement, “To me, R.E.M.’s music has always embodied a celebration of freedom: freedom of expression, lyrics that make us think, and melodies that inspire action. Those are the very aims of our journalists at Radio Free Europe — to inform, inspire, and uphold freedoms often elusive to our audiences. We hold dictators accountable. They go to great lengths to silence us — blocking our websites, jamming our signals, and even imprisoning our colleagues.”

In March, President Trump issued an executive order seeking to dismantle Voice of America, which oversees Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and others. The broadcasters have won court rulings to reverse Trump’s move but the White House has withheld funding, leading to layoffs and uncertainty at the outlets. On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore $12 million in congressionally appropriated funding for Radio Free Europe.

On Friday, the heads of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks sent a letter to Trump officials urging them to restore funding “immediately.” That came as Radio Free Asia laid off most of its staff. “Our journalists are terrified that the withdrawal of support from their employers will lead to harassment, prison, and worse,” they said in the letter, per CNN. “We urge you to restore our funding immediately before further irreparable reputational harm is done to the United States — and before innocent lives are needlessly and recklessly lost.”

R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe 2025” is available to stream and download now. A limited-edition, 10-inch orange-vinyl pressing is available for pre-order now exclusively via the official R.E.M. store and independent record stores; it will be released Sept. 12. Proceeds from all vinyl sales will go to RFE/RL, an editorially independent nonpartisan and nonprofit corporation.

Released through Craft Recordings, the “Radio Free Europe 2025” EP was overseen by the band’s original producer Mitch Easter. The record opens with the 2025 remix by Grammy-winning producer Jacknife Lee (U2, Snow Patrol, Taylor Swift, The Killers), who also produced R.E.M.’s final two studio albums, “Accelerate” and “Collapse Into Now.” Lee “gives the track a fresh take while staying true to its indie-rock DNA,” according to Creative Recordings. Rounding out the EP are four of Mitch Easter’s original 1981 recordings: the Hib-Tone single mix of “Radio Free Europe,” its flip-side “Sitting Still,” the “Wh. Tornado” demo, and Easter’s never-before-released 1981 remix “Radio Free Dub.”

In 2009, “Radio Free Europe” was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry for “setting the pattern for later indie-rock releases.”

Formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, R.E.M. had a three-decade run of multi-platinum sales before amicably disbanding in 2011. Over the course of their career, R.E.M. released 15 studio albums, won three Grammys, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2007) as well as the Songwriters Hall of Fame (2024).

Here’s the track list for the new EP:

Radio Side

Radio Free Europe 2025 (Jacknife Lee Remix)*
Radio Free Dub (Mitch Easter 1981 Remix)*

Liberty Side

Radio Free Europe (Original Hib-Tone Single)
Sitting Still (Original Hib-Tone B-Side)
Wh. Tornado (From Cassette Set) **

* Never before released
** First time on digital and vinyl

R.E.M., “Radio Free Europe 2025 (Jacknife Lee Remix) RFE/RL Dispatch” (2025)

Source: Todd Spangler, “R.E.M. Releases New ‘Radio Free Europe’ EP, With Proceeds Benefiting Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Amid Trump Cuts,” Variety, 2 May 2025

In the 1970s, at the height of Soviet jamming of the BBC, the most coveted short-wave radios in the USSR were made by the VEF factory in Latvia – which was then part of the Soviet Union.

A generation of young Russians grew up learning how to twist the dial with great precision, to find whichever BBC signal had somehow bypassed the howling and whistling of the jammers. When you found it, it a window opened into a whole other world – of uncensored news, literature and western pop music, all coming to you live from London.

Those days are long gone. The jamming stations have all closed down. The VEF factory doesn’t make radios anymore. And Latvia is now an independent country. But since the start of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the information space in Russia has been shrinking.

A new generation of Russians are now having to fight to stay connected to the world. And our team has to battle internet blocking and shutdowns to keep on reaching them. Four years ago, the Russian Service Moscow newsroom had to leave Russia but their work continues in exile, and their new home by a twist of fate just happens to be in Latvia.

Over the past eighty years history often seems to have repeated itself.

Take the first ever Russian Service radio news bulletin from 24 March 1946. The news reader was the splendidly named Mrs Sonia – Betty – Horsfall. The top story was all about Iran – and the ongoing negotiations for Soviet troops to withdraw after their wartime occupation.

Now it’s the US-Israeli war on Iran that’s dominating the news. And to reach audiences in Russia in 2026, we have to tell the story in a myriad of ways across different platforms. Our website is blocked in Russia – as are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Tiktok, and WhatsApp. The messenger app Telegram used to be our only uncensored way of getting information in and out of Russia. But not any more.

These days Russians can only reach the BBC website and social media channels – and many other banned sites – by using VPNs – virtual private networks, which allow them to bypass the censors. Everyone from young people to the shortwave radio generation has had to learn how to do it. “But what will we do if they start blocking VPNs and shutdown internet access altogether?” one of our team asked the other day.

It’s a question we often ask our colleagues in BBC News Persian, who are now reporting the war on their country despite an almost complete internet blackout in Iran. We have so much to learn from them – and increasingly, sadly, so much in common with them.

We had to leave Russia in 2022 because it was no longer safe for our staff to continue doing their jobs there. Even calling Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine a war, was against the law.

Getting nearly 50 shell-shocked BBC Russian journalists, their families and their pets out of Russia and into Latvia now feels like the easy bit. Building new lives, learning a new language, and finding new ways to keep reporting Russia from the outside has been a much tougher challenge.

“The thing that’s really helped is knowing we’re all in this together and we can all support each other,” says one of our team.

But everyone has paid the price for carrying on. No-one can travel safely back to Russia. Home and family have become unreachable. Reunions have to happen in third countries.

And even in exile our staff are still being pursued. Eight have been designated ‘foreign agents’ by the authorities in Russia – required by law to put disclaimers on all their published work, taken to court and fined in absentia for failing to comply, heading inevitably towards criminal prosecution.

“If I get a criminal record in Russia, then the list of places where I can safely meet my Mum is going to get even shorter,” one colleague told me the other day.

There have already been cases of Russians discovering too late that they’re on the international wanted list in countries friendly to Moscow.

When the Russian Service first went on air, Winston Churchill had just made his famous post-war speech warning that an iron curtain was coming down over Eastern Europe. In 2026 a digital version of that iron curtain has come down again.

The post-revolutionary emigres and the Cold War exiles who lead the Russian Service in those earlier radio days, have now been replaced by a new generation who never thought that one day it would be their turn to leave.

“The Russia I grew up in has completely disappeared,” says one of our ex-Moscow team. “In the blink of an eye the freedom, the possibilities, and the excitement have all gone. I don’t want to think that I’ll never go back,” she adds “But right now it’s hard to believe.”

Russians clearly want more than their state-controlled news media is currently giving them and after 80 years, I hope our first newsreader Mrs Horsfall would be proud to see how many of them still trust the BBC.

This story was broadcast on ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, on BBC Radio 4 on 21 March 2026.

Source: Jenny Horton, “BBC News Russian at 80: Still here, still growing, still battling the censors,” BBC News Russian, 24 March 2026. This report was added to the original post on 24 March 2026. ||||| TRR

Cruel and Unusual

I am heating water for my coffee on a gas burner because there is no electricity.

Kyiv, the Kyiv region, Odesa region, and the Dnipropetrovsk region are in a total blackout — the result of Russia systematically destroying Ukraine’s energy system over the past months.

The Kyiv metro has stopped. There is no water anywhere.

At the same time, Russia’s State Duma Speaker Volodin, speaking on behalf of Russian deputies, openly calls for genocide — urging new strikes on Ukraine’s already devastated energy and heating infrastructure in order to cause mass civilian deaths.

This weekend the temperature drops sharply. Next week, it is expected to reach –30°C.

Meanwhile, ordinary Russians are celebrating on social media that Ukrainians are freezing.

We know this logic well. Their aspiration is simple: to make life here “like it is for them.”

In Russia, even without war, power outages in entire regions are normal.

In a gas-rich country, it is normal for many regions to have no gas at all.

This is exactly what the so-called Russian world aims for — to make us like them, if not through conquest, then through the destruction of our critical infrastructure and the physical extermination of Ukrainians.

Source: Lyuba Yakimchuk (Facebook), 31 January 2026

The number of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention on a given day has skyrocketed, jumping more than sixfold since the start of the second Trump administration. The Marshall Project analyzed data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and found that ICE held around 170 children on an average day under Trump. During the last 16 months of the Biden administration, ICE held around 25 children a day.

The Marshall Project’s analysis found that on some days, ICE held 400 children or more. The data covers September 2023 to mid-October 2025, meaning it does not include the surge of arrests from recent immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. Nor does the data include children in the custody of the Border Patrol or the Office of Refugee Resettlement, where children are held without a guardian.

The Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas is the main facility for family detention. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro spent two-and-a-half hours inside Dilley on Wednesday, visiting parents and children. He said that the 1,100 detainees housed at the facility included a 2-month-old infant. “They are literally being treated as prisoners,” said Castro, a Democrat from San Antonio, in a live-streamed video. “This is a monstrous machine.”

In 2021, Biden largely halted the practice of family detention, and the Dilley facility, which had mostly housed families, closed in 2024. But the Trump administration revived the practice last year, and the facility, which is located about 75 miles outside of San Antonio, reopened.

The detainment of children by ICE has led to protests in recent weeks, both inside and outside Dilley. On Wednesday, state police used pepper spray on people protesting outside.

Immigration attorney Eric Lee was visiting clients at the facility on Saturday when staff abruptly told him to leave. Outside, he could hear a large group of children and women detained inside chanting, “Let us out.” Lee said he later learned that families inside the detention center had gotten news that people across the country were protesting the detainment of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, whose story went viral amid the backlash against the Trump administration’s recent immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota.

The Marshall Project (YouTube), 28 January 2026

Javier Hidalgo, legal director at the Texas-based immigration advocacy group RAICES said he’s seen many young children like Liam in Dilley. “That’s very much the norm,” Hidalgo said. “That’s what the government is spending taxpayer money on.”

A previous Marshall Project analysis found that ICE has booked at least 3,800 children into detention since Trump took office last year. At least 1,000 children were held longer than 20 days, a court-ordered limit on child detention.

“Every single day that a kid is in a place like this, they deteriorate,” Hidalgo said. “I’ve seen [them] withdraw. They lose weight; they just get physically worse.”

Children being detained with their families as part of immigration raids has become a common occurrence across the country. According to school officials in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, four children, including Liam, have been detained from their district during recent raids.

A 7-year-old in Portland, Oregon, was taken from a hospital parking lot in January with her family, after her parents took her to the emergency room, according to Oregon Live. As ProPublica reported, a 6-year-old boy in Chicago was detained with his mother in a large apartment raid during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

The Marshall Project spoke with three different lawyers representing children who were held with their families at Dilley. They said their clients were often taken into detention during in-person check-ins and had pending cases that could result in them remaining in the country legally. The lawyers believe their clients were detained not because of any danger they posed, but because the Trump administration is trying to deport as many people as possible.

“They’re probably the easiest catch for a lot of immigration officials,” said Veronica Franco Salazar, a Houston-based immigration lawyer.

In court documents, families have described horrific conditions while detained with their children in Dilley. They reported moldy, worm-filled food and foul-tasting, undrinkable water. With little for children to do, some resorted to playing with rocks. Parents worried about the psychological toll of detention, describing children hitting themselves in their faces or wetting themselves despite being potty-trained.

During his visit, Castro said that he heard many families talk about the psychological toll of detention. He spent half an hour with Liam, and said Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told him Liam has been depressed and sleeping a lot. Liam remained asleep in his father’s arms during the visit with Castro. Arias said Liam had been asking about his classmates and the bunny hat he was wearing when detained. The congressman said he told the father that children at Liam’s school were still saving a spot for him at his desk.

CoreCivic, the private company running the Dilley facility, declined to answer a detailed list of questions. “Our responsibility is to care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to,” Brian Todd, a public affairs employee at CoreCivic, told The Marshall Project in an emailed statement. Todd referred all questions to ICE, which did not respond to emails.

Kristin Kumpf, coordinator for the National Coalition to End Family and Child Detention, explained that the public may see videos or photos of the moments people are taken from their homes or snatched off the street, but there is less attention to the conditions children endure in the black box of detention.

“It’s only a matter of time before we see a child die within Dilley or another facility,” Kumpf said.

Hayam El-Gamal and her five children, including 5-year-old twins, have been locked inside Dilley for eight grueling months. Lee, who represents the family, said they’ve received poor medical care and are suffering from psychological stress.

“They’re calling me crying every day,” Lee said. “It’s an unmitigated horror show, and there’s no other way to put it.”

El-Gamal’s husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, is facing charges for attacking people at an event in Colorado supporting Israeli hostages in Gaza. At least 13 people were injured in the attack, and one person died, according to prosecutors. Soliman told detectives his family knew nothing of the attack, according to court documents, and an FBI agent testified they were not involved. The family’s lawyer said they are being unfairly punished for crimes they had no part in.

Lee recounted how one of El-Gamal’s children had appendicitis while in detention and “was left writhing on the floor of the facility screaming and in pain.” Lee said facility staff just gave him Tylenol, and it was only when he started vomiting that the child was taken to urgent care.

“Why is this happening to us?” El-Gamal’s eldest daughter, 18-year-old Habiba Soliman, asked in a handwritten statement provided to The Marshall Project by Lee. “It’s very easy to see the truth about this place and about us. The people need to be truthful to themselves and follow the facts.”

Lee said he believes ICE is retaliating against Habiba Soliman for speaking out about her family’s long detention. She was recently moved to a different area of the facility. Lee said the timing of the move, many months after her 18th birthday, but shortly after she spoke to the press about her long detainment, suggested it was punishment. ICE did not respond to questions about the reason for the separation. Lee said she has faced threats of being moved to a different facility altogether if she didn’t behave.

“I will never forget the look of fear and helplessness on my mother’s face as she watched me being taken away and couldn’t do anything to prevent it,” Habiba Soliman wrote in her statement. “We need everyone to step up and say that detaining families for indefinitely long periods should be illegal.”

Source: Anna Flagg and Shannon Heffernan, “‘Why Is This Happening to Us?’ Daily Number of Kids in ICE Detention Jumps 6x Under Trump,” The Marshall Project, 29 January 2026. Thanks to White Rose Resistance for the heads-up.

Is 19-Year-Old Lyuba Lizunova a Terrorist?

I post this with a big ask: please share it!

There are political prisoners whose names are not mentioned often and so they have few chances of making it onto prisoner exchange lists.

In a nutshell: political prisoner Lyubov “Lyuba” Lizunova, who is now nineteen years old, was arrested along with her boyfriend Alexander “Sasha” Snezhkov in 2022, when she was sixteen and still in high school (Sasha was nineteen at the time). This is the so-called Case of the Chita Anarchists or the Case of the Transbaikal Leftist Association. Why were they arrested? For writing the graffiti “Death to the regime” on the wall of a co-op garage on the outskirts of Chita, and for moderating Antifa Telegram channels. She was the drummer, and he was the vocalist in a band. They recorded songs and played concerts. . . . Lyuba was originally sentenced to three and a half years behind bars; Sasha, to six years. They are both behind bars now: Sasha is in prison in Krasnokamensk, while Lyuba is in a penal colony in Ulan-Ude.

I have been corresponding with Lyuba. The last letter I got from her arrived yesterday, the twentieth of January.

Now here’s the bottom line.

The very same day, yesterday, a court ruled that the Transbaikal Leftist Association is a “terrorist” organization, and named Lyuba and Sasha as its organizers and leaders. This means that they could be charged with, and found guilty of, violating Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 205.5 [“organizing and participating in the activities of a terrorist organization”].

The penalty for violating this law is fifteen to twenty years in prison. If she is convicted on the new charges, Lyuba Lizunova could be released in the 2040s.

The 2040s!

She will be around thirty-nine years old.

She wrote me a letter earlier, on the sixteenth of January:

“I don’t know what to expect. […] It’s a rather hefty sentence for a social media post and a bit of graffiti, right? I’m slowly shedding my usual calm confidence that I’ll be released on 19.02.2027. Don’t think I’m complaining or being dramatic—it’s just the way it is. The prisoner transport is also not clear. I will go either this month, or in March. The trip to Yaroslavl is long: it will take two months, including stops, just to get there, and the same amount of time for the return trip. I need to stock up somehow. […] Everything is kind of shaky and unreliable. The only things which are strong are ideals, principles, and love.”

I would argue that very young people should be at the top of the prisoner exchange lists, that we should drag children, schoolchildren, and university students out of prisons by any means necessary. These prison sentences are Stalinist [in their severity].

Actually, this is my main point. What follows are personal details.

I will later publish excerpts from Lyuba’s letters if she permits it.

While Lyuba was jailed in the pretrial detention center, she studied for the Unified State Exam and managed to finish eleventh grade. (I don’t know how she managed that.) During the ten months in jail and later, during the long prisoner transport (in a Stolypin wagon and paddy wagon) to the penal colony in Tomsk and then to Chita, she read about one hundred books (all of Solzhenitsyn, Kafka, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Frankl, and Dante—basically, whatever she could find). She has no time to read that much in the penal colony, although she has recently been reading Anna Seghers: she has only one day off, and that day she is kept busy with “squad” assignments. But she asked me to send her something to read; I’ll try to send something, I’ve never done it before. She is the “detachment artist,” so she designs all the holiday celebrations, posters, and props. She writes poetry for her own amusement and sometimes borrows a guitar from a “local lady.” In the next barracks, someone has a synthesizer.

I am including these details on purpose, as they make it possible to visualize Lyuba’s story: the daily lifestyle, including sewing and cleaning the premises; eating Dosirac instant noodles (Lyuba is a vegetarian and cannot eat the food served in the penal colony, because everything is cooked in a meat broth); and the nitty-gritty of the prisoner transports.

Strikingly, Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression was observed at Lyuba’s penal colony: she drew a poster for the occasion. Actually, our correspondence and acquaintance began that same day: I chose her letter from a long list of letters from other political prisoners to read aloud at our Returning the Names event. It had a particularly poignant ring. I later realized why she takes the Stalinist crackdowns so personally. She wrote to me that her great-grandfather was a bigwig in the Chita KGB. When she was taken to FSB headquarters for interrogations, she was escorted past a stand dedicated to him, featuring a framed portrait, documents, and awards. It sounds like a movie—a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl being led down a corridor past a portrait of her great-grandfather—but it isn’t a movie.

If you have ideas about who can publicize this case, or who can help make the media cover the cases of very young political prisoners, please write to me. And write letters to them, please.

https://memopzk.org/figurant/lizunova-lyubov-vitalevna

FKU IK-7 UFSIN of Russia in the Republic of Buryatia • Lyubov Vitalyevna Lizunova (born 2006)

Source: Alexandra Selivanova (Facebook), 21 January 2026. 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. ||||| TRR

A court in Russia’s Transbaikal region has designated the informal youth group known as the Transbaikal Left Association (ZLO) as a terrorist organisation and banned its activities nationwide.

According to the ruling by the Transbaikal Regional Court, the group, which was founded in 2019, operated with its own symbols and maintained pages on social media. The court concluded that elements of terrorist activity were present in its actions, as outlined in a lawsuit brought by prosecutors, Caliber.Az reports via Russian media.

The case named Alexander Snezhkov and Lyubov Lizunova, described by authorities as the group’s unofficial leaders, as defendants. Snezhkov was sentenced to six years in prison, while Lizunova received a sentence of three and a half years. They were convicted on charges including vandalism, incitement to terrorism, and extremism.

Snezhkov rejected the accusations, stating that ZLO functioned primarily as an information platform through which he expressed his personal views. At the same time, he acknowledged that in 2022 he had asked Lizunova to prepare a post that he later published online. He said he subsequently deleted the post after realising that it could be interpreted as justifying terrorist activity, including attacks on military enlistment offices.

Source: Sabina Mammadli, “Russian court bans Transbaikal left association, designates it as terrorist,” Caliber, 20 January 2026

(Anti)Fascism Tuesday

Federal immigration agents detained three people and deployed chemical agents at multiple locations around E. 34th Street and Park Avenue in Minneapolis’ Powderhorn neighborhood Tuesday morning. At least two were observers and not the target of immigration enforcement operations.

Around 9:40 a.m., community response networks began sending alerts about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) door-knocking at E. 34th Street and Park Avenue. By 10 a.m., a crowd of over 100 observers had gathered, confronting agents at multiple intersections.

Among the detainees was a woman who was forcibly removed from her vehicle after agents smashed her passenger-side window.

In a video taken by Sahan Journal, the woman can be seen arguing with agents prior to being grabbed by multiple agents and carried to agents’ vehicle. The woman can be heard shouting that she is disabled and on her way to a doctor’s appointment that ICE was obstructing. Prior to the detention agents had instructed her to drive away.

After being pulled out of a car, a women screams as she’s being arrested by immigrations agents at 34th and Park in Minneapolis on Jan 13, 2026. Credit: Chris Juhn for Sahan Journal

Shortly after, another observer on site was tackled and forcibly put in agents’ vehicle as well. According to state Rep. Aisha Gomez, DFL-Minneapolis, who was present at the scene, agents pushed the man’s head into the concrete prior to carrying him away. Gomez also said that agents were physical with her as well.

“These officers have obviously not had the basic law enforcement training,” Gomez said. “I was shoved with no verbal communication whatsoever.”

Andy Larson, a south Minneapolis resident who was out observing ICE activity Tuesday, told Sahan Journal that one protester kicked out the taillight of an ICE vehicle and was tackled to the ground up the road on Park Avenue and E. 36th Street.

“It was a really good kick,” Larson said.

The protester managed to escape ICE agents, Larson said. ICE deployed chemical irritants and shot pepper balls into the crowd and fled the scene.

According to Sahan Journal photojournalist Chris Juhn, a Hispanic man was also visible in the back of one vehicle. It is unclear whether the man was an observer or target of federal operations. ICE did not respond to Sahan’s request for comment on the operations.

At multiple points during the operation, agents deployed chemical agents at observers. Agents fired pepper balls at observers’ feet and threw canisters of tear gas at the corner of 34th Street and both Park and Oakland avenues prior to leaving the scene. Eyewitness Moses Wolf said there was no singular precipitating event that led to tear gas being deployed on Park Avenue.

“There was a crowd confronting each other telling ICE to get out,” Wolf said. “I didn’t really see any physical altercation happening.” He said it appeared to be a tactic by ICE agents to exit the scene.

Wolf said the confrontation prior to the deployment of tear gas had not escalated beyond what had already been happening.

“It wasn’t anything crazy,” Wolf said. “I turned around for one second and there was this whole entire cloud of it, and pepper spray came with that.”

Eyewitness Neph Sudduth said at Oakland Avenue agents used tear gas as they were leaving.

“They were finally leaving, it was the last car of the convoy,” Sudduth said. “They just threw two or three canisters out at us as they left.”

Both Sudduth and Wolf said they witnessed agents using pepper spray out of the windows of their vehicles as they drove off.

“They just wanted to hurt us cause we told them how we felt, and they didn’t like it,” Sudduth said.

The operation in Powderhorn is part of a flood of federal immigration activity in Minnesota. As many as 2,000 federal agents are present in the state according to reporting from the New York Times, with an additional 1,000 set to be deployed.

For Gomez, the clash with ICE is the new reality of life in the Twin Cities with federal agents present.

“This is what our streets are like,” Gomez said. “We have these masked, unaccountable unknown to us federal agents, and it’s like they’re the secret police.”

Despite the difficulties, Gomez believes observers should and will continue to show up to meet federal agents in the streets.

“Our community is undeterred,” she said. “We’re not going to just lay down. You can gas us and mace us all you want, we’re not going to just lay down.”

Sahan Journal reporter Andrew Hazzard contributed to this story.

Source: Nicolas Scibelli, “Crowd of 100 confronts immigration agents door-knocking in south Minneapolis,” Sahan Journal, 13 January 2024

1. Numbers

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised to deport every illegal immigrant who was a rapist, murderer, or thief. He also promised to deport 20 million immigrants. Some voters believed the first promise; other voters believed the second.

Because people are stupid, that first group of voters believed that there were 20 million undocumented immigrants who have committed felonies. This is not possible. The total number of people in jail in America today—this includes federal, state, local, and tribal land prisons—is just under 2 million. The number of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes cannot be 10x the entire prison population of the United States. If it were, then daily life in America would look like Escape from New York.

So some Trump voters were duped owing to their general ignorance and/or innumeracy.

But others were not. Others signed up for Trump because of his second promise (the 20 million deportations) and viewed the first promise (about deporting only criminals) as the pap necessary to get the suckers onboard.

There are two crucial questions about these two groups. The first is:

What is their relative size? What percentage of Republican voters were tricked into voting for Trump’s immigration policies versus what percentage are getting exactly what they wanted?

Would you like to guess? Go ahead. I promise that whatever you’re thinking, it isn’t dark enough.

Here’s a survey tracking Republican approval of Trump’s immigration policies (the top line, in red) over most of 2025:

That’s a consistent level of support around 80 percent. Now here is the first poll conducted after the killing of Renee Good:

Even after the killing of an unarmed American citizen, a total of 80 percent of Republicans approve of what ICE is doing and 53 percent of Republicans strongly approve.

It seems pretty clear that, at best, one in five Trump voters were duped. The majority of them are getting exactly what they wanted.

Now if Trump were to lose the support of 20 percent of Republicans voters—or even 14 percent—it would be meaningful for Republican electoral prospects. Which is nice.

The problem is that having 80 percent of Republican voters actively supporting a fascist race war is meaningful for our societal prospects.

Which brings us to the second question: How are these groups distributed through the elite positions of power in government? And here it seems that many of the Republicans most invested in a race war have a great deal of power. Like, for instance, Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

At the elite levels, even the idea of 20 million deportations is too little. Here’s a tweet from the Department of Homeland Security on New Year’s Eve:

100 million deportations?

There are 43 million foreign-born Americans. Most of them are legal immigrants. In order to perform 100 million deportations, DHS would have to round up every immigrant of any status—even naturalized citizens—and then also snatch 57 million American who are citizens by birth and deport them, too.

Want to guess who those other 57 million Americans might be?

This week the Department of Labor published this:

Of course, the slogan sounds better in the original German.

Oh, and don’t forget the Department of Labor’s heroic propaganda posters depicting the American worker in a very specific way.

On the one hand, it feels weird to say that the U.S. government is attempting some low-key ethnic cleansing.

On the other hand, the reality is that we have a masked secret police force going door-to-door attempting to kidnap brown people; one government agency publicly daydreaming about deporting 100 million people; and another government agency saying that the ideal worker is a 20-year-old white guy.

2. Demographics

Another tell: This administration is obsessed with America’s falling fertility rate. From the NYT:

Vice President JD Vance last week called falling marriage rates “a big problem.” The deputy secretary of Health and Human Services in December urged his agency to “make America fertile again.” And at a recent conference for young conservatives, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, doubled down on the importance of marriage and children, holding out his nine kids as a model for others to follow.

Full disclosure: I am also obsessed with America’s falling fertility rate. Enough that I wrote a book about it.

The problem here is that nearly all of the declines in total fertility rate (TFR) over the last decade have been the result of declining Hispanic fertility.

Here’s the deal: The TFR—the total number of kids the average woman has over the course of her life—has been below the replacement level, but relatively stable, among white and black Americans for the last generation or so. But America’s TFR kept declining anyway. Why?

Because Hispanic Americans—many of whom were recent immigrants—had TFR’s higher than the U.S. average. And their baby-making propped up the nationwide number. The problem is that, as recent immigrants spent time in America, their reproductive behavior began regressing to the mean. The shift has been dramatic:

If you were concerned about the fertility rate in America, would you be trying to (a) halt all immigration—since immigrants usually bring with them fertility rates higher than native-born Americans—and (b) deport 100 million people from the ethnic group that has the highest fertility rate?

No.

The only reasonable conclusion is that the concern of people in the Trump administration isn’t about the total fertility rate. It’s about the white fertility rate.

I don’t know how much clearer the regime could be.

So tell me: What does the pie chart look like on Republican voters and race war? What is the percentage of Trump voters in each of these categories:

Group A: Sees and understands the administration’s intent and supports it.
Group B: Sees and understands, but oppose it.
Group C: Do not understand that the regime views its program as part of a race war and thinks it’s all business as usual?

And follow-up question: How big can Group A be for us to retain a functional, liberal society?

I look forward to your discussion.

Source: Jonathan V. Last, “The Nazi Slogans Are Not an Accident,” The Bulwark, 13 January 2026. I subscribe to the Bulwark, and so I have shared this article here as a service to my own readers. ||||| TRR

Forbes Breaking News, “BREAKING NEWS: Robin Kelly Introduces Articles Of Impeachment Against Kristi Noem,” 13 Jan. 2026

[. . .]

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to announce I will be impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem,” announced Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois.

“Secretary Noem has violated the Constitution and she needs to be held accountable for terrorizing our communities. Operation Midway Blitz has torn apart the Chicagoland area. President Trump declared war on Chicago and then he brought violence and destruction to our city and our suburbs in the form of immigration enforcement.”

Rep. Kelly then broke down some of the outrageous violence that ICE has visited upon her district.

“In my district, federal agents repelled down from Black Hawk helicopters and burst into an apartment building in the South Shore area. They dragged US citizens and non-citizens alike out of their beds in the middle of the night. They claimed the apartment was infiltrated by members of a Venezuelan gang. I don’t understand this president’s obsession with Venezuela, but they did not arrest a single member from that gang.”

“I visited that apartment building and saw firsthand the destruction those agents left. Doors to people’s homes or apartments were kicked down. Belongings, including little kids’ toys, were strewn about in the hallway. That raid and so many others shook our community, not just immigrants, but everyone. Now, Secretary Noem has brought her reign of terror to Minneapolis after she left Charlotte and Raleigh. We have all seen what happened.”

“ICE officers shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. Without knowing any of the facts or an investigation, Secretary Noem lied about what happened. She called [a] beloved 37-year-old mom a domestic terrorist. Secretary Noem and her rogue agents are the ones terrorizing our communities, and she is breaking the law to do so. I will hold her accountable.”

“I’m filing three articles of impeachment against Secretary Noem. Number one, obstruction of Congress. Secretary Noem has denied me and other members of Congress oversight of ICE detention facilities. It is our constitutional duty to find out what’s happening in these centers where people are reportedly being treated like less than animals. Two, violation of public trust.”

“Secretary Noem directed ICE agents to arrest people without warrants, use tear gas against citizens, and ignore due process. She claims she’s taken murderers and rapists off our streets, but none of the 614 people arrested during Operation Midway Blitz has been charged or convicted of murder or rape.”

“Three, self-dealing. Secretary Noem has abused her power for personal benefit. She steered a federal contract to a new firm run by a friend, her friend. Her propaganda campaign to recruit ICE agents cost taxpayers $200 million. She made a video that turned the South Shore raid into something that looked more like a movie trailer. But make no mistake, this is not a movie. This is real life and real people are being hurt and killed. I really have to wonder who are the people behind the mask. These DHS agents have no identifying factor.”

“From all their botched raids and officer-involved shootings, I have to ask, what is their training like? What is the vetting? Is Secretary Noem recruiting January 6th insurrectionists? I was one of the last members of Congress to escape the House Gallery on January 6th. I remember hiding on my hands and knees and running through the hallways to a safe room. Insurrectionists are not fit to serve as law enforcement. I realize that impeachment of Secretary Noem does not bring Renee back.”

“True justice would be Renee alive today at home with her family. Impeachment doesn’t bring back the four other people killed by immigration officers this year, including a man in Chicago. We could not bring them back to their loved ones. What we can do, though, is impeach Secretary Noem. Hold her accountable. Let her know the public is watching. In this country, we do not kill people in cold blood without consequences. These are not policy disagreements.”

“These are violations of her oath of office and she must answer for her impeachable actions.”

[. . .]

Source: Occupy Democrats (Facebook), 13 January 2026

Audience members at the all-ages Minneapolis rock venue Pilllar Forum tussled with ICE agents on the street outside the club on Sunday — prompting that night’s show to be canceled.

The owner of Pilllar Forum, Corey Bracken, said several of his customers and musicians were pepper-sprayed by ICE agents and at least two were hit with batons on the street outside the venue, at 2300 Central Av. NE., where other ICE detainments and community protests have happened in recent days.

“My staff doesn’t feel safe after this, and our artists and customers don’t feel safe,” said Bracken, a dad who expanded his skateboarding store into a music venue and coffee shop in 2023 to bring more live music and art to underage fans.

He is leaving it up to his staff and the bands themselves to decide whether to proceed with upcoming concerts, including several more scheduled this week.

The ruckus started shortly after the 6:30 p.m. showtime for a four-band bill headlined by Pilllar Forum regular Anita Velveeta, a popular trans/queer punk act. Audience members saw ICE agents pull up and detain two individuals outside the neighboring Supermercado Latino market, prompting the club’s young music fans to quickly exit onto the street and protest the agents’ actions.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a Star Tribune request for comment. An employee at Supermercado Latino also declined to comment on the incident.

Antonio Carvale, singer/guitarist in one of Sunday’s opening bands, BlueDriver, said he was one of five people at the venue who had to be treated with water and saline solution after being hit with pepper spray. He said agents fired the spray after they pushed a protester who pushed back.

“Honestly, the pain felt brutal, but fortunately the community was prepared and helped treat our eyes,” Carvale said, but he commiserated with a bandmate who was also struck by a baton and “banged up pretty bad.”

The band was disappointed Sunday’s gig then was canceled, but he added, “It would’ve been hard to play when I couldn’t even see the frets.”

One of the audience members who was pepper-sprayed, Jess Roberts of Minneapolis, said she had to go to an urgent care clinic because she was sprayed in the ear, which led to an infection.

The run-in with ICE followed a viral Instagram post by Pilllar Forum that went up Friday and landed 25,000 likes. It showed a peaceful but loud crowd of protesters shouting down ICE agents on Central Avenue, with the message, “And that is how you get it done.”

Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne and the new Minnesota state senator representing northeast Minneapolis, Doron Clark, joined Bracken in another social media video posted late Sunday denouncing the incident. Clark called Pilllar Forum “an institution here on Central.”

Payne urged residents, “Stay safe and stay vigilant.”

Twin Cities musicians and music fans offered online support for Pilllar Forum after Sunday’s mayhem.

“Thank you for supporting the community!” veteran rocker Tim Ritter of the band Muun Bato wrote on the venue’s Facebook page.

Bracken did offer refunds to paid attendees of Sunday’s canceled show, proceeds of which were to be donated to families affected by ICE detainments, per headliner Anita Velveeta’s request.

“So far, I haven’t heard from anyone who wants their money back,” Bracken said.

Source: Chris Riemenschneider, “Music fans scuffle with ICE outside all-ages Minneapolis rock venue,” Minnesota Star Tribune, 12 January 2026. I subscribe to the online edition of this newspaper (which I grew up reading as a kid), and so I am just as happy to share its contents here when appropriate. ||||| 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

Ukraine

Some of Ukraine’s youngest defenders (clockwise from upper lefthand corner): Serhiy Dodurov, Oleksandr Romanuk, Deniz, Ivanna Tsimerman, and Sofiya Yanchevska

As Russia’s full-scale war enters its fourth year, a generation raised under air-raid sirens is now old enough to fight. Despite not yet being subject to conscription, these young Ukrainians are voluntarily joining the military, trading lecture halls for dugouts, or trying to balance both worlds.

Their decision comes at a time when Ukraine is facing mounting pressure to address critical manpower shortages. In 2024, the government lowered the mobilization age from 27 to 25 and later introduced one-year “special contracts” aimed at 18 to 24 year-olds, with Hr 1 million ($24,000) pay and free higher education.

Meanwhile, many young Ukrainians are making another choice — to leave the country — heightening fears of a looming demographic crisis.

The Kyiv Independent spoke to five young Ukrainians about why they enlisted, how they balance study and service, and what they hope for after the war.

Continue reading →

Suffer the Children

LOCAL INSPIRATION of the day. This quilt by Joleigh Kambic is part of a larger quilt titled “Babies in Gaza Who Never Made It To Their First Birthday.” The quilt is composed of smaller quilts created by nearly 40 quilters from across the Monterey Bay, commemorating the children who were killed in the Israel-Hamas war. It is on display through Oct. 3 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Monterey Peninsula, 490 Aguajito Road in Carmel.

Source: Monterey County NOW newsletter, 29 September 2025

Special detention center for waifs and “troubled” teens. Moscow, 1988. Photos: Igor Stomakhin

Source: Igor Stomakhin (Facebook), 1 September 2025. The first of September (aka Knowledge Day) is the first day of the school year in Russia and other former Soviet countries.

Continue reading →

Andrei Khrzhanovsky: Even Tel Aviv Hipsters Can Commit Genocide

Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Source: social media

Son of the renowned filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, anthropology graduate and activist Andrei Khrzhanovsky moved to Israel in 2022. He almost immediately adopted a pro-Palestinian stance in the Middle East conflict, dubbing Israel’s actions genocide, and Zionism an ethnically supremacist idea. He says he is fighting for the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank due to his sense of guilt over the war in Ukraine. He spoke with Marina Berdichevskaya about his radical stance and his conflicts with his family.

Andrei Khrzhanovsky, 26, has been living in Israel since 2022. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he found himself in Tel Aviv with his entire family, including his famous father, grandfather, and grandmother. When the time came to fly home, there was nowhere to go. On February 24, Ilya Khrzhanovsky had begun circulating a petition, condemning the invasion of Ukraine, among cultural figures. Andrei flew to Georgia and applied there for Israeli citizenship.

Since March 2022, Andrei X, as he likes to be called, has enthusiastically plunged into the weeds of Israeli life and quite quickly chosen a side: he has taken up activism and, so he claims, journalism, on behalf of “the most vulnerable group on Earth at the moment,” the inhabitants of the West Bank. At the same time, Andrei has been doing battle with “the genocide in Gaza” and on this score has found himself at odds with his father, who has repeatedly said that, in the wake of 7 October 2023, he has felt himself to be Israeli first and foremost.

We talked at length and quite emotionally about how the profoundly erudite Khrzhanovsky, who has a degree in anthropology from the University of London, has decided to atone for the collective guilt of generations for world colonialism. Andrei happily juggles concepts and historical facts and is sure that this is the only way to do things: to always stand up for the downtrodden and to never succumb to propaganda. Whether he himself is suspectible to propaganda is an open question. Ah, yes. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of Republic or its editors—nor should they.

“The closer you are to the empire’s center, the greater the blame”

— Let’s begin with where you live. Your Facebook page says you live in Jericho. Is this true?

— Nowadays, I don’t stay anywhere longer than a few days in a row. I rent a flat, but I won’t divulge its location, because I get several death threats a day. I come home once every month and a half for a couple of days and then I hit the road again. Yesterday, I came from Bethlehem.

— How do people on the West Bank relate to you? Do they understand that you have an Israel passport?

— I’ve never had any problems with this because this is a political conflict, not an ethnic one. I speak with Palestinians deep in Area A (the West Bank is divided into three areas; Area A, which makes up seventeen percent of the West Bank, is wholly controlled by the Palestinian Authority — Republic) whose relatives have been killed, who have done time in prison. Israel fosters the illusion that all Palestinians want to kill all Jews. But this isn’t an ethnic conflict, and not even a religious one at the end of the day.

— In February of last year you said in an interview, “When the war in Ukraine began, I had an enormous sense of guilt that I hadn’t done more [to stop it]. That’s why I’ve thrown myself into all political activism here.” You explained your activism in terms of not wanting to “squander another country.” Where does such a young man come by a sense of personal guilt for what is happening in and with a country? After all, many Russian nationals, especially the remainers, reject the very principle of collective guilt.

Karèn Shainyan, interview with Andrei Khrzhanovsky and Artyom Nikitin (in Russian, with no subtitles)

Today’s episode of Who Am I After This? is very sensitive for me personally. The conversations with its two subjects, leftists and human rights activists, were the hardest and most emotional in the whole project because they both touch on a very painful personal conflict of loyalties for me. This is the only episode where there are two protagonists at once: journalist Andrei Khrzhanovsky and architect Artyom Nikitin. Quite handsome and young, both moved to Israel after the war in Ukraine began, and both travel to the West Bank to support the local Arab [sic] population, even and especially now, when there is a war in [sic] Israel.

Source: Karen Shainyan (YouTube), 2 February 2024

— Before February 2022 we all lived in a magical reality of sorts: there was a dictatorship in Russia, seemingly, but no one was getting killed, as it were; everything was sluggish, we had to tackle corruption and so on. But there was no sense of the disaster that any dictatorship represents. This illusion personally crumbled for me on 24 February 2022. The disaster started then, and then intensified after the genocide in Gaza began. Over the past few years, the feeling has only grown in me that we are all to blame for what is happening; some more, some less. The closer you are to the empire’s center, the greater the blame.

— And when did you personally start counting down that blame?

— If we speak of the entire timeline, there were three moments. The first was 24 February 2022. The second was an article by Yuval Abraham (an Israeli journalist and co-director of the Oscar-winning film No Other Land — Republic), based on conversations with soldiers fighting in Gaza who admitted that they had been tasked with firing on civilian targets. And the third was the morning when I woke up, opened Instagram, and saw the video of a man in Gaza burning alive after an IDF strike on a hospital.

— How did you get involved in political activism in Israel?

— I had an approximate, general notion of what was happening here when I turned up here. I grew up in the Russophone media space after all. But when I arrived I realized that I had to figure out what was happening. I started reading books and talking to people. The more I researched, the more horrified I was. Suddenly, I found out about the status of Palestinians in East Jerusalem: their land was annexed, but they weren’t granted [Israeli] citizenship. To get into the Shuafat refugee camp, which the Israelis annexed and surrounded with a wall, Palestinians have to go through a security checkpoint. The sheer number of different methods for constructing a state based on ethnic supremacy is insane.

Continue reading →