He Left Russia with Steinbeck in His Rucksack

Gregory Kunis. Photo: Bumaga via Mr. Kunis’s Facebook page

Gregory Kunis, cofounder of iGooods and former owner of the newspaper Moy Rayon (“My District”), has left Russia following the prosecution’s appeal against the verdict in the Anti-Corruption Foundation donations case, he announced on his Facebook page last night.

Kunis writes that on 12 December, the prosecution lodged an appeal against his sentence on the grounds that the punishment was “excessively lenient.” On 8 December, the Petrograd District Court fined him 350,000 rubles in connection with the donations case, our correspondent reported. Kunis was released from custody in the courtroom. The prosecution had sought a six-year prison sentence in a medium security facility.

The court’s website states that, on 15 December, the prosecution’s appeal was taken under consideration. Kunis decided “not to tempt fate” and fled Russia.

“My motherland let me go carrying a small rucksack, which contained a laptop, a change of clothes, a book (Steinbeck), and toiletries. I’m not angry with her. After all, she did let me go.”

The businessman was arrested on 24 July and charged with “financing an extremist group” for making monthly donations of 500 rubles to [the late Alexei Navalny’s] Anti-Corruption Foundation, donations which continued for some time after the Foundation had been designated an “extremist organization.” Kunis pleaded guilty.

Kunes owned the newspaper Moy Rayon from 2003 to 2014. In 2015, he founded the grocery delivery service iGooods. He was among the first organizers of the Immortal Regiment march in Petersburg. The businessman was arrested on 24 July and later remanded in custody.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 18 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Are the rumors true that the company iGooods was “stolen” from its founder, Gregory Kunis, while he was in pretrial detention facing political charges? We spoke with the business’s new beneficiary to get both sides of the story.

One of the first grocery delivery services in Russia, iGooods (which has been around since 2015) came under the control of entrepreneur Roman Yarovsky while its founder, Gregory Kunis, was under arrest in connection with the Anti-Corruption Foundation donations case, Bumaga reported earlier. The two sides disagree about how honestly the deal came off and whether politics was a factor.

Kunis’s story is that iGooods urgently needed infusions of cash in 2025. In July of that year, Gregory and his brother Dmitry transferred 50% of the company to a new investor, Roman Yarovsky, who was obliged to preserve the business and the agreed-upon stakes in it of all its shareholders, including Kunis. Subsequently, Gregory was arrested, and the company’s new director, Alexander Bolotnikov, who had replaced Kunis under Yarovsky’s watch, was among the people who testified against him. The new owner “took advantage of the situation” and transferred 100% of the company’s shares to a new legal entity in which none of the previous owners had a stake.

These details (except for Bolotnikov’s incriminating testimony) were corroborated by Yarovsky, but he interprets them differently.

Yavorsky’s story is that, in July 2025, iGooods was in debt to its employees and business partners. Roman took over management of the business. The ownership transfer process took 45 days, but, according to Yavorsky, he began investing money immediately.

“My partner Roman Chubey and I spent about 17 million rubles [approx. 198,000 euros—TRR]. It took about three days: we had just changed ownership and submitted the paperwork when the ‘mask show’ [police carrying out a raid] arrived. They turned the whole office upside down and confiscated all the servers. Do you know what Federal Law No. 115 [the Law on Combating Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing] is? We were told that our former director had apparently been sponsoring an extremist organization, so the business would be shut down. […] I asked [the law enforcement officers] to give us at least a couple of weeks. They agreed. We managed to transfer our business operations to another company [“Global iGoods”],” Yavorsky claims.

According to Yarovsky, none of the old shareholders got a stake in the new company because Kunis was under investigation and thus a danger to the new company, while the other owners allegedly failed to show up for a shareholders’ meeting which, interestingly, had been held only about a month earlier.

“What else could I do in such a situation? I had to save the capital I had invested,” Yarovsky concludes.

Kunis argues that this claim is far-fetched: at the time the criminal case was opened, he no longer had any formal connection to the legal entity and could not have posed a threat to it. Yarovsky claims that the business transfer paperwork was still being processed by the tax inspectorate when the company’s offices were raided and Kunis was detained. Yarovsky was unable to provide us with documents corroborating that a search had taken place and that he had received threats from law enforcement.

What is at stake? According to public records, the company that owns iGooods was profitable but financially unstable in 2024. According to RBC Petersburg, by 2025, employee salaries began to be delayed due to a shortage of cash flow. According to Kunis, one of the key causes of the downturn was a competitive market and the shift of some customers to large companies that subsidized their services.

The new legal entity, Global iGoods, is currently continuing the operations of the iGooods service, which delivers groceries from four stores in Petersburg, including the upscale Super Babylon.

Who is Yavorsky? He is known as one of the shareholders of the Deti group of companies, which operated the large Deti (“Children”) Zdorovy Malysh (“Healthy Baby”) sore chains. The group was declared bankrupt due to its debts, so Yavorsky himself cannot own the new business. His daughter Pelageya was formally named the holder of the initial 50% stake in iGooods.

Elena Chubey (who shares the same last name as Roman Yavorsky’s partner) currently owns 100% of the shares in the new LLC.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 25 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

I am Gregory Kunis. Until recently I lived in St. Petersburg, where I built my career in media and business. I built projects such as the St. Petersburg Times and Moj Rajon, and later worked in technology, including the grocery delivery service iGoods. I was not a political activist. I lived an ordinary professional life and assumed I was beneath the radar of the Russian state.

That illusion ended when I was arrested in July last year for donating the equivalent of 35 euros to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. I spent five months in pretrial detention. After my release I still faced an appeal by prosecutors — who thought my fine of 350,000 roubles ($4,500) was too lenient — and the possibility of a six-year sentence. On the day I was freed I left Russia. I now live in Israel, separated from my family for the time being, trying to rebuild a life from almost nothing.

I am writing this diary because I want to describe Russia from the inside, not through slogans or geopolitics, but through lived experience. Many people abroad see only the surface and conclude that repression works mainly through open terror, or that support for the war is simple and voluntary. But fear is only part of the story. Uncertainty is just as important. When the state keeps shifting the boundaries of punishment, people begin to censor themselves before anyone has to order them to. That is the mechanism I want to describe: how a system reshapes people inwardly, and how apparently bureaucratic institutions are used to break resistance.

One of the clearest examples is the Russian pretrial detention system, the SIZO. If you want to understand how recruitment to the war works, you have to begin there.

The first day in detention is designed to strip you of time, dignity and control. The prison transport is cramped and airless. There are no windows, almost no ventilation, and long periods of waiting in heat and foul air. You are moved like cargo. Then come the holding cells, where eight or 12 people may be packed together in a tiny space, with bad water, almost no food, cigarette smoke, and no explanation of what is happening. There are no clocks. No one tells you what will happen next or when. You are taken to one short procedure, then sent back to wait again. The language around you is reduced to orders. By the end of the day, after interrogation, dry rations, and hurried processing in the middle of the night, you are physically and mentally emptied out. Long after midnight you are placed in a dark cell not knowing where you are, who is with you, what the rules are, or what will become of you.

Then comes quarantine, the first stage of detention, which is far worse than what follows. The conditions are harsher than in the later stages of custody: crowded cells, barred windows, almost no fresh air, no walks, no shower, no books, no news, and no contact with the outside world. You are allowed one letter, with no certainty that it will arrive. The deepest burden is not only physical discomfort, but isolation. You don’t know what is happening to your loved ones, and they don’t know what is happening to you.

In such conditions, time itself starts to dissolve. Without clocks, without movement, without normal daily markers, the day loses structure. Prisoners improvise ways to follow the sun just to recover some minimal sense of reality. This uncertainty is not an accidental by-product of the system. It is one of its main instruments. A person deprived of information, rhythm, privacy, and contact becomes easier to control.

It is precisely during these first days, when people have been stripped of strength, information, and emotional stability, that recruitment for the war takes place.

This is one of the most important things I want to record. The offer is presented as an escape: sign the contract, go to war, and leave prison behind. In that moment, the choice is not experienced as a political decision. It is experienced as a way out of unbearable confinement. By my reckoning about 30 percent agree immediately, and another 10 percent say they may agree later, once they better understand their likely sentence and future prospects. That is a striking figure, but it should not be misunderstood. It does not prove that these people are ideologically committed to the war. It shows how the state exploits exhaustion, fear and disorientation.

In such a condition, almost any exit begins to look reasonable. Moral judgment is pushed aside by something more primitive: the need to escape. The dangers of combat, the meaning of the war, and even basic ethical questions become secondary to the immediate desire to get out. The person is no longer choosing freely between prison and military service. He is making a decision after being systematically reduced to a state of weakness and despair.

That is why recruitment in detention cannot be understood through propaganda alone. Posters, patriotic rhetoric and official television are only part of the story. The deeper mechanism is institutional. It lies in the sleepless nights, the sealed windows, the bad air, the missing clock, the silence from home, and the unending uncertainty about what comes next. That is where many decisions are actually made. The state takes people at their weakest moment and converts brokenness into manpower.

This is also why I believe it is important to write. Systems like this do not survive by violence alone. They survive by learning how far a person can be bent before he gives way. They survive by turning despair into compliance. If I want readers outside Russia to understand how the war is sustained, I have to show not only the battlefield or the speeches from Moscow, but also the prison cell and the mechanisms operating inside it.

As for me, I do not believe I will return to Russia. I am listed there as a terrorist, my bank accounts are blocked, and I cannot imagine building a normal life under those conditions even if I were physically free. But I can still write. My hope is simple: to leave an honest record of how this system works from the inside, and to help others see more clearly how fear, uncertainty and war are connected. If I do that, I will have succeeded.

Source: Gregory Kunis, “How fear recruits for war,” The Russia Report 300, 8 May 2026

By April 2026, according to Mediazona’s count, at least 225 criminal cases had been opened across Russia over donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) made after it was banned as “extremist” in August 2021. The true figure is almost certainly higher: the courts, our main source, do not always publish enough information to distinguish ACF transfers from funding of other “extremist organisations.”

2025 was a record year for the number of ACF donor cases reaching the courts, and the pace of prosecutions has not slowed this year. Here is what we know about the state of the crackdown as of today.

By the spring of 2026, at least 225 criminal cases had been opened in Russia on charges of “financing extremism” (Article 282.3 of the Russian Criminal Code) over donations made to the ACF after the foundation was banned in the summer of 2021. Mediazona established this figure from press releases issued by law enforcement agencies, court records and statements from the defendants themselves.

We have documented such cases in 64 Russian regions, from Kaliningrad in the West to Sakhalin in the Far East. The highest number is in Moscow (25 cases), followed by Sverdlovsk Region (17) and Kaliningrad Region (13).

Of the 225 cases known to us, 187 have been filed in court. There are a total of 190 court cases related to ACF donations, but three of them do not involve ordinary donors: the prosecutions of Leonid Volkov, Alexei Navalny, “Navalny Live” staff member Daniel Kholodny, and the foundation’s investigator Sergei Ezhov. We include these in the chart of cases filed in court, but not in the overall statistics.

Last year set a record for the number of ACF donor cases in the courts. In 2022 there were only two such cases; four in 2023; and 27 in 2024. In 2025 we recorded 131 criminal cases. In the first months of 2026 we have found a further 23, and it is already clear the total by year’s end will be considerably higher.

Our tally includes only those cases in which we could reliably confirm that the defendant was being tried for transfers to the ACF rather than to another “extremist organisation”—religious groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the vaguely-defined gang-culture movement A.U.E., and others.

It is often only possible to determine exactly where a defendant sent money several months after the verdict. This means 225 cases is a conservative estimate, since the courts are reluctant to share information about ongoing trials.

For this reason, in the majority of “financing of extremism” case filed in courts in 2026, it is not yet possible to establish to whom the defendant transferred money. The rise in the number of unidentified Article 282.3 cases in the courts coincides with the rise in ACF cases, suggesting that a significant share of them do in fact concern the ACF, even if we cannot yet confirm this.

To date, we are aware of 167 convictions linked to the ACF’s fundraising. As before, judges typically impose non-custodial sentences: more than 85% of defendants have avoided prison.

Fines are the most common punishment, handed down to 114 people. By Mediazona’s calculations, the total value of those fines has reached nearly 40 million roubles (about $527,000), while the donations that triggered the prosecutions amount to roughly 400,000 roubles (about $5,270).

One of the cases that ended in a fine is particularly notable because, for the first time, the text of the verdict revealed how law enforcement and Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial intelligence watchdog, track down ACF donors.

In December 2025, the Petrogradsky District Court of St. Petersburg fined businessman Gregory Kunis 350,000 roubles ($4,640) for donations to the ACF. The agencies involved in the case were the FSB and Rosfinmonitoring, which has access to all bank transactions in Russia. A deputy head of the financial investigations department of Rosfinmonitoring’s Northwest Federal District office testified for the trial. He first mentioned an FSB request regarding Kunis personally, then explained that after the ACF was designated an “extremist organisation”, Rosfinmonitoring and law enforcement had jointly carried out a financial investigation into the merchant account with the identifier V2NI29SJROMGYKY in order to identify those who had transferred money to it.

The account with merchant ID V2NI29SJROMGYKY is cited in almost every donor case apart from the earliest ones: it is through this identifier that investigators prove the defendant sent money to Navalny’s foundation.

This witness testimony proves that search for ACF donors is being run centrally, with Rosfinmonitoring working alongside the security services. You can read more about the investigation into the donation cases in Mediazona’s first article on the topic.

Of the cases Mediazona has been able to review, 24 defendants received suspended sentences. A further five were sentenced to compulsory labour.

Another 24 defendants received prison sentences (four of them in absentia). The charge of “financing extremism” carries a maximum of eight years’ imprisonment, but the courts have yet to reach the upper limit where that was the sole charge.

Half of the custodial sentences have been handed down in Moscow. ACF donors in the capital have until now been punished significantly more harshly than those in the regions—but in recent months, Moscow judges have started behaving less predictably.

On a single day, March 2, the Timiryazevsky Court fined an IT entrepreneur for donating to the ACF while the Meshchansky Court sentenced Alexei Buchnev, a former Central Bank employee, to three years in prison. The following day, the Butyrsky Court sentenced one of Buchnev’s colleagues to compulsory labour. Two weeks later, on March 16, the Savelovsky Court fined Dmitry Nyudlchiev, an employee of a Rosatom subsidiary. The next day, the IT specialist Alexei Yekaterinin was sentenced to four years in prison by the Perovsky Court.

Why the courts hand down such wildly different punishments is unclear. It does not depend on the size of the donations: for transfers of the same 2,100 roubles (about $28) in total, one Moscow resident received a fine and another a prison sentence. Some defendants donate to Russia’s Ukraine war effort in the hope that it will be treated as a mitigating factor—but this is no guarantee of freedom. Yekaterinin, who was sent to prison, had transferred more than 10,000 roubles (around $130) to the “People’s Front. All for Victory” fund. The same goes for renouncing one’s previous views. Yekaterinin pleaded guilty, and his lawyer argued in court that the ACF had “set him up” by “playing on” citizens’ patriotic sentiments.

A lawyer who handles ACF donor cases told Mediazona that, in his experience, sentencing is shaped by a host of factors, including “the personal impression the defendant and the defence make on a particular judge”.

Outside Moscow, custodial sentences have become more common in Kaliningrad Region, though punishments there remain lighter than in the capital. In October 2025, defendants named Feshchenkov and Kovalenko were each sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. In December, a local resident named Kazanovsky received four months. In February 2026, another Kaliningrad resident was sentenced to three years. In total, at least five people in the region have been given custodial sentences, including Pavel Natsarenus, who was jailed for eight months in 2024.

Besides Moscow and Kaliningrad Region, custodial sentences for ACF donations have also recently been handed down in Kirov Region and Stavropol [Territory]. In November, a court in Kirov sentenced an IT entrepreneur, who had left Russia back in September 2022, to three years in absentia. Konstantin Bernatov, a resident of Stavropol, received the same sentence in January, this time in person. The details of his case are not known.

The folklorist Valery Ledkov from Khanty-Mansiysk, whom we mentioned in our previous update, has since been released. In February, the Seventh Court of Cassation commuted his custodial sentence to a suspended one.

We deal separately with cases in which the defendant is charged with something else in addition to ACF donations—an additional charge can substantially affect the sentence. Lawyers warn that once the security services have taken an interest in someone because of their support for the foundation, they may well find other grounds for prosecution.

Igor Meshalnikov, a resident of Kostroma Region, was first fined 40,000 roubles (around $530) for donating to the ACF and then, several months later, detained on a fresh charge of financing Artpodgotovka. He was ultimately sentenced to 10 years.

Alexander Germizin, secretary of the Vladimir branch of the liberal opposition party Rassvet, was first convicted of “[condoning] terrorism”. A second case was then opened against him over cryptocurrency transfers to the ACF and the Armed Forces of Ukraine made after the start of the war (“financing extremism” and “treason”). The security services had likely gained access to Germizin’s devices during the first case and found the prohibited payments there. He was sentenced to 15 years.

A similar sentence—14 years—was imposed on a resident of [the Maritime Territory] in the Far East who had made transfers to the ACF and the AFU “totalling more than 13,000 roubles” (around $170). Exactly how he moved the money is unclear.

There are also the opposite cases, in which someone is first detained on charges unrelated to supporting the opposition. This is what happened to Viktor Mezhuiev from Sakhalin Region. In 2025 he and his friends were first convicted of illegal fishing, and a few months later he was sentenced on charges of “financing extremism”. He was fined 300,000 roubles (around $4,000).

The Moscow City Court designated the ACF an extremist organisation in June 2021; the ruling came into force on August 4. The next day, the foundation launched a new donation drive through the American payments service Stripe.

The ACF’s team believed that because Stripe would not cooperate with the Russian security services, investigators would be unable to identify its donors. But on the very first day of the new drive, a critical error occurred: the payment description that appeared on some donors’ bank statements contained part of the foundation’s website address: WORLD.FBK.IN (ACF’s Russian-language abbreviation is FBK).

The first criminal cases were opened in August 2022. While analysing bank statements, security forces noticed other matching identifiers in the ACF transfers, specifically the merchant ID. This significantly expanded the pool of suspects, and merchant IDs and other technical identifiers have now become the primary evidence in donation cases.

In early August 2025, Mediazona published a detailed study on how criminal cases against donors are structured; at the time, 76 cases were known. The study concluded with instructions on how to check if you are at risk and what to do if you sent money to the ACF via Stripe.

The ACF issued a statement emphasizing that Vladimir Putin bears responsibility for the repressions and that the evidence in such cases is inconsistent. The foundation added that it had warned “a significant number of potential defendants in criminal cases” of the danger, and “several people were successfully evacuated.”

In early September, the ACF’s director, Ivan Zhdanov, announced that he was stepping down from the foundation. In an interview after his departure, he described the decision to launch a donation drive after the organisation’s ban as “ill-advised”.

“Risky decisions were taken, which Putin’s regime ultimately exploited,” he said.

Source: Olga Romashova, “The 225 donor cases. Russian authorities continue to prosecute donors to Navalny’s Anti‑Corruption Foundation across the country,” Mediazona, 21 April 2026. The emphasis is mine. I have also made a few tiny emendations to bring the text into line with common English-language editing standards. ||||| trr

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

Recent Russian Opposition YouTube Blockbusters: “Age of Dissent 2024” & “The Yashins”

Andrei Loshak, “The Age of Dissent 2024” (in Russian, with English subtitles)

The eve of the 2018 presidential election saw the release of Andrei Loshak’s series Age of Dissent, about young supporters of Alexei Navalny who were involved in his election campaign.

The sequel to the series, filmed on the eve of the latest presidential “election,” recounts how the lives of the activists who dreamed together with Navalny of “the wonderful Russia of the future” have changed dramatically in six years. Filming was almost completed when news came Navalny’s death. The movie’s protagonists ask themselves how to live without dreams and hope.

Source: Current Time Doc (YouTube), 3 June 2024. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

The protagonists of Andrei Loshak’s documentary film Age of Dissent 2024: (clockwise, from upper left corner) Filipp Simpkins, Lilia Chanysheva, Ksenia Fadeeva, Yegor Chernyuk, and Violetta Grudina

On June 3, Current Time hosted the premiere of Russian filmmaker Andrei Loshak’s documentary Age of Dissent 2024. It is a sequel to Age of Dissent, which was filmed on the eve of the 2018 presidential election in Russia and focused on opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and the young supporters who helped him with his unofficial campaign. He was denied registration as a candidate but campaigned as if he was on the ballot.

Fast forward six years, to 2024, and another Russian presidential election, which was held in March and won, again, by Vladimir Putin with what the state said was 87.3 percent of the vote. Loshak’s new film, commissioned by Current Time, RFE/RL’s Russian-language TV and digital network, tells how the lives of the same activists who had dreamed, together with Navalny, of a “beautiful Russia of the future” changed dramatically.

Filming was almost completed when news broke in February of Navalny’s mysterious death in a Russian Arctic prison while serving a 19-year term on charges his supporters and many Western governments considered politically motivated.

On the eve of the film’s premiere, Current Time journalist Ksenia Sokolyanskaya met with Loshak in Tel Aviv.

RFE/RL: Did you think from the very beginning that this story would have some kind of sequel? Or did something happen at a certain moment that made you want to return to these people?

Andrei Loshak: I must say that, probably, this idea was there from the very beginning. After I released the first film, I saw that it kind of took off. People began to tell me that they wondered what would happen to the subjects next. And I thought, yeah, it’s really interesting that it will be a new election cycle six years later.

I had to monitor their fates, so I asked to film some things, although I didn’t know for whom it was to be done or when. But then I realized that they had all left Russia, that their fates had changed very dramatically, and that everything that they had fought for and lived for, all of it was destroyed in these past six years.

Yes, it seemed to me that this was enough to return to them and film what had happened to them. But you have to understand that we finished filming in January and early February [of 2024]. I sat in Tbilisi and thought about what to do with all of this.

What was my idea? To draw attention to Aleksei Navalny, because for me, this was such a serious motivator. There was a moment when he was being transferred to [the Polar Wolf prison in Russia’s Arctic town of] Kharp, and he disappeared, and I was struck by how few people wrote about it. For two weeks, it was not clear whether he was alive or not.

They killed Aleksei on February 16. At that moment, I was simply lost. I didn’t understand what to do with the material.

I think it was important to record the reactions of [the film’s subjects] to the news of that day, before they had time to get used to it. Although, to be honest, I’m still not used to it. It killed me, too.

This is probably the most personal film I’ve made in a long time. Because usually you take the position of an observer and film all sorts of things, but in this film I lived with the subjects — with one dream, one hope — and Aleksei was as important a figure for me as he was for them.

RFE/RL: I read the comments under the teaser for the film, which was posted the other day. People wrote that it was painful to watch, that their hearts were broken. We live in a Russia we don’t want to live in, and Violetta in the film talks about “those traumatized by Russia.”

Loshak: Moreover, a psychotherapist gave them such a diagnosis.

RFE/RL: In the film, a separate theme is the question: How do you live when the main thing you’re living for is taken away? Do you think there is an answer?

Loshak: We are all asking this question now, and few people understand how to overcome all this. This is a recording of this moment, when our homeland rejected us. We found ourselves superfluous and unnecessary there. She needs us, but the circumstances are such that they don’t expect us there, they don’t want us there, they push us out of there.

Hope is such a straw. You still clutch at it. Of course, a few months is not enough time to understand how to live now. I am in this process, and my heroes are in this process of understanding. [In the film,] Oleg says this [phrase] from the point of view of common sense: “We need to stop this, guys.”

RFE/RL: Meaning that political activism is not a profession?

Loshak: Yes. It is possible in some historical cycles, but in others it is impossible. And when you find yourself rejected, uprooted and without a homeland, your plan must change….

That’s why I always look at this whole “opposition movement” with great skepticism. I don’t know who looks at it without skepticism. But on the other hand, I don’t deny it. It’s kind of necessary, because they’re doing the right things, but it’s virtually impossible to influence anything in Russia from [exile]. This must be understood clearly.

This feeling of helplessness with which Violetta says: “What, how, and why?” — the loss of these meanings is very painful. But we always have to say goodbye to something; everything has its own lifespan. And unfortunately, we are now at this point where we need to say goodbye to all this and start something new. The question is: What?

RFE/RL: Do you have faith? In the film people talk a lot about faith, and it ends with Aleksei’s words about the need to believe. Do you have faith that Aleksei’s story can also transform into something that people will watch, and that if they don’t know the story of Jan Palach, they will learn it from your film? (Editor’s Note: On January 16, 1969, 20-year-old university student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague to protest the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. He died of his burns three days later.)

Loshak: I’m sure of it. I’m convinced of it. Such sacrifices, heroic deeds of such magnitude, cannot be in vain. I am absolutely sure that this is not a wasted sacrifice and that Aleksei will remain in the history of Russia forever as one of these heroic figures, which, of course, will acquire its own mythology. And in what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read about him, we would hardly recognize Aleksei.

There are always few such figures in history. I have never encountered anything like this in my life, such a level of self-sacrifice.

RFE/RL: The scale.

Loshak: Yes, but we also had, of course, our own Jan Palach: [Russian journalist] Irina Slavina, who set herself on fire in Nizhny Novgorod [in 2020], opposite the city police headquarters. (Editor’s Note: Before self-immolating, Slavina wrote on Facebook, “Blame the Russian Federation for my death.” A day earlier, she had written that police had searched her apartment, trying to find evidence linking her with the opposition Open Russia group and confiscated her computers and mobile phone.)

She didn’t do it in vain, either. I’m absolutely sure. Although who remembers her now? This was just a few years ago, before the war [in Ukraine]…. She will also be in this pantheon of heroic people who openly came out against evil.

Of course, Aleksei and what he did, and the way he died — all of this will later inspire people because everyone always needs bright examples, everyone needs these myths. And Aleksei has already become this myth. I can already see how people who never appreciated him during his lifetime — and, in general, I heard little good from them about Navalny — are now writing: “But Navalny would not have said that,” or, “Navalny would not have done that.”

His wings have already grown; he is already soaring over this unfortunate Russia, and he will always soar there from now on. This is actually good because you have to believe in something.

RFE/RL: After Navalny’s death, a discussion appeared in the Russian-speaking, mostly emigrant, community. It seems to me that the impetus was Shura Burtin’s manifesto on Meduza that a “beautiful Russia of the future” will not happen and that hope for some kind of good future is harmful. One of your subjects, Violetta, also talks about how she doesn’t feel joy, that she can’t say she lives, she just exists. Do you think you should actually believe such stories?

Loshak: Believe in what?

RFE/RL: You said Aleksei’s sacrifice was not in vain, but it seems to me that for a large number of people this is not true.

Loshak: That everything is in vain, that evil triumphs over good, and that this has always been the case in Russia? It has always been this way. But it seems to me that everything has its time. Even if we look at the history of Russia, evil has always defeated good, but there have also been moments when good had a chance.

There have always been thaws, rollbacks toward democratization, and liberation from the shackles with which the state always entangles people in Russia. We have always had this chance; we just never took advantage of it.

With Aleksei there was this chance; he gave us this chance throughout his political life, starting in 2017, but this liberal layer of us, so to speak, simply looked at it all with the curiosity of a TV viewer, nothing more.

Then he returned. He returned [to Russia from Germany in January 2021 after being treated for poisoning], realizing that, of course, he would most likely be imprisoned. But he gave us this chance again, and it was as if it was all staged. He returned, his documentary Putin’s Palace was released, which was watched by 100 million people. Then there was a rally, and the usual 20,000 to 40,000 people came out.

We wasted the chances that Navalny gave us.

I really believe that at some point people will understand how important it is to participate in politics, how important it is to be a citizen, and not just to be a resident of this country. One of the subjects in the first part of the documentary in 2017 said to me — I won’t say his name now, because he is in Russia, but he was on the Maidan; by accident, he ended up there — “When 10,000 people come out, it’s nothing. But when 1 million people come out, you can’t do anything about it.”

This is why I endlessly respect Navalny: for the fact that he did everything he could, and more than he could, to give us these chances. And we blew them. And I hope that someday this will become obvious. You see, what is happening to Russia now cannot last forever.

RFE/RL: Why?

Loshak: Because it’s against common sense, it’s against the passage of time. This is an attempt to turn back time, to turn it around….

In general, history is cyclical. Now there is some moment of crisis in which Western civilization finds itself. We see incredible divisions within Western countries. I don’t remember this before. This is also some kind of new sign of the times. But nevertheless, Western societies have gone through many crises, and their strength is that they are democratic, and thanks to this openness they survive them, work through them, and reach a new level.

But Russia is not doing this. Russia is simply driving us into some kind of Middle Ages with its boots. The rhetoric that is heard now is about a “holy war,” about the defense of traditional values. It all comes down to homophobia really. This is the only thing they found as a scarecrow around which they built this whole structure about the “holy war” of the Russian world with Western civilization, which is satanic, because gay people can openly hold each other’s hands and recognizes their marriages. This is complete bulls**t.

For this generation, about which I filmed in 2017, there was no issue of homophobia at all. They had already grown up in this cross-border world of the Internet. They saw that this was normal. This is how all people live, and they are happy.

I subscribe to Russian-language Iranian opposition channels. You’re amazed how much the same is there. It’s just that these grandfathers look more colorful there. Ours are in secular blue jackets, and in Iran there are bearded ones in dressing gowns. But everything is the same. People want to live freely; they want to be happy. It is impossible to be happy when everything is forbidden.

It is impossible to keep these prohibitions all your life because the reverse process is taking place all over the world. People are following the path of gaining more and more freedom, because it is more comfortable to live this way, and at the same time respect the freedom of others….

But at any moment the Russian state can invade your life and tell you how you should behave, how to dress. You have nothing. You owe them everything for some reason, but they don’t owe you anything.

This is such an old patriarchal model of the world order. If you look at all this more broadly, I see it as a rebellion against patriarchy. And what is happening in Russia is the agony of the patriarchy. In Russia, the strong are always right. To the question, “What is strength?” [I answer that] in Russia there is strength in strength. Not in any truth. This is nonsense. What is the truth? The truth was on Aleksei’s side. And where is he? I’m sure [these grandfathers] are becoming decrepit. Time will simply kill them because time is not on their side. And at some point they will simply stop being strong, and then they will be finished.

Arriving at Jan Palach’s grave [in Prague], Oleg tells the story about what happened in 1969. And in 1989, the Velvet Revolution [in Czechoslovakia] began with people coming to his grave. Yes, we had to wait 20 years for this name and this feat to become an impulse and begin to work. But now, it seems to me, time flows faster. I would like to believe that we will not have to wait another 20 years.

RFE/RL: When you invited people to the premiere in Tel Aviv on Facebook, you wrote: “I don’t wish you a pleasant viewing. That would be hypocritical on my part.” As someone who has seen the film twice, I can say it is indeed very difficult to watch. What effect do you, as an auteur, hope for?

Loshak: Due to what happened during the filming — and it was not I who wrote Navalny’s death into the script — I stopped thinking at all about who I was doing it for. It’s just a film that has a lot of my personal pain in it. I did this in order to try to part with this pain. It’s like psychotherapy: You have to work through it and live it in order to move on….

Navalny was important to so many people. This is a figure on a much larger scale than perhaps even we thought. Both importance and value. Still, his presence in Russia, even in prison, in this political landscape was completely incommensurable. We just don’t even understand yet how important. And we will understand gradually more and more. This film is probably for these people.

RFE/RL: You wrote a big post on Facebook about Aleksei and said that you miss him, and that it doesn’t go away. And in the end you say that despondency is a mortal sin, that Russia is a terrible fairy tale with a bad ending. You say that faith is an irrational thing. Do you want to return to Russia?

Loshak: Of course, I want to return to Russia now…. If Putin dies, then, of course, I will return….

Listen, this is our homeland. It’s not that we’re injured. It’s normal to want to live in your homeland with your people. They turned us into some kind of national traitors, although they are the national traitors. But we ourselves even began to get used to it, feeling that we were somehow different, which means we don’t belong there, that this is not our homeland.

But, damnit, this is our homeland, our roots are there, our everything is there. Why shouldn’t we want to go back? It’s normal to want to go back and desire to live in a different country. That is, to want changes in your country, which has simply turned into a fiend of hell, which threatens the whole world with nuclear disaster and is working to split the whole world and plunge it into some kind of abyss of chaos.

What is Western civilization? If we talk about European values, this is democracy, this is human rights, this is freedom — these are normal things. This is the norm. And they declared the norm to be evil. Who are they after that? This is some kind of madness that will end either in a nuclear apocalypse or in the fact that at some point they will simply die, as generally happens in history with villains: At some point, they simply died, and the world sighed freely until a new one was born.

RFE/RL: In an interview, you said you’d like to shoot a film in [the Ukrainian city of] Odesa, which is an important place for you. Did you have in mind a film that is less heavy than the one you have made for Current Time? Something entirely different?

Loshak: I really want to. I am very tired of politics, of Putin — of this creature, this absolutely insignificant bastard, who forces us to follow him all the time. Then we all write about it, film it, and react in horror. We are forced to because we react to abuse, to constant violence against us, because this person mocks us.

I want to film about something more metaphysical. With hope, with faith, with love. There is a lot of love missing.

Source: Ksenia Sokolyanskaya, “‘We Wasted The Chances He Gave Us’: Director Andrei Loshak Talks About His New Navalny Film,” RFE/RL, 4 June 2024. Although this isn’t a perfect translation, I refrained from editing it—except for the title of Loshak’s new film, which was translated flagrantly wrongly in the original text. ||| TRR

Tell Gordeeva: “The Yashins: ‘His Sentence Will End When the Regime Ends'” (in Russian; no subtitles)

In February 2022, opposition politician Ilya Yashin openly spoke out against the war while declaring that he would never leave Russia. In December, he was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on charges of “discrediting” the army. Yashin has been held in a punishment cell over a month (since 17 May 2024), a visit from his parents was canceled, and nothing is known about the state of his health. We talked to Yashin’s parents about their son, whom they are proud of.

Contents: 00:00 Why do the Yashins not keep their son’s letters at home? 2:45 “A person is jailed for 15 days and until the last minute he doesn’t know whether he’ll be released or not” 7:15 “I’ll be the first to tell you’re wrong” 10:16 “Emigrating means admitting that we lost”11:47 “Gorinov doesn’t have it better because Ilya’s in prison” 13:43 “Who will know whether you gave your consent or not?” 17:36 “I guess I’ll have to be in prison for a while. What’s a little bit?” 21:21 How the clerk at the Tushino district court fell in love with Yashin and quit her job 22:36 Does Ilya Yashin have a fiancee? 25:20 How Yashin’s ex-girlfriends attend his court hearings 27:29 “We don’t communicate with Ksenia Sobchak” 31:27 Why didn’t Yashin become an actor? 33:53 “We accidentally met Lyudmila Navalnaya at the trial” 35:31 How Lyudmila Navalnaya taught Tatyana Yashina to put together prison care packages 36:48 Why do shampoo and toothpaste have to be poured into a plastic bag? 39:08 “His sentence will end when the regime ends” 40:46 “Now nothing good will ever happen” — on Navalny’s death 42:52 “Both my friends are dead” — Yashin’s letter after Navalny’s murder 44:55 “There are people who have it worse than we do” 48:53 Yashin’s health problems 52:49 How did Yashin’s parents meet? 54:58 Who taught Ilya to box and why 56:46 “I did everything to make sure Ilya was a momma’s boy” — Valery Yashin on parenting 1:00:28 “We Spartak fans are indomitable!” 1:02:16 Yashin asked for a wash basin in prison 1:06:01 “Ilya lived in a barracks in the tenth grade” 1:11:09 “He’s serving the longest sentence in the penal colony in Smolensk” 1:13:47 How his son has changed in prison, according to his father 1:14:36 …and according to his mother 1:19:19 “It’s him doing, but I’m the one who’s ashamed” — how Yasha’s mom taught her son to be a good deputy 1:25:00 “He went to his first protest rally in the eleventh grade after school”1:28:08 “Yabloko decided to do a deal with the Kremlin”1:31:24 How did Yashin and Nemtsov become friends? 1:33:48 “Even from prison, Ilya manages to send me flowers for my birthday” 1:34:46 “Mom, I’m in a paddy wagon but I’m okay” 1:36:57 The scariest day in Tatyana Yashina’s life 1:42:52 “I don’t consider Putin my enemy” 1:47:21 “Our son really did something wrong, but your son is paying for everyone” — what relatives of other prisoners say to Yashins 1:58:20 “Absolute strangers made care packages for him” — about the prisoner transport to Izhevsk 2:01:05 How did Yashin end up in the Okrestina detention center in Belarus in 2020? 2:03:48 “If you haven’t raised a person who is smarter than you, you’ve wasted your life” 2:05:34 “This is a marathon, and I have no doubt you’ll make it to the finish line” — a three-day visit with Ilya 2:07:05 “I missed your omelettes the most” 2:08:03 Why does Ilya Yashin’s mom not want him to become president? 2:10:13 “Guys, don’t get upset!”

Source: Tell Gordeeva (YouTube), 17 June 2024. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin is currently serving an eight-and-a-half year sentence in prison for spreading “disinformation” about the Russian army after speaking out against the mass murder of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine. Journalist Katerina Gordeeva sat down with his parents, Tatyana and Valery, who still live in Russia, to learn how they’re coping with his incarceration, how they support their son in prison, and what hopes they have for the future. Meduza shares key points from the interview.

On not persuading him to leave Russia

We never pressured him on any issue — neither small ones nor something like this. It’s his life, and he has to make these decisions; we can only help. I always told him, “Ilya, no matter what happens in life, know that you have a strong support system. That doesn’t mean you’ll always be right. And if I think you’re wrong, I’ll be the first to tell you.” The decision [not to leave Russia] came in 2012, after the Bolotnaya Square case. Leaving would mean giving up, admitting that everything was in vain.

He didn’t leave then. And then Boris Nemtsov was killed, and he said, “Now, even more so, I can’t leave. Leaving would mean admitting that we lost. As long as I’m alive, I don’t believe that I’ve lost.” We didn’t try to talk him out of it because I understood how he felt, and I can’t imagine him being abroad now. I think it would have been such an ordeal that what he’s going through now is still much easier.

On an exchange

He himself doesn’t want an exchange. His main argument is: “Even if there are any exchanges, I’m far from being the first in line, and probably I’m the last, because there are people for whom it’s a matter of life and death. Secondly, I’m not ready to be exchanged for a hired killer who will then be free. Thirdly, agreeing to an exchange means leaving the country. I could have left the country right away.” I told him, “Ilya, it’s clear which way everything is going. Maybe if the opportunity arises, you shouldn’t be stubborn and should agree? After all, who will know whether you gave consent [for the exchange] or not?” He said: “I will know. That’s enough.”

On why they themselves stay in Russia

Because our son is here. We use any possible fleeting opportunity to see [him]. If there’s an appeal hearing, and he’ll be there via teleconference, maybe he’ll see us, and we’ll wave to him. And then he’ll see and make a heart. Maybe we’ll be given five minutes to exchange a few words. Letters are one thing, but it’s another when you can see him and understand by his expression, [by the way] he shuffles papers, what state he’s in, what his mood is. That’s why we attend all the court sessions.

On their son’s sentence

I was shocked when the prosecutor requested nine years for Ilya. I thought I’d misunderstood, I had misheard, because it couldn’t be true. Then, after we’d left the courtroom but before the sentence was pronounced, there was a moment when it overwhelmed me a little. But I quickly pulled myself together, and by the time of the sentencing, we took it quite calmly, philosophically: when the regime ends, the term will end. He chose this path, and we’re walking it with him. We are beside him, we are helping, and what will be, will be.

On family life

We never had any secrets. In our family, we made all our decisions collectively, so to speak. Any decisions — important or unimportant — were discussed by the whole family, and we included Ilya in this from a very young age.

On how Ilya has changed in prison

Tatyana: He’s become kinder and less rigid, paradoxical as it may sound. When he was young, he could break off relationships abruptly. Now, he’s more understanding, he doesn’t judge. Some things make him smile wryly — but without judgment.

Valery: He used to have moments where he was very categorical in his judgments. He’d listen, understand, agree, but still stick to his opinion. Now, he’s grown more tolerant. He’s developed [an open-mindedness]; he’s matured and become more resilient.

On people’s support

We were in Smolensk; the court was hearing an appeal on an administrative case for failing to fulfill the so-called duties of a “foreign agent.” And the [train] arrives just on the dot, so we had to take a taxi and rush into the building. When we got there, a journalist who’d arrived earlier called us and said, “They changed the courtroom because there are a lot of people.” And when we walked in, we saw a full hall — Smolensk residents of all ages. […]

And then these people came up to us — there were these guys, a very young man, a student, young women, and a local lawyer. They said, “Come with us, we’ll show you where you can sit, have coffee, eat, and warm up.” It was so touching. Then a charming woman, about our age, maybe a bit younger, came up to us. She said, “I live nearby too, you can always rely on me.” I’ve met a lot of people who say things like, “Hold on, everything will be fine, this will all end.” But no one has ever called my son a traitor or whispered it behind my back.

On the future

During our last visit, which lasted three days and was the first in two years, we could hug and talk about anything. We talked a lot. He said: “What can you do? It’s a marathon.” I told him, “Ilya, I might not make it to the end.” He said: “You’ll make it. I have no doubt.”

Source: “‘He chose this path, and we’re walking it with him’: The parents of imprisoned Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin on coping with their son’s incarceration,” Meduza, 19 June 2024

Old Deaf Joke

A Russian and a Cuban and an American were on a train
It quickly came to pass that the Russian took out a bottle of vodka and after a few swigs he tossed it out the window
The other two men exclaimed why throw still have vodka good waste why
The Russian opened his fur coat and showed them rows and rows of bottles and he said there Russia vodka plenty
The two men said oh and settled back in their seats
After a while the Cuban took out a cigar and after a few puffs he tossed it out the window
The other two men exclaimed why throw still have left good cigar waste why
The Cuban opened his suit and showed them rows and rows of cigars and he said there Cuba cigars plenty
The two men said oh and settled back in their seats
After a while a young man came whistling into the car from the next one
The American grabbed him by the collar and belt and tossed him out the window
The other two men exclaimed why throw still young good man waste why
The American made an expansive sweep with his hands and said here America hearing people plenty
The two other men said oh and settled back in their seats

Source: John Lee Clark, How to Communicate (W.W. Norton, 2022), which has been nominated for the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry and won the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Mr. Clark (born 1978) is an American deafblind poet, writer, and activist from Minnesota.

Apart from a detailed peace plan to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has a less conventional idea for ending geopolitical crises like these: let dogs run the world.

In the rare downtime he gets as a wartime leader, Zelenskiy, speaking to Reuters by video link on Wednesday, suggested man’s best friend might fare better when it comes to getting along on the global stage.

“Sometimes I’m … looking at all these wars or looking at all the crisis, Middle East crisis. It’s not only Ukraine, everywhere in Africa and the Middle East.

“Sometimes I’m looking at this and think that the best way (is) if this planet will be the planet of dogs,” he said at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York, responding to a question about what still makes him laugh.

The Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, now in its 21st month, has upended Europe’s security architecture and sent ripple effects through Africa and Asia, which have seen food shortages thanks to Russia’s de facto blockade of the Black Sea.

Kyiv’s Western partners have provided crucial financial and military support, but are now also dealing with the conflict in Gaza.

Along the front line, Ukrainian forces have been fighting for months to reclaim Russian-occupied territory in a counteroffensive but have made only incremental gains.

Zelenskiy, who is promoting a 10-point peace proposal, said his dogs provide much-needed relief when he spends time with his wife and children, and are “always funny”.

“Sometimes I don’t understand people, really,” Zelenskiy added with a smile.

To view the live broadcast of the World Stage go to the Reuters NEXT news page: https://www.reuters.com/world/reuters-next/

Source: “Zelenskiy hopes for “planet of dogs” to solve world’s crises,” Reuters, 8 November 2023

Today we ask you to support one specific and very important project — Navalny’s Propaganda Machine. It functions very simply: volunteers telephone people in Russia and talk with them, persuading them to turn from Putin supporters into doubters, and from doubters into opponents of Putin and the war.

The more people in Russia start asking questions and stop tacitly supporting everything that the Putin regime is doing, the better for our country. The volunteers of Navalny’s Propaganda Machine are working on this right now.

You can become a volunteer by sending an email to antiwar@navalny.com or supporting the project with a donation. A one-minute call costs two cents. That is, your $10 will turn into 500 minutes of conversation. And $20 is a thousand minutes of conversation with actual residents of Russia, who, thanks to you, can learn the truth and get motivated to fight. Make your contribution at https://acf.international.

Thank you for being on our side!
The Navalny Team

“Navalny has been in prison for 1,025 days”

Source: email newsletter from the Navalny Team (Anti-Corruption Foundation), 9 November 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

The TED Talk

Dasha Navalnaya is the daughter of Alexey Navalny, the politician and leader of the Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin. Sharing the story of her father’s poisoning, persecution and current imprisonment, she details what it was like growing up under the watchful eye of government surveillance as her father led a decade-long investigation into the corruption of Putin’s regime — and shows why paying attention to what happens in Russia matters to everyone, everywhere.

Source: TED (YouTube), 13 October 2023

There’s been some discussion lately on what proportion of russians actually believe russian propaganda. The presumption is that a low number gives hope for the end of the regime. There’s a lot of problems with that logic. Firstly, domestic russian propaganda is very often very open about the crimes russia is committing as an imperial aggressor. So it’s nonsensical to talk only about whether russians recognise lies. What matters is the extent to which they share this imperialist mindset and chauvinistic attitudes. It doesn’t matter whether you can recognise lies if you still think of Ukrainians as your little brother speaking a funny dialect of russian who needs to be pulled back into line. The key question is what proportion understand Ukraine is an independent nation – all the way to Crimea – and has a right to exist and do sovereign things like choose its own security alliances. It’s definitely not 85%. Not even close. When it comes to russia’s lies – like the lie it’s fighting nazis – I’d estimate the proportion of russians who understand this to be a lie at roughly 100%. On some level, to some extent, literally everyone knows this is a lie. Consider this. Have you ever heard anyone ever express any confusion as to why wagner, founded by a neo-nazi, had a leading role in ‘denazification’. It was never hidden. And it does not make any sense if you believe the lie. But no one really believes russia is fighting nazis. This would be a very, very long thread if I went through all the examples of where no one ever expresses confusion when russia openly does and says things that are completely contradictory to much of its own propaganda. No one is confused because everyone knows russia lies. But that does not translate to not supporting the regime. Lying is an endemic feature of russian society. People accept lying as easily as they lie themselves because, in this case, they know the lies are necessary to advance the imperial agenda. When Navalny’s people speak to Western audiences, they play on the assumption that western values are universal in russia and that russians are yearning for a liberal democracy yet only being held back by lies told to them. This is nonsense. Think of russia like a sports team. When diehard fans see their players fake an injury to get a free kick, the fans will shout outrage to the referee in favour of their team’s free kick with no care whether that is fair or not. Would you wade into that crowd of diehard fans to tell them “actually your side cheated” and think this would end their support for their favourite team? On some level, those fans know their side cheated, but what matters is that they just don’t care about the truth despite their feigned indignation. Similarly, convincing russians their country is an imperial aggressor committing genocide does not mean they’ll suddenly want to become a rules-based democracy that stays within its borders. They already know what they are. They support it. Note that russia’s key lies, like the denazification narrative, are used far more prominently towards international audiences in just the same way as fans shouting at a referee. In both cases, the lies are part of the game to them. But this is why international attitudes to Navalny are more positive the further away from russia you get. From afar, it’s easy to convince yourself that exposing russia’s lies will lead to the end of the regime and the start of some happy liberal era led by whoever rules next, even though so much of the russian opposition reflects these same imperial attitudes. What really matters is the end of the russian imperial mindset and its ability to conduct aggression with impunity. For that, the world must support a victory to Ukraine and a Special Tribunal for russia. Give us a TED Talk about that. More importantly, do it.

Source: Bad Baltic Takes (Twitter), 20 October 2023

Blessed Are the (Un)Happy

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A post shared by Maria Pevchikh (@maria_pevchikh)

I was at an interview on TV Rain last week. We were supposedly going to discuss the Oscars, but suddenly we touched on what is an important topic, I think — how to behave appropriately during the war and amid everything else that is happening now.

I often read comments about how I smile all the time, but there is a war going on. About how I joke on the air, but now is not the time for jokes — Navalny is in prison. Why did I post this or that photo? It’s too glamorous and frivolous. Now is not the time for such things.

The complaints are understandable, but I totally reject the point they’re trying to make. It seems to me that the most destructive, the most incorrect thing we can do now is to don dark clothes, wring our hands and publicly suffer in front of our audience. By no means am I saying that there is no point in suffering in this situation. There is. The war is the most terrible event that has ever happened to us. It is absolutely incomprehensible how to go on living when your country has attacked and is destroying innocent people and destroying their lives forever as the scumbags on Russian national TV hoot and holler for joy. Everyone who is reading this post has experienced all this, I am sure, and of course you have been suffering. And those whom Putin came up with the idea of bombing with missiles and killing have been suffering even more.

Only one thing remains to us: to take all these terrible emotions, all these experiences, and turn them into concrete actions. Not cry on camera, not get hysterical, but to try and stop this horror as soon as possible. Today is better than tomorrow. Tomorrow is better than the day after tomorrow, etc. Each of us knows best of all what we ourselves are capable of doing and how to do it. The main thing is not to give in to despair. Despondency, despair and indifference are exactly what Putin wants from us. Don’t give him that.

I’ve attached a bit of the interview. And a frivolous photo to boot.

Source: Maria Pevchikh, Instagram, 31 January 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

[…]

And where you find a hero, you always find tragedy. The hero is always a vehicle for suffering, pain, rupture and tragedy. There are no happy heroes: all heroes are necessarily unhappy. The hero equals misfortune.

Why? Because being both eternal and temporary, dispassionate and suffering, heavenly and earthly is the most unbearable experience for any being. It is a condition that you wouldn’t wish on your enemy.

Ascetics, martyrs, and saints took the place of heroes in Christianity. There are likewise no happy monks or happy saints. All of them are profoundly unhappy as individuals. But according to another heavenly account, they are blessed. Just as those who weep, those who are exiled, those who suffer slander, and those who hunger and thirst are blessed in the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the unhappy.

A person is made a hero made by an idea aimed skyward that crashes to the ground. A person is made a hero by suffering and misfortune, which tear him apart, which torment, torture, and harden him, and it has always been thus. This can happen during war or an agonizing death, but it can also happen without war, and without death.

The hero looks for his own war, and if he does not find it, he goes into a monk’s cell, to live as a hermit, and fights there with the real enemy. Because true warfare is spiritual warfare. Arthur Rimbaud wrote about this in Illuminations: “Spiritual combat is as brutal as battle between men.” (Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes.) He knew what he was talking about.

One hero, as the Neoplatonist Proclus says, is equal to a hundred or even thousands of ordinary souls. He is greater than a human soul because he makes every soul live vertically. This is the heroic dimension to the origins of the theater and, in fact, the ethics of our faith. It is the most important thing, which we should not lose, which we should cherish in others and nurture in ourselves.

Our job is to become deeply, fundamentally and irreversibly unhappy, no matter how scary that sounds. It is the only way we can find salvation.

Source: Alexander Dugin, “The Hero: The Metaphysics of Unhappiness,” Katehon, 3 February 2023. Translated by An Unhappy Translator. Thanks to Pavel Pryanikov for the heads-up

Maria Pevchikh: “In any puzzling situation this is what I choose and suggest that everyone else choose.” Source: Instagram

Now every employee of the Russian embassy in Germany has to think about Navalny on their way to work because they will see a replica of the solitary confinement cell where Alexei has been confined for the eleventh time.

Not only embassy employees see this solitary confinement cell. It is seen by Berlin residents, tourists and journalists. It is seen by readers of the world’s major media outlets. Millions of people see it — and thus learn about the torture chamber in which Navalny is being held. Some will tell their friends about the project, others will join the Free Navalny campaign, while still others will put pressure on local politicians contemplating compromise with Putin. Circles radiate all over the world from this one site.

It is in your power to make these circles spread even wider. Help us achieve freedom for Navalny and for the whole of Russia — support our campaign at acf.international/#donate.

Free Navalny!

Thank you for being on our side!

The Navalny Team

“Navalny has now been in prison for 745 days.”

Source: FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) email newsletter, 2 February 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

Pevchikh: What Corruption Has Done to Russia / vDud
6,370,703 views • Feb 5, 2023
(In Russian, without subtitles in English — for the time being, I imagine)

Maria Pevchikh is an investigator and associate of Alexei Navalny.

0:00 Let’s go! 0:37 Why we met in London 5:13 How the film Navalny is saving Navalny’s life 9:36 Dud in the Internet’s homeland 13:03 How to turn a photo of a hallway into an investigation 16:17 What is going on with Navalny now? 20:26 The second largest house in the UK is owned by a Russian oligarch 25:30 But why can’t a Russian oligarch buy a house in London? 29:48 The UK is fighting Putin but harboring thieves: is that normal? 37:22 Who are you and where are you from? 42:31 Where did you get the money to study in London? 44:02 What’s wrong with Moscow State University’s sociology faculty 47:19 What did your father do for a living? 48:41 A crash course about British universities (eight lectures a week) 53:16 Alexander Dugin was Maria’s thesis advisor: how did that come about? 1:00:03 Does Putin listen to Dugin? 1:03:05 What Medvedev was like thirteen years ago 1:05:20 “My cat was hit by a car, please sort it out”: what British MPs do 1:08:22 Gadaffi’s son was at university with you 1:14:35 Where did you work before becoming an investigator? 1:16:32 Do you have a flat in London? 1:17:47 How did you meet Navalny? 1:22:50 Why didn’t you mention Skabeyeva and Popov’s mortgage? 1:27:28 How are drones able to fly over Putin’s and Medvedev’s residences? (A question from Nikolai Solodnikov) 1:33:14 Where did you get the conductor Gergiev’s bank statements? 1:36:32 Is it okay to pay a bribe to avoid mobilization? 1:40:54 What is your beef with Fridman? 1:48:13 Is Galitsky an accomplice of the regime? 1:57:18 Can we detest someone for being afraid? 1:58:26 Why does Popular Politics have such sensational headlines? 2:04:08 Is it okay to call a program guest a “fat beast”? 2:08:21 The rude tweet about Durov 2:10:21 Does radicalism prevent the Anti-Corruption Foundation from becoming popular? 2:16:09 Roman Abramovich is a master of reinventing himself 2:24:13 How soft power works 2:29:52 If Abramovich had ended the war would you have forgiven him? 2:31:38 The “List of the 6,000” 2:33:59 Why have you called for sanctions against Sobchak? 2:35:35 Why have you called for sanctions against Venediktov? 2:44:00 What did Oleg Kashin do wrong? 2:46:34 Why were the designers of a facial recognition system removed from the “List of the 6,000”? 2:51:01 Is your father an accomplice of the regime? 2:55:49 How do you do your work without Navalny? 2:57:18 Why were your supporters’ data hacked? 3:05:38 “Carry out a mission in the fight against Putin and get points”: what is that about?! 3:07:53 How do people who work for the regime change sides? 3:15:51 Do you see yourself as a politician? 3:19:44 Do you have a plan for Russia’s future? 3:25:09 Won’t the dictatorship in Russia survive without Putin? 3:30:20 Do you have a UK passport? 3:35:51 What exactly have you done over the past year to overthrow Putin? 3:41:21 “Compromisers” 3:52:07 Russia without Putin 3:56:58 What does it mean to be strong?

Source: vDud (YouTube). Annotation translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Tiina Pasanen for bringing this remarkable video to my attention and persuading me to watch it despite my initial misgivings. When I assembled the first part of this mash-up, a few days ago, I had no idea that Pevchikh and Dugin were so closely connected in real life. For another perspective on the sociology faculty at Moscow State University during roughly the same period as Pevchikh describes, see Oleg Zhuravlyov and Danail Kondov, “Towards a History of the Conflict in the Moscow State University Sociology Department” (2008). ||| TRR

720 People Can’t Be Wrong

*“Contacted us: 720 people. Amount paid out: 10,295,596 rubles. Total amount of fines: 13,781,500 rubles. Fines already paid: 529. We need to urgently raise: 852,000 rubles.”*

Some European politicians think that Russians do not want to fight Putin and tacitly support the war. But we know quite well that this is not the case because we continue to help pay the fines of those who have openly opposed the authorities. Since the beginning of the war, 720 people, facing 13,781,500 rubles [approx. 230 thousand USD) in fines, have contacted us. Thanks to your support, we have already paid most of this amount, namely 10,295,595 rubles.

The fines have due dates, and right now we urgently need to disburse another 852,000 rubles [approx. 14 thousand USD) so that the unjustly convicted do not have problems. These people opposed Putin and his war at the most dangerous time. We have no right to leave them to face the system alone. Let’s help our brave fellow citizens!

Help us raise these 852 thousand rubles — it will be a great way to support the real Russia, the Russia opposed to Putin, war, and injustice: acf.international/#donate.

Thank you for supporting us!

Team Navalny

Source: Anti-Corruption Foundation, email newsletter, 18 August 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader, who just donated twenty dollars to the Anti-Corruption Foundation. According to Wikipedia (citing Rosstat, the Russian Federal Statistics Service) the Russian Federation had a population of 145.5 million people as of 1 January 2022 (including the approximately 2.4 million people living in the illegally “annexed” Crimean Peninsula). According to OVD Info, the police have made 16,437 detentions (which may not necessarily have led to fines, jail terms, criminal charges or any other consequences for the people detained) for anti-war protests since 24 February 2022. In fact, this number has barely changed since mid-March of this year. As of 8 July 2022, AP reported, “Net Freedoms had counted 68 criminal cases involving false information charges and at least 2,000 misdemeanor cases for the alleged disparagement of the Russian military.”

Today’s Mail Bag (How Russia Was Betrayed)

Nikolai Starikov
How Russia Was Betrayed

Who is the culprit of Russia’s troubles in the last three hundred years? Why do we show benevolence and generosity to those who betray us? Leading historian and opinion journalist Nikolai Starikov explores the history of Russia’s relations with the leading countries of the world and answers these questions. This book is a collection of shocking facts about the treachery and cynicism of most countries in Europe and the United States, which will not leave even those who are remote from history and politics unmoved.

__________

A leading public historian of Russia, writer, economist and politician explores the history of Russia’s relations with the leading countries of the world.

This wonderful book gives a comprehensive answer to the question: why today, as a hundred years ago, as two hundred years ago, does Russia have only two allies, its army and navy?

Are we the problem? Is it our naivety? Our almost complete lack of rancor? Our generosity and benevolence?

Yes, partly.

But mostly the problem is the guile and cynicism of most countries in Europe and the United States.

Starikov’s book calmly, step by step, argument by argument, reveals the damning truth about Russia’s relations with so-called allies, partners and brothers.

The reader will discover a lot of unusual, shocking facts in this book. Consequently, it will open everyone’s eyes and reveal the main secret of the ages: who is the culprit of our troubles over the past three hundred years?

Source: Litres email newsletter, 7 October 2021 + website

Were you surprised when you found out about all the offshore companies that Ernst, Chemezov and others own? We weren’t particularly surprised. It has long been clear why Putin and his friends need power: to steal. They don’t do anything useful, but all of them are billionaires. Their children are billionaires, and even their mistresses are billionaires. They made themselves rich at the expense of the federal budget.

The owners of offshore companies are very unhappy when they are not allowed to steal quietly, when they are prevented from disposing of the country as if it were their property. Therefore, they brand all dissatisfied people as “foreign agents” and “extremists” and declare them enemies of Russia.

But they are not Russia. We are Russia. While they are crooks and enemies of our country.

Support Team Navalny, and we promise to spend every ruble to fight Putin and his offshore friends. As always.

Attention! Do not use PayPal if you have a Russian account. We advise everyone who lives in Russia to donate in cryptocurrency: it is the safest way right now. And we also advise you to install a VPN if you cannot open our links: then no blocking will be able to prevent you from opening them.

Thank you for being on our side!
Team Navalny

“Navalny has been in prison for 261 days.”

Source: Anti-Corruption Foundation/Team Navalny email newsletter, 7 October 2021

Central image courtesy of Ozon.ru email newsletter. Translated by the Russian Reader, who received these images and texts via email this morning.

Navalny’s Musicians

13 musicians not allowed to perform at City Day concert in Moscow due to support for Navalny
The Village
Tasya Elfimova
September 11, 2021

The Federal Protective Service (FSO) did not allow several musicians to perform at a concert in honor of City Day in Moscow due to their alleged support of Alexei Navalny.

Sergei Sobyanin and Vladimir Putin were planning to attend the celebration, so the FSO vetted the lists of performers in advance. The FSO did not admit thirteen people to the performance without explaining the reasons. Dmitry Klyuyev, an employee of the State Academic Chapel Choir, believes that it happened because the musicians were in the leaked databases of Alexei Navalny’s projects or had taken part in protest rallies.

Four employees of the chapel choir, three people from the Svetlanov State Orchestra and six people from the team of directors were removed from the concert.

“The organizers are in shock, no one has explained anything to them,” Klyuyev said.

Source: OVD Info

Translated by the Russian Reader

Alexander Gudkov, “Aquatic Disco,” a song inspired by Alexei Navalny’s revelations that the blueprints for “Putin’s palace” contained a room labeled as such

Moscow Police Use Leaked Personal Data To Investigate Navalny Supporters
RFE/RL Russian Service
August 18, 2021

Moscow police are using leaked online personal data from projects linked to jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny to investigate people who have supported the Kremlin critic.

The OVD Info website said on August 17 that police had visited some 20 individuals who registered for online projects developed by Navalny associates or donated to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and his other projects.

According to OVD Info, police are demanding explanations from the people as to how their names were included in the leaked data related to Navalny’s online projects and why they are involved with him.

In June, a court in Moscow labeled FBK and Navalny’s other projects and groups extremist and banned them. Under Russian law, cooperation with such groups is considered illegal and may lead to criminal prosecution.

Police have not said how they obtained the people’s personal data from Navalny’s websites.

One person, who was not identified, told OVD Info that police asked him to file a legal complaint against Navalny to accuse him of sharing personal data.

Journalist and municipal lawmaker Ilya Azar, whose personal data was among those leaked, wrote on Telegram late on August 17 that police had tried to visit him as well, but he was not at home.

“They talked to [my] neighbors about some personal data leaked on the Internet,” Azar wrote.

One such leak took place in April, when the online campaign called “Freedom to Navalny” was reportedly compromised.

Navalny associates said at the time that a former FBK worker had “stolen” all the personal data of those who registered at the pro-Navalny site.

After that leak, the Moscow [subway] fired dozens of workers whose personal data turned up among the names of Navalny supporters.

Ivan Pavlov: Thanks!

Russian human rights lawyer outside the Basmanny District Court in Moscow yesterday. Photo courtesy of his Telegram channel

Dear friends, colleagues, and allies!

This is Ivan Pavlov.

Yesterday was not an easy day for me, my family and the team. At 6 a.m., my friend Igor Dorfman had his door broken down. His apartment was searched for eight hours, and he was interrogated by the FSB. The Team 29 office was searched until nightfall.

But despite the fact that I have been restricted in my access to all means of communication, I am still with you.

My Facebook page has been temporarily blocked for security reasons. My Telegram channel will be run by my team. And this message has been written by Yevgeny Smirnov, who spent the whole day alongside me.

The team’s media resources will continue to function, publishing the latest news and features, because openness to the press and freedom of information have always been a priority for us. This, by the way, has always irritated our opponents a great deal.

The attack on me and my team is, of course, revenge for our work, for our principled stance, for our involvement in high-profile criminal cases run by the Russian FSB’s investigative department. And, of course, revenge for defending the Anti-Corruption Foundation, founded by Alexei Navalny, in court. But we are not going to stop. We will keep on working and fighting. Let’s not fall to the ground before shots are fired.

Especially since my team and I felt extraordinarily strong support from journalists, human rights defenders and the public on this day. And, most importantly, from our colleagues in the legal community, who came to the rescue without unnecessary formalities.

I am grateful for this difficult day because I learned how many people support me and Team 29. This inspires an optimism that cannot be diminished by interrogations, searches and court hearings.

Thanks!
Ivan Pavlov
(via Yevgeny Smirnov)

Source: weekly Team 29 emailing. Translated by the Russian Reader

____________________

Russia targets lawyer over media comments on treason case
Daria Litvinova
Associated Press
April 30, 2021

Russian authorities have launched a criminal probe against a lawyer representing a former Russian journalist accused of treason and the team of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, accusing him of disclosing information related to a police investigation.

St. Petersburg-based lawyer Ivan Pavlov told reporters Friday he was formally charged with the criminal offense, punishable by a fine, community service or detention of up to three months, after his Moscow hotel room was raided on Friday morning and he was summoned to Russia’s Investigative Committee for interrogation.

Pavlov appeared in court later Friday and was ordered not to contact witnesses in the case or to use the Internet or a cellphone.

Pavlov’s colleague, Yevgeny Smirnov, had reported that the lawyer was detained. But Pavlov’s spokesperson, Yelizaveta Alexandrova-Zorina, later clarified to the Associated Press that Pavlov formally wasn’t arrested even though he was de-facto detained in his hotel room during the search.

The Team 29 association of lawyers that Pavlov heads said on social media that its office in St. Petersburg, the apartments of one of its employees and of Pavlov’s wife, and Pavlov’s house in the countryside were also raided Friday.

Opposition supporters, independent journalists and human rights activists have been facing increasing government pressure in Russia. Raids targeting Pavlov and his team elicited outrage in the Russian legal and human rights community, with prominent lawyers and legal aid groups calling on authorities to stop “using the law as a tool of pressure on lawyers.”

Pavlov said the accusations against him were connected to his defense of Ivan Safronov, a former Russian journalist charged with treason in a case that has been widely seen as retribution for his journalistic work. He said he was targeted because he shared information about the case with the media.

“The investigators maintain that I committed a crime when I told you, reporters, that your colleague is being unlawfully held in Lefortovo (pre-trial detention center) on absurd accusations,” the lawyer said.

Safronov, who wrote about military and security issues for a decade before becoming an adviser to Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin, was detained last year and accused of passing military secrets to Czech intelligence. Many journalists questioned the charges, and his former newspaper rejected them as “absurd.”

Safronov’s former colleagues alleged that authorities may have sought revenge for his reporting that exposed Russian military incidents and opaque arms trade deals. Safronov has remained in pre-trial detention since July.

Pavlov had been due to appear in a Moscow court on Friday at a hearing about extending Safronov’s pre-trial detention. The lawyer said police unlawfully seized “almost the entire dossier” of documents related to the case during the hotel raid, including those subject to attorney-client privilege.

According to his colleague Smirnov, Pavlov frequently received threats from investigators at Russia’s Security Service, or FSB, with an investigator involved in the case against the former journalist allegedly saying to the lawyer, “We’re going to do everything to put you behind bars.”

Pavlov maintained his innocence and said he considered the case against him “revenge” for his work on cases investigated by the FSB.

Smirnov told the AP that persecution of Pavlov sends a signal to all lawyers: “Don’t even think about working effectively on criminal cases. Don’t even think about speaking out. Don’t even think about defending people.”

In August, Russian media reported the FSB had lodged a complaint against Pavlov over his refusal to sign a non-disclosure statement in Safronov’s case. Pavlov said he had signed a statement not to disclose state secrets in connection with the case, but no one had asked him to sign a broader non-disclosure statement.

The case against Pavlov was opened shortly after he started representing the [Anti-Corruption Foundation], founded by President Vladimir Putin’s longtime foe, opposition leader Navalny.

This month, the Moscow prosecutor’s office petitioned the Moscow City Court to outlaw Navalny’s foundation and his network of regional offices as extremist groups. The case, expected to be heard May 17, is part of a sweeping crackdown on Navalny, his allies and his political infrastructure.

On Friday, the Rosfinmonitoring agency, which analyzes financial transactions to combat money laundering and terrorism financing, added “Public Movement of Navalny’s Headquarters” to its list of organizations involved in extremist activities or terrorism.

However, Navalny’s top strategist Leonid Volkov said no such organization exists. Rosfinmonitoring can freeze access to bank accounts and it is not clear how Friday’s move would affect Navalny’s foundation or other operations.

Navalny is currently serving time in a penal colony outside Moscow. He was arrested in January upon his return from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from a Soviet nerve agent poisoning he blames on the Kremlin. Russian officials have rejected the accusations. European labs have confirmed he was poisoned.