Man repeatedly detained at protest rallies in Perm deported from U.S. to Russia
Today, 25 July, Perm activist Leonid Melekhin, who had been wanted by law enforcement authorities for several years and is on the Russian federal list of “terrorists and extremists,” was remanded to custody in a pretrial detention center, Properm.ru’s correspondent has learned. Melekhin had attempted to emigrate to the U.S. via Mexico, a process about which his friends had written extensively on social media.
Melekhin tried to cross the border between Mexico and America in August last year and spent several months in detenshen (immigration prison in the U.S.), but lost his legal bid to remain in America. This entire time he was wanted by the Russian authorities for his cooperation with the Navalny Headquarters (an organization deemed “extremist” that has been banned in Russia).
According to our correspondent, Melekhin was turned over to the Russian authorities [sic!] before being deported to Russia and detained on suspicion of “condoning terrorism.”
As their source at Perm’s Lenin District Court confirmed to our correspondent, Judge Oksana Korepanova today granted the motion filed by an FSB investigator and remanded Melekhin to a pretrial detention center until 25 September.
Before leaving Russia in late 2023, Melekhin was repeatedly detained by the police for his involvement in unauthorized protests.
Convicted Russian anti-war activist Andrei Trofimov. Photo: Mr. Trofimov’s Vkontakte page, via Mediazona
In 2023, Andrey Trofimov, an anti-war activist from Tver, was sentenced to ten years in a maximum security penal colony on several charges [to wit, disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army, calling for “extremism,” and attempting to join the Free Russia Legion]. In his closing statement at trial, he called Vladimir Putin a “dickhead” [khuilo] and “heartily endorsed” Ukraine’s attacks on the Crimean Bridge and the Kremlin. This statement was the grounds for the second criminal case against Trofimov, this time on charges of “condoning terrorism” and “defaming the army.”
Today [6 May 2025], Judge Vadim Krasnov of the Second Western District Military Court lengthened Trofimov’s sentence to thirteen years. Prosecutor Andrei Lopata had petitioned the judge to impose a longer sentence of fifteen years.
Before the verdict in his first trial was read out, Trofimov had petitioned the court to impose the maximum penalty. Now he has suggested that he be charged with the more serious offense of high treason, claiming that he has been involved in the information war on the Ukrainian side.
Below, Mediazona has published a slightly abridged version of Trofimov’s statement during oral arguments at the [second] trial.
* * * * *
Your honor, the factual circumstances of my actions, which the investigation has categorized as crimes, are correctly stated in the indictment and have been fully investigated during the court hearing.
In my statement I would like to dwell on the reasons for these actions, on my goals, to review in detail, charge by charge, my response to the allegations—that is, to explain my motives for not pleading guilty. And, in my conclusion, I would like to petition the court as to what to do with me next.
I was living quietly at the dacha with my cats and was a bother to no one. My life changed drastically on 24 February 2022. The reason for both the first criminal case and the current criminal case [against me] was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I will further explain why I regarded this event in this way.
I am in prison for what I have said, after all. I took no action in either the first case or the second. But this has been my way of being involved in the events, because it was physically impossible for me to leave the country, and I had no desire to stay silent in this situation. I mean, it is my life.
Why have I done this? I must respond to your remarks yesterday to the effect that my statements, including in court, could harm my own interests. Your honor, I have no interest in a shorter sentence. I am already imprisoned.
What is the purpose of what I am doing? Writ large, it is a matter of self-preservation. It is just that I understand the instinct of self-preservation not as the preservation of the body per se, of its physical health, because I am not my body alone. I want to preserve my conscience in this difficult situation, my ability to tell black from white, and lies from truth, and, quite importantly, my ability to say out loud what I believe to be true.
This thing of mine did not start in 2022. I have always tried to live this way. It is just that my desire to preserve this ability in such situations—meaning, the ability to tell the truth, to maintain my conscience— is what causes such actions.
What actions have we observed? We have witnessed concrete evidence of crimes with which I have not been charged, evidence of the violation of Article 278 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code—that is, the forcible seizure or the forcible retention of power. I am referring to Vladimir Putin, who has held the highest official post in the Russian Federation for exactly a quarter of a century. During this entire time, the Constitution of the Russian Federation has contained the principle of succession of power, set out in the guise of the two-term rule [for Russian presidents]. We have witnessed a direct violation of this rule—that is, the forcible retention of power.
In what has occurred since 24 February, we see concrete evidence of a violation of Criminal Code Article 353—that is, the planning, preparation, unleashing, and waging of a war of aggression.
What have I done in this situation? Publicly, in the mode of a solo picket (just a protracteed one), I have demonstrated the Russian state’s insanity. Look, the prosecution is asking for fifteen years in total—the sentence given for murder, but even for murder, sentences are often shorter. And yet my deeds harmed no one nor caused any damage.
I am not just talking about the period covered by these criminal cases. I have never laid a finger on anyone, never stolen a penny, in my entire life. Nevertheless, [the prosecutor wants to send me down for] fifteen years. I believe that this is a demonstration of the state’s insanity. The state happily displays this quality using me as an example.
What have I done in response? I have shown fortitude. This is vital, because I hope that what I have been doing is seen by Ukrainians. Look at this: they arrested him. He was convicted and given a dozen years of maximum security. Judge the effect in terms of the second case. Did you do a good job of convincing me [of the error of my ways]? That is, have I stopped doing what I was doing? Has my voice become less audible? No, it has not.
We have witnessed the same thing on the military front. For four years running, the Russian state has been spilling blood in a neighboring country. Ukraine has not surrendered and will not surrender.
Among the things that I have not exactly been charged with, but which have been repeated in the indictments and in the evidence presented at trial is my insulting Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin by using the foul word “dickhead.” What have I done? It is called desacralization.
Because the sacredness of supreme power is one of the foundations of the Golden Horde method of governance. When I publicly, repeatedly, and daily, at the first trial, at the second trial, in the pretrial detention center, perform this trick, I am desacralizing Vladimir Putin. This is important, because this regime will end all the same, and I very much want to hasten its end. I hate this man. And what the prosecution says about the “motive of political hatred” is the sacred truth. I can confirm that.
The audience I am addressing by these actions is not in Russia, because Russian society is dead and it is useless to try and talk to it. Ukraine is my audience.
As for the charges against me, I do not plead guilty to either count of violating Criminal Code Article 205.2. At issue is one and the same text, simply posted on the internet and spoken aloud in the pretrial detention center. Because I do not consider the incidents which I chose to include in my closing statement at trial to be “terrorist acts.” I chose them on purpose.
What is at issue are the two attacks on the Crimean Bridge. The Crimean Bridge is a vital transport artery which supplies the Russian federal armed forces in Crimea. An attack on a military installation is an instance of armed hostilities. The attack was carried out by the armed forces of Ukraine.
Why was it categorized as a “terrorist attack”? I know perfectly well why. This was done in order, first, to use it in Russian propaganda to dehumanize the enemy. In other words, the Russian Federation is at war not with the armed forces of Ukraine, which are stipulated under Ukrainian law and are doing their constitutional duty, but with terrorist gangs of “Banderites” and “Ukronazis.” To support this agenda, decisions are made to launch criminal proceedings on charges of “terrorism” over instances of armed conflict.
As for the second incident I mentioned, the attack on the Kremlin on 3 May 2023, what do we know? The communique from the Investigative Committee, which the prosecutor quoted yesterday, states outright that the attack was carried out against the residence of the President of the Russian Federation, who is the commander-in-chief of the Russian federal armed forces. Moreover, the Ukrainians also hit the building of the Senate, which is in the section of the Kremlin closed to tourists and where one of Putin’s offices is actually located. Excuse me, but this was not a terrorist attack. It was a Ukrainian combat operation, and a failed one at that.
I must say loudly and out loud that I do not condone or support terrorism, and that I have never condoned terrorism, nor do I intend to condone terrorism. I have a categorically negative attitude to the ideology and practice of terrorism.
Let us move on to [the charges under] Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code. This article is brand-new: it was adopted after the start of what we call the “special operation.”
This is a pure example of persecution for telling the truth. Because a situation has arisen where it has been necessary to shut the mouths of the war’s opponents, but it is impossible to charge them with violating, say, my beloved Criminal Code Article 207.3. How can you charge a person with “disseminating fake news” if they simply voice their attitude to current events? This is how Article 280.3 and the notion of “defamation” emerged, which is quite poorly conceptualized legally.
I have been told that my phrase “Ukraine is a victim of aggression on the part of the country of Russia” defames the Russian federal armed forces. What do we have? We have the UN General Assembly’s 2014 resolution saying that Russia “annexed” Ukraine. Those are not my words. This is a General Assembly resolution: there is no veto power there [as there is on the UN Security Council], so it was passed by a decent majority [of member states]. This is the position of international law.
Similarly, we have a March 2022 UN General Assembly resolution, in which the events of February 24 are labeled an “aggression.” And we have a UN General Assembly resolution on Russia’s incorporation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson which labels these actions “annexation.”
I should note that the statements of, say, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Masha Zakharova are not a source of international law. Statements by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov are not a source of international law. UN General Assembly resolutions are, on the contrary, a source of international law, and so my assessments are based on international legal documents.
But my phrase about “Putin’s scumbags” is also part of the “defamation” charge against me, of course. First, from your viewpoint, “Putin’s” cannot be defamatory, because as you see it, Putin is good. As for the second word [in the phrase], yes, this is my personal opinion, and it does not apply solely to Russian servicemen who carry out unlawful orders. Yes, there are also people in the Russian armed forces who do not carry out unlawful orders, but they are not the only ones fighting there.
Excuse me for characterizing in this way people who murder the soldiers of a neighboring country for money. This is my personal judgment, and it is based on [their] actions.
I will summarize this part of my statement. The Russian federal constitution contains Article 29, [which guarantees] the right to free speech, including the right to gather and disseminate information. This is what I have actually been doing. That is, I have not overstepped Article 29 of the Constitution by a single millimeter. But at the same time I certainly have violated these two current articles of the Criminal Code.
How can this be the case? It can be the cacse because the articles under which I have been charged are unconstitutional. If Russia had a real Constitutional Court, these articles would have ceased to exist long ago.
I cannot fail to mention my report to Prosecutor Zhuk, which was not part of the charges against me, but nevertheless we heard witnesses talk about it yesterday. It does not contain the text of [my] closing statement [at the first trial]. It makes no mention of terrorism or any violent acts at all. I did not say a word about the armed forces either.
The point is that this second case is the result of my statement to the prosecutor’s commission. Because the case file contains two resolutions by FSB investigator Lieutenant Colonel Sergey Vyacheslavovich Yerofeev to dismiss the case—that is, by the investigator in my [first] case, with whom I have a very good level of mutual understanding and who understands exactly what I have been doing and what I have been trying to achieve. He tried to dismiss this case twice.
In the final part of my statement, I turn to the correct characterization of my actions. I am involved in the war on the Ukrainian side. It just that this involvement takes place without weapons, because war is such an extraordinarily multidimensional event. Apart from the fighting in the steppes of Donbas, in the Black Sea, and in the skies above Ukraine, it is fiercely fought in the information space by state entities, by Russian bodies. On the Ukrainian side, for example, interesting entities are also involved.
I am an information warrior. In what sense? On 9 October 2022, I wrote and sent an email to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky asking him to grant me Ukrainian citizenship. I am entitled to it because of my ancestry. All my grandparents hailed from Ukraine. Ukrainian law says that I have the right to [Ukrainian] citizenship.
I was able to enter a screenshot from Kasparov.ru into the record and have it examined in court. What does it confirm? The fact that, apart from publishing my closing statement at trial, Kasparov.ru has published me on a regular basis. What does this confirm? That what I am being tried for now was, in fact, just an instance of my work, which I have not ceased.
I will also mention, of course, Novaya Gazeta, whose website also published my letters. And my latest achievement in this wise is that I have been officially designated a political prisoner, because that is what I call myself at the pretrial detention center, and that is how I sign my petitions to this honorable court. But it was still a kind of self-designation as it were.
On 14 April of this year, the Council on Political Prisoners of the Memorial International Human Rights Defense Center published a decision[designating me a political prisoner]. As part of my work, I have used the criminal cases [against me], the first and the second case, as publicity opportunities.
The information war is a real thing. I am involved in it, and I am trying to prove this now. Informationally, I support Ukraine and the armed forces of Ukraine. In fact, I have defected to the enemy side in an armed conflict involving the Russian Federation. This is the essence of the crime defined in Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code—high treason.
I ask the court to send my criminal case back to the prosecutor, as the factual circumstances indicate that there are grounds for charging me with a more serious crime. Try me for treason: I betrayed your deranged state.
* * * * *
Address for letters:
Trofimov Andrei Nikolayevich (born 1966) 141 ul. Bagzhanova, FKU SIZO-1 UFSIN po Tverskoi oblasti Tver, Tver Oblast 127081 Russian Federation
You can send letters to Mr. Trofimov and other Russian political prisoners via ZT, F-Pismo, and PrisonMail.online. (The last of these services accepts payments made with non-Russian bank cards.)
Today, the 1st Western District Military Court sentenced 67-year-old dissident Alexander Skobov to 16 years in prison and fined him 300,000 rubles (just over $3,500). Skobov, who first faced criminal prosecution in the USSR, was convicted under charges of “participation in the activities of a terrorist community” (for his involvement with the Free Russia Forum, a Russian opposition conference abroad) and “justification of terrorism” (for his social media posts and articles). Mediazona publishes Skobov’s closing statement from today’s trial—a passionate speech in which he continues to openly support Ukraine, defies persecution and denounces judges as accomplices of Putin’s war crimes.
I will not dwell on the fact that the investigation has branded the organisation I have the honour of belonging to, the Free Russia Forum, as a terrorist community. There has been no official ruling from any government body recognising the Free Russia Forum as such. For now, it is merely an “undesirable organization.”
But I have little interest in all this petty mumbling. I prefer to speak about what truly matters. What matters here is the platform of the Free Russia Forum, a platform I was directly involved in shaping, and one that distinguishes the Free Russia Forum from most other opposition organisations.
Let me remind you that this platform is built on three principles. First: we stand for the unconditional return to Ukraine of all its internationally recognised territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Yes, Крим це Україна. [Crimea is (part of) Ukraine — TRR.]
Second. We support all those who are fighting to achieve these goals—including citizens of the Russian Federation who have voluntarily joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
And third. We recognise any form of war against Putin’s tyranny inside Russia, including armed resistance. Of course, we are deeply disgusted by the methods of ISIS, when innocent people are targeted, as was the case in Crocus City.
But are the Kremlin’s war propagandists a legitimate target? The Free Russia Forum has not formally debated this issue or adopted any resolutions on it, so what I say next reflects my personal position alone.
I believe that propagandists such as TV host Vladimir Solovyov deserve the same fate as Hitler’s chief propagandist Julius Streicher, who was hanged by the Nuremberg Tribunal. Until these outcasts of the human race are brought before a new Nuremberg Tribunal—and as long as this war continues—they remain legitimate military targets.
For me, the comparison between Putin’s and Hitler’s propagandists is not mere rhetoric. Much of my public writings has been devoted to proving the inherently Nazi nature of Putin’s regime—a regime with which peaceful coexistence is fundamentally impossible.
I appeal now, as I have before, first and foremost to Europe, which should remember the origins of the current European system. Since 1945, Europe has been building a world in which predators no longer prevailed, a world based on the principles of law, justice, freedom, and humanity. Europe had achieved much on this path and seemed to have rid itself of massacres and territorial redistributions forever.
Europe once believed that this safe and prosperous world was securely protected by a great powerful ally across the ocean. Today, this world is being torn to splinters by two scoundrels on both sides: the Kremlin and Washington. People with pro-fascist values have come to power in the United States.
We are witnessing a disgusting attempt at a purely imperialist collusion between two predators. An even more despicable collusion than the Munich Betrayal of 1938. If Putin’s annexations are legalised, it will spell disaster for civilization. Europe, you have been betrayed. Wake up and go fight for your world!
Death to the Russian fascist invaders! Death to Putin, the new Hitler, murderer and scoundrel! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!
I usually end my speeches with these words. But today I will be further asked whether I plead guilty.
Well, I am the accuser here.
I accuse Putin’s corpse-stinking clique of planning, unleashing, and waging an aggressive war. Of committing war crimes in Ukraine. Of orchestrating political terror in Russia. Of corrupting my people.
And now, I ask the servants of Putin’s regime present here, mere cogs in the repressive machine: do you find yourselves guilty of complicity in Putin’s crimes? Do you repent?
A Russian military court sentenced Soviet-era dissident Alexander Skobov to 16 years in prison on charges of justifying terrorism and being a member of a terrorist organization, the exiled news outlet Mediazona reported Friday.
Skobov, 67, was arrested in April on allegations that he justified an attack on the Russian-built Crimea Bridge in an online post and was a member of the Lithuania-based liberal opposition platform Free Russia Forum, which Russian authorities have outlawed as “undesirable.”
A military court in St. Petersburg convicted Skobov on both charges and sentenced him to serve his time in a maximum-security prison.
Prosecutors had requested an 18-year sentence for Skobov, whose health had deteriorated significantly during pre-trial detention.news
In a defiant last statement in court, Skobov condemned both Russian and U.S. leaders as “predators” engaged in an “imperialist conspiracy” in Ukraine.
“Death to the Russian fascist invaders! Death to Putin, the new Hitler, the murderer and scoundrel! Glory to Ukraine!” Mediazona quoted Skobov as saying.
“I’m the one blaming you here. I accuse Putin’s ruling clique, which stinks of corpses, of preparing, unleashing and waging an aggressive war,” Skobov added.
Russia’s Justice Ministry designated Skobov as a “foreign agent” in March 2024. He is among the few outspoken critics of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to remain inside the country despite the risk of facing criminal charges under wartime censorship laws.
A dissident since the late 1970s, Skobov was convicted twice and subjected to punitive psychiatric treatment for “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
I was brought up in the Soviet Union to believe that when a malicious, cruel aggressor attacks civilians, you have to take up arms and go do battle with him, and that if you cannot bear arms, you help the people who are doing battle and call on others to do the same.
All my work as a political commentator has been about calling on people to go do battle with the aggressor which has attacked Ukraine, to assist Ukraine with weapons and ammunition.
No one had attacked or threatened Russia.
It was Putin’s Nazi regime which attacked Ukraine, only because of the megalomania of the regime’s ringleaders, because of their inhuman thirst for power over all they survey.
Murdering hundreds of thousands of people is their way of bolstering their self-esteem. They are degenerates, scum, and Nazi riffraff.
The guilt of Putin’s Nazi dictatorship in plotting, unleashing, and waging a war of aggression is obvious and does not need to be proven. We also do not need to prove our right to offer armed resistance to this aggression on the battlefield and in the aggressor’s rear. It would be laughable to expect this right to be acknowledged by a regime which tosses people in prison for morally condemning its aggression out loud. All legal means of protesting Putinist Russia’s aggression have been eliminated.
My calls to resist the aggressor’s regime with armed force have caused me to be charged with terrorism.* I won’t deign to argue with the aggressor’s officials even if they claim my actions constitute pedophilia. Russia’s courts have long ago shown themselves to be appendages of the Nazi tyranny and seeking justice from them is pointless. I will never stand up before these people, who are the lackeys of murderers and scoundrels.
I see no point in arguing with puppets of the dictatorship about how conscientiously they execute their own laws. In any case, these laws are the laws of a totalitarian state and their aim is to stifle dissent. I do not recognize these laws and I will not obey them.
I also have no intention of appealing any rulings made by or actions taken by representatives of the Nazi regime.
The Putinist dictatorship may murder me, but it cannot force me to stop fighting against it. Wherever I find myself, I will keep calling on honest Russians to join the Ukrainian Armed Forces. I will keep calling for airstrikes on military facilities deep in Russian territory. I will keep calling on the civilized world to inflict a strategic defeat on Nazi Russia. I will keep trying to prove that the new Hitler’s regime must be routed militarily.
Putin is the new Hitler, a vampire driven insane by impunity and drunk on blood. I shall never grow tired of saying, “Crush the viper!”
Death to the murder, tyrant and scoundrel Putin!
Death to the Russian fascist invaders!
Glory to Ukraine!
[Grani.Ru:] Thanks to Alexander Valeryevich’s dedicated wife Olga Shcheglova (pictured above). Thanks to SotaVision for filming at the Petersburg military court (Skobov is participating in the trial via video link from Syktyvkar). Thanks to those who didn’t unsubscribe from Grani.Ru after it closed. It’s as if Skobov timed his brave deed to coincide with the final moral collapse of numerous media brands. And yet he will be heard by a handful of his contemporaries. But he has already gone down in history.
* Skobov has been charged with “publicly calling for terrorism,” “publicly condoning terrorism or promoting terrorism using the mass media, including the internet” and “organizing a terrorist community and participating in it.” If Skobov is convicted on these charges, he faces a maximum penalty of ten to fifteen years in prison and fines of up to one million rubles (approx. 9,500 euros)— TRR.
The number of Russians who find themselves behind bars for opposing the authorities who launched the war with Ukraine grows by the day. There are hundreds of political prisoners in the country. We try to remind our readers about these people every chance we get. Today, Mediazona’s David Frenkel tells the story of Alexander Skobov, 67, a historian from St Petersburg, a defendant in the last criminal case against ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ in Soviet history, a convinced Marxist, and a veteran of the dissident movement, who after decades has found himself on a very familiar path: searches, arrest, psychiatric ward, jail.
Alexander Skobov is one of the most experienced political prisoners in Russia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was twice sent to a psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment: the first time as an editor of samizdat, the second time for slogans in favour of political prisoners, which Skobov wrote on the walls of Leningrad houses.
Almost half a century later, in April 2024, the authorities came after him again. Skobov was accused of ‘justifying terrorism’ because of his post about the explosion on the Crimean Bridge and sent to a pre-trial detention centre. In protest, he refused to take his glasses and medication with him. Later, an article on participation in a ‘terrorist community’ was added to the charge, and Skobov was transferred from St Petersburg to Syktyvkar.
“We were left alone for a long time. The reasoning being: we’ll die out on our own. Or we’ll leave and live out the rest of our lives off the once acquired (quite deservedly) political and moral capital. The blow came to other people, most of them much younger,” he wrote from the pre-trial detention centre.
Skobov maintains an active correspondence in pre-trial detention. He discusses philosophical and political topics, his letters are even published in historical journals. Write to Alexander, argue with him, disagree with him, I’m sure it would be valuable to him. The only thing is that his wife asks that the letters to him be written in 18-point Sans Serif font. Skobov can’t even see his own texts well: he first drafts them on the back of used sheets of paper and then blindly transfers the texts to the reply form.
Address:
167028, г. Сыктывкар, поселок Верхний Чов, д. 99 , ФКУ СИЗО-1 УФСИН России по Республике Коми. Скобову Александру Валерьевичу 1957 года рождения
Please write letters in Russian, otherwise the prison censors won’t let them through. You can send letters online via a special services called PrisonMail.
You can also write in English, using the websites Letters Across Borders and Lifeline, two projects by OVD Info, a media outlet and human rights defense group.
Lawyer Dmitry Talantov has been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army and inciting hatred in connection with several social media posts about the war. Talantov had been on the defense team of journalist Ivan Safronov, who was sentenced to twenty-two years in a penal colony for high treason. Talantov had also served for many years as the head of the Udmurtia bar association, so it is likely that both the judge who sentenced Talantov and the prosecutor who petitioned the judge to sentence the respected 64-year-old defense lawyer to twelve years in prison knew him personally.
Talantov delivered a memorable closing statement today in court.
Dmitry Talantov, sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for antiwar social media posts:
Brodsky once said that “prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time.” I didn’t completely understand this phrase. I didn’t get it. I’m certain that none of you totally understands it, because it is the surplus of time which is frightening about this situation, not the lack of space. It is the time during which you suffer, and the time that tries to kill you. Every minute tries to kill you, and every minute in there [in prison] is equal to an hour.
[…]
People often ask for forgiveness during their closing statement. I also want to ask for it. I’m saying this to my wife. Forgive me, Olga. I love you. If this is overdoing it emotionally, then I’ll put it this way. Olya, if you’re ever sent to prison for twelve years for some reason, I’ll wait for you to get out. Take it easy.
Sasha Skochilenko, the Petersburg artist and musician sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for posting antiwar price tags in a supermarket and released as part of a prisoner swap in August 2024:
Alexei Gorinov, the Moscow municipal district council member who was initially sentenced to seven years in prison for “disseminating fake news” during an argument about whether it was appropriate to hold celebrations for children during a war, and who is now on trial a second time for allegedly “condoning terrorism” in conversations with cellmates:
I was also a municipal council member during the August 1991 coup. I stood with other defenders outside the Russian Supreme Soviet, the so-called White House. We were defending our freedom, our right to live freely and, thus, to speak freely, voice our thoughts, gather information, and share it. If they had told me then that thirty years later I would be tried by a criminal court for my words, for my opinion, I wouldn’t have believed them.
Nadezhda Buyanova, a pediatrician, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for “disseminating fake news,” after she was denounced by the widow of an army officer killed in Ukraine: the doctor had allegedly said to the woman’s seven-year-old son that his father had been a “legitimate target”:
If there used to were doctors and patients, nowadays there are providers and clients. That’s what we were told at the planning meetings: “Humiliate yourself. And us.” We medics can be slandered, we can be insulted, we can be called every name in the book. We can’t defend ourselves, our explanations are not heard by our superiors, and conflicts are not resolved.
There was no interrogation and the child had nothing to say. “At the end of the appointment, he walked out of the office.” You cannot believe such a tale. You cannot lie like that: it’s a disgrace. How can you accuse a person without evidence, on the basis of a false accusation? Where is the logic? Where is the justice? Earlier, in ancient times, there were wise men. They would have said: “Well, what do you expect from a person without proof?”
Roman Ivanov, a journalist for RusNews, was sentenced to seven years in prison for three social media posts. During his closing statement in court, he knelt down to apologize to Ukrainians:
What can we do in this situation? I honestly don’t even know anymore. But I want to ask for forgiveness from all the citizens of Ukraine, to whom our country has brought grief, whom our country has robbed of their relatives, their loved ones, and their friends, who will never come back.
And [I ask for forgiveness] not for the whole country, but for me personally, for Roman Viktorovich Ivanov, a citizen of the Russian Federation. I would like to get down on my knees before the relatives of the people who were murdered in Bucha, although I don’t know who murdered them. But they are the consequences of what our country has become.
The politician Alexei Navalny was repeatedly tried on trumped-up charges before he was murdered in a penal colony on 16 February 2024. Perhaps it was Navalny, during his endless trials, who revived the closing statement in court as a literary genre. Here is an excerpt from his speech at his trial for “extremism” in July 2023:
Former Moscow politician Alexei Gorinov, the first known Russian to be imprisoned for denouncing the invasion of Ukraine, was sentenced to three more years on Friday on charges of “justifying terrorism” that he says he was framed for.
Ahead of his sentencing, he read the following statement to the court and the press:
Imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Gorinov, sits in a cage of the courtroom as his second trial for criticizing Russia’s actions in Ukraine swiftly nears its conclusion in Vladimir, Russia, Friday, Nov. 29, 2024. Photo: Dmitry Serebryakov/AP
“All my life I have been an opponent of aggression, violence and war, and devoted myself exclusively to peaceful activities: science, teaching, education, governance and public activities as a deputy, human rights activist, member of election commissions and controller of the electoral process. I never thought that I would live to see such a level of degradation of my country’s political system and its foreign policy, when ordinary citizens who favor peace and are against war, who number in the thousands, would be accused of slandering the Armed Forces and justifying terrorism, and would be put on trial.
“The third year of the war is coming to an end. The third year of casualties and destruction on European territory, of deprivation and suffering of millions of people on a level unprecedented since World War II. We cannot remain silent about this.
“Back in late April, our former defense minister announced the losses of the Ukrainian side in the armed conflict – 500,000 people. Think about this number! And what losses have been suffered by Russia, which, according to official information, is constantly successfully advancing along the entire front? We still do not know. And who will be responsible for this? What is all this for?
“Our authorities and those who support them in their militaristic aspirations wanted this war so much — and now it has come to our land.
“I would like to ask them: has our life become better? Is this how you understand the well-being and security of our country and its population? Or did you not envision these developments in your calculations?
“But for now we have to answer not to those who organized the war, continue to kill, propagandize the war and engage in mercenarism. Rather, we ordinary citizens of Russia, who raise our voices against war and for peace, have to answer, paying with our freedom and, for some, with our lives.
“I belong to the outgoing generation of people whose parents took part in World War II or survived it with all its hardships. The generation that has already passed away entrusted us with preserving peace with all our might as the most precious thing on Earth for all its inhabitants. But we have neglected these principles and devalued our memory of these people and the victims of that war.
“My guilt is that I, as a citizen of my country, allowed this war to happen and failed to stop it. And I ask you to note this in the verdict. But I would like my guilt and responsibility to be shared with me by the organizers, participants and supporters of the war, as well as the persecutors of those who advocate peace.
“I continue to live with the hope that someday it will be so. In the meantime, I ask the people of Ukraine and my fellow citizens affected by the war to forgive me.
“Within the framework of the case in which I was accused and tried for my opinion that we need to seek an end to the war, I have expressed my attitude fully to this abominable human endeavor. I can only say that violence and aggression breed nothing but reciprocal violence. This is the true cause of our troubles, our suffering, our senseless sacrifices, the destruction of civilian and industrial infrastructure and our homes.
“Let us stop this bloody, needless slaughter — neither for us nor the inhabitants of Ukraine. Isn’t it time to leave our neighbors alone and deal with our own snowballing domestic problems? Long ago we proved to the world how brave, resilient and peace-loving we are. So, maybe enough is enough?
“Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy — from a letter to his son (1904): ‘For me, the madness and criminality of war is so clear that I can see nothing in it except for this madness and criminality.’
“I too join and subscribe to these words of our great compatriot.
“You can join too!”
SOTAVision reported that Judge Vladimirov interrupted Gorinov when he started to talk about losses in the war in Ukraine and called a 15-minute break so Gorinov could “think over his speech again.”
Muscovite Ivan Astashin knows firsthand what human rights activism, Russian prisons, and terrorism and arson charges look like. As a young man, he was close to Eduard Limonov’s National Bolsheviks and was arrested as part of the high-profile Autonomous Combat Terrorist Organization (ABTO) case, in which a group of young men were charged with a series of arson and terrorist attacks.
At the turn of the 2000s and 2010s, this story was widely discussed in the media, sparking debates over whether the arson attacks were justified. Astashin was convicted of torching an FSB district office in 2012 and spent over nine years behind bars.
Upon his release, Astashin worked for Andrei Babushkin’s Committee for Civil Rights and was involved in defending the rights of prison inmates. In February 2022, Astashin joined the protests against the invasion of Ukraine and was soon forced to leave Russia.
Astashin is now involved in the campaign Solidarity Zone, which aids Russians who have been arrested for radical anti-war protests.
How did the “Solidarity Zone” come into being?
When full-scale war broke out, large protests took place in many Russian cities, and criminal charges were filed against protesters, both charges of “violence against police officers,” which have been routine at protest rallies (police officers themselves use violence, but they don’t pay for it), and charges that were newish for Russia.
There was Anastasia Levashova, who threw a Molotov cocktail at police officers. There was the case against Anton Zhuchkov and Vladimir Sergeyev: they were detained near Pushkin Square in Moscow on 6 March 2022 on their way to an anti-war rally. A Molotov cocktail was found in Sergeyev’s backpack. The police did not know what they guys were planning, so they were able to accomplish part of what they’d planned. Zhuchkov and Sergeyev had planned to commit suicide publicly at an anti-war rally as a sign of protest—they were so desperate. As they were being detained, they took lethal doses of methadone. The police failed to notice this. They put them in a paddy wagon and beat them up there, but on the way to the station the police realized that their detainees were quite sick and took them to hospital. They were saved in the intensive care unit at the Sklifosovsky Institute.
Zhuchkov and Sergeyev were sent from the intensive care unit to a pretrial detention center after being charged with “attempted disorderly conduct.” According to police investigators, the men had been planning to set fire to empty paddy wagons. When detained, Sergeyev said that they “wanted to torch a couple of paddy wagons,” emphasizing that it was empty vehicles they had intended to target. At first, we wanted to find out the address where we could write to Zhuchkov and Sergeyev at the pretrial detention center, so we asked OVD Info, but we also learned that OVD Info would not defend them, as theirs was not a peaceful protest.
We realized that none of the existing human rights organizations was willing to take on such cases. We decided to take on Zhuchkov and Sergeyev’s case: we published the address to which people could send them letters and found them a lawyer. A little later, the authorities started charging people with arson attacks on military recruitment centers, and so we decided that we should also aid such people. By September 2022, we had launched Solidarity Zone’s social media accounts and expanded our work.
Do I understand correctly that the attitude of OVD Info, Memorial, and other human rights organizations to people engaging in “non-peaceful” anti-war protests has changed? Have their motives become clearer to these human rights organizations?
Yes, their attitude has changed. As I see it, it changed after the military mobilization, when people began setting fire to military recruitment offices en masse in protest. Now it is easier to get announcements of fundraisers for such detainees reposted. But the position of human rights organizations has remained the same.
We had a public discussion with Sergei Davidis, head of Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. He said these people should certainly be supported, that in most cases they have been wrongfully charged with violating Article 205 of the Russian Criminal Code (“terrorism”), but that whereas the criminal code articles on “discrediting” the army and “disseminating fake news” about the army clearly contradict Russian law and international conventions, and people charged with violating these laws can be designated political prisoners without a detailed examination of their cases, then with regard to people who attempt to torch military recruitment centers, Memorial examines the cases in detail and is guided by international criteria. They have designated twenty such people political prisoners, but the number of these cases is many times greater.
All human rights organizations have their own focus. OVD Info deals with cases related to peaceful protest; First Department, with high treason cases; and the Net Freedoms Project, with freedom of expression cases. Our cases do not fit these criteria. Before we started, there was no organization which was willing to support such people.
Is your campaign volunteer-driven? How many people are you assisting now? How do you define the people you support?
We support people who have been arrested for anti-war protests, for radical anti-war actions, although nowadays virtually all anti-war protests are radical. We handle cases where people actually set fire to a military recruitment center or a railroad signal relay box, and cases where they were merely planning to do such things.
Or they weren’t even planning to do such things, but the security services have fabricated a case against them, alleging that they were planning to torch a military recruitment center, as happened to Ivan Kudryashov.
We are currently supporting nineteen political prisoners. In almost all cases we pay their defense lawyers and organize fundraisers to this end, and in many cases we are also involved in arranging for parcels and care packages to be sent to the prisoners and replenishing their personal commissary accounts at their detention facilities. We talk publicly about their cases and similar criminal cases. We did a count in September 2023, and at that time there were around three hundred people in Russia facing criminal charges over radical anti-war protests. There was no further info on half of these people: we could not find out whether they were under arrest or wanted by the police.
We try to cover such cases as much as we can because we are a volunteer organization: we don’t get paid or have permanent funding, although we would certainly like to have such things. We raise money for political prisoners through cryptocurrency and PayPal donations. We also do personal ruble-denominated fundraisers to pay lawyers through the platform Zaodno (“In Cahoots”).
In the first quarter of 2024, we spent 900 thousand rubles (approx. 9,100 euros) paying for care packages and one-off visits by defense lawyers. When lawyers defend our prisoners in court, we organize personal fundraisers. Sometimes we hold events in Europe to raise money, and sometimes other campaigns hold events to raise money for us.
Let’s imagine that a programmer in Tver has been arrested for attempting to set fire to a military recruitment center. His relatives are scared: they are unlikely to want to do business with a volunteer campaign based in Europe. How do you reach out to those accused of anti-war protest?
Actually, we are increasingly being approached by relatives of arrestees as we are becoming famous. We are recommended in various chat rooms dealing with support for political prisoners. Often people contact OVD Info, and they suggest contacting us.
Aftermath of an arson attack on a military recruitment center in Kemerovo
We also search for information on detainees ourselves. If you have at least a first name and a surname, you can find the rest of the information in the public domain. But sometimes you cannot find out which thirty-year-old native of Voronezh has been detained. There are such case, unfortunately. Information can be obtained when a person is added to the list of “terrorists and extremists” via court filing. When a person is in the database, the locale of the pretrial detention center where they are held is identified as well. In many cities there is only one pretrial detention center, so we can dispatch a lawyer there to offer assistance to the arrestee and get their take on the case.
Some argue that publicity is not always beneficial to defendants in political criminal cases given the current conditions. Does Solidarity Zone not take this approach?
Our opinion is that publicity is beneficial in most cases. Despite everything, the security services still don’t like their lawlessness to become public. This still entails inspections, which, although they are formal procedures, are still unpleasant for them.
Publicity is a defense against torture and coercion. Also, you cannot raise money to pay a lawyer if there is no publicity. Without publicity, a person will not receive letters from supporters and well-wishers, but letters are very important. Publicity has practically no effect on the sentence nowadays, neither positively nor negatively.
So the lawyer is the prisoner’s link with the outside world? If a person ends up in this situation, they will still get a brutal sentence of ten, fifteen or twenty years or more, won’t they?
The lawyer is the only person who can visit someone in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies without limits on the number and length of visits. During the investigation phase of a case, relatives usually do not have visitation rights, especially if the individual has not pleaded guilty. So the support of a lawyer is very important.
As time goes on, this is less and less the case, but what the lawyer does can still affect the sentence. If a person has a court-appointed defense lawyer, they often tell them to agree to every deal offered by the prosecution and to sign every paper they ask them to sign, so the sentence will be shorter. Ultimately, however, the investigators and prosecutors add new charges, and the sentence is huge. But if there is a lawyer who really defends their client, they at least make sure that no new charges are filed.
A lawyer can go after the gross violations on the part of the state. Take Ivan Kudryashov: there was no evidence in his case, and so he should have been acquitted. But there are no acquittals in Russia, so he was sentenced to six years for “planning a terrorist act.” This is a short sentence by today’s standards, but his lawyer got it reduced on appeal to four years and ten months.
Although Ilya Baburin was just sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for violating six articles of the Criminal Code. For one incident—planning to torch a military recruitment center—he was charged with violating four different articles, for one and the same thing! And the lawyer could do nothing.
Ilya Baburin in court
There are news stories of phone scammers conning people into torching military enlistment office, of people being offered money on Telegram to torch railway signal relay boxes. Do you handle these cases?
We have been approached about such cases. Those people shouldn’t be in jail, of course. It is doubly cynical that the pensioners who were conned have also been charged with terrorism, although in terrorism cases what matters most is the person’s intent. We have limited resources, however, so we only assist people who take an anti-war stance, which is an important criterion for us.
You also have the criterion that the defendant not testify against anyone else. Whether they pleaded guilty or not doesn’t matter.
What matters is that they didn’t willingly testify against others. Anything can happen under torture.
The number of people who go down the road of torching military recruitment centers and railway relay boxes has not been decreasing, has it? Not all those who oppose the war and Putin have left the country or gone to jail, have they?
On the contrary. Whereas previously we tried to write about all arrests on such charges, we now realize that our small team cannot cover all the arrests because they occur almost daily. Often little is known about the detainees, but the news reports say that the person was on a mission for the Free Russia Legion, meaning that the person has an anti-war stance.
When a person engages in such actions, they seemingly first of all undergo an existential crisis because they live in a quasi-fascist empire that has also attacked its neighbors. Does this person want to do something even though they realize that their life may be in danger?
Yeah, that’s right. In the cases that are well known, the defendants say they wanted to do something, to take radical action by way of protesting.
In 2022, Navalny supporters were often detained for such actions, such as Igor Paskar, who threw a Molotov cocktail at an FSB building, or Vladimir Zolotarev, who set fire to a Russian National Guard building in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. People used to go to protest rallies, but then there were no more protest rallies. Another motive we can observe among such people (Zolotarev and the anarchist Alexei Rozhkov, who set fire to a military recruitment center in March 2022, spoke of it) is that they couldn’t tear themselves away from the news about Ukraine. At some point it was impossible for them to just read all of it: they had to do something as well.
When the military mobilization began, people realized that all of this was not happening somewhere far away, but could affect them. Many people realized that they would go to jail, but they went to commit arson because they thought it was better to go to jail than to go fight a criminal war. Roman Nasryev and Alexei Nuriyev were sentenced to nineteen years each for attempting to set fire to a military registration office in the Chelyabinsk Region. This phrase in Nasryev’s correspondence jumps out: “It’s time to start—or we’ll die as slaves.”
There are now people who are primed for a long-term confrontation with the military machine, for guerrilla actions, and for greater degrees of security. And if you look at the reports of sabotage, not every one leads to the capture of the perpetrators.
It is clear what could have prompted radical action in February 2022. In the autumn of 2022, it was the mobilization. But how can it be that someone tolerated the war for a long time and decides to act only now? Or are these just “guerrillas” who have avoided capture for a long time?
That is a good question, to which I have no answer. We know generally about those detained for radical protests in 2022, but there is still little data even for 2023. We can assume that some people went abroad in 2022, but had to return to Russia because they could not settle down here. Some people may not have resisted in 2022 because they hoped that everything would end quickly, but now they see that nothing ends by itself.
The case of Sergei Okrushko can be cited as an example. He is Ukrainian but has a Russian passport. In 2022, he went to Moldova, whence he wanted to enter Ukraine and work on humanitarian projects. But he was not allowed to enter Ukraine because of his Russian passport. He was forced to return to Russia. He got a job at an oil refinery (as an electrician) and set off an explosion there.
Are you also a wanted man in Russia? What are the charges?
The authorities have not yet responded to inquiries about what the criminal charges are, although my lawyer submitted a request over a month ago.
After this interview was recorded, Moscow’s Cheremushkinsky District Court published information that it had been petitioned to arrest Ivan Astashin in absentia on charges of “condoning terrorism.” Other details of the case are still unknown.
Alexander Skobov. Photo courtesy of V. Izotov/Deutsche Welle
A new criminal case, on charges of “involvement in a terrorist community,” has been opened against former Soviet dissident and Russian political journalist Alexander Skobov, who has been detained for over a month on charges of “condoning terrorism.” This news was reported on Saturday, 18 May, on Skobov’s official Facebook account by his wife, Olga Shcheglova.
Shcheglova said that she visited her husband on 14 May in the pretrial detention center in Syktyvkar, where he had been transferred from St. Petersburg. During a conversation with him, his lawyer and local police investigators, she learned that Skobov has also been charged with “condoning terrorism” and “involvement in a terrorist community.” The dissident’s wife is convinced that these two charges stem from her husband’s affiliation with the Free Russia Forum.
According to Shcheglova, on 21 May, Skobov will be sent to the regional psychiatric hospital in Komi for a forensic psychiatric examination. Skobov himself has stated that he would not participate in the investigation and forensic expertise, and he would appear in court only if his mother were present at the hearings. Skobov’s defense has filed an appeal, which will be heard by the court on 22 May.
Skobov’s Persecution in the USSR and Russia
On 22 March 2024, Russian authorities designated Skobov a “foreign agent.” According to the Justice Ministry, he had “disseminated unreliable information” about the decisions of public officials, opposed the war, “identified the Russian Federation with a terrorist organization,” been involved in the work of an “undesirable organization,” and produced and distributed “foreign agent materials” [sic], the human rights project OVD Info reports.
In 1978, Skobov was arrested over his active involvement in the Left Opposition group and the samizdat publication of an anti-government magazine. He was later sentenced by the court to undergo treatment at a psychiatric hospital, from which he was released in the summer of 1987.
This time around, the political journalist was arrested on charges of “condoning terrorism.” Skobov was detained in St. Petersburg on 2 April 2024. In protest, the dissident refused to take with him to jail his diabetes medication and his glasses, despite his poor eyesight. According to the Telegram channel Memorial Support for Political Prisoners, the real reason for his arrest was “a [social media] post condoning the bombing of the Crimean Bridge.”
In early April, 66-year-old dissident Alexander Skobov was arrested for allegedly “justifying terrorism” in his posts online. For his friends and family members, the arrest came as no surprise.
Skobov, a long-time dissident who was made to spend seven years in a psychiatric ward after taking part in protests against the Soviet authorities in the 1970s, had published multiple posts condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine since 2014. In March he was named a “foreign agent”, and since then people close to him said his arrest had seemed inevitable.
“He and I talked a hundred times about the fact that he would be arrested — if not today then tomorrow,” said Skobov’s friend Yuly Rybakov, a human rights activist and former deputy in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. “People have been imprisoned for much less.”
Skobov’s 90-year-old mother, whom he lives with and cares for, said she had been having nightmares about his arrest for months before it happened, and Rybakov recalled that Skobov himself said he “didn’t understand” why the authorities hadn’t come for him yet.
Skobov’s children, who moved abroad long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, urged their father to flee the country when they saw him in Istanbul in early March. Other friends have also tried to convince him to leave and avoid arrest, citing his many health issues, including severe diabetes, hepatitis C, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and near blindness.
But, Rybakov said, Skobov was resolute, telling him that he “wanted to be part of his own judicial process” when he was inevitably arrested.
Rybakov said that Skobov had been “driven to despair” by what had been happening in Russia in recent years and “felt that someone had to be radical”.
Another friend, Mikhail Sedunov, said that trying to convince Skobov to change his course of action was like “grabbing the wing of a plane that was already accelerating down the runway”.
On 2 April, masked policemen arrived at Rybakov’s flat, where Skobov had been staying. When Rybakov left to take the dog for a walk, the police reportedly entered the property, threw Skobov to the ground, twisted his arms and handcuffed him. According to Rybakov, Skobov “defiantly” refused to take either warm clothing, his diabetes medication, or his glasses with him, intending these gestures as an “act of protest”.
Skobov’s wife, Olga Shcheglova, managed to buy him replacement medication and glasses, which she brought to him ahead of his interrogation by Russia’s Investigative Committee. But Skobov refused to accept them — a reaction Shcheglova said she had “expected” from her husband.
Resistance to the authorities and a fight for justice had defined Skobov’s life for more than four decades. His first foray into political activism was in 1976, when he and other university students in St. Petersburg scattered leaflets calling for the “establishment of true humane socialism” and the “overthrow of the tyranny of officials” ahead of a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The students were expelled from university and brought before a court, and some, like Skobov, were then sentenced to compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals because, according to Rybakov, it was believed that “only crazy people could dislike the Soviet regime”.
Skobov’s radical spirit remained unquelled when he was finally released from hospital in 1981, however, and he immediately joined the Free Inter-Professional Association of Workers, a dissident group that led the first attempt to create an independent trade union in the USSR. In 1982 he was arrested for his involvement with the group and sent back to hospital, where he spent another three years.
In the early 1990s Skobov taught history at a secondary school for gifted students, writing and publishing his own award-winning textbooks. But later in the decade political activism again became the focal point of his life as he took part in protests against the Chechen wars.
When Russia annexed Ukraine in 2014, Skobov took to social media to rail against the regime, openly supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia’s military action. The same year, two unidentified men armed with knives attacked him outside his home in what his friends and family members say they are sure was retribution for his criticism of the regime.
Even this did not deter him, however, and his friends said his statements opposing Putin’s rule became “even sharper, more unrestrained, and more radical”. Speaking last year at the Free Russia Forum, an opposition conference held biannually in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, Skobov condemned the regime more harshly than any of the other attendees, despite being one of the only participants still living in Russia.
Another friend of Skobov, Nikita Yeliseyev, said he doubted Skobov would survive the 7.5-year sentence that he is almost certain to receive.
“He is an old man,” Yeliseyev said. “And he has a number of very serious illnesses.”
Sedunov said all of Skobov’s actions stemmed from a desire to “struggle, as vigorously as possible, against the obvious evil represented by the current Russian government”.
“This is the way he was brought up: he wanted to fight evil any way he could. And this was the only way left,” Sedunov said.
Aleksandr Skobov has been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments for more than four decades, from the Soviet era to President Vladimir Putin’s long rule. And now, in pretrial detention in St. Petersburg and facing prison, he is in no mood for compromise.
“On principle I refuse to comply with fascist laws,” he told RFE/RL late last month, shortly after the Russian government designated him a “foreign agent” on March 22. “I don’t intend to get into debates with the government. I will not try to prove my innocence. I will not label my writings, and I will not write any financial reports for them.”
“A criminal case could be launched at any moment,” he concluded.
He was right: On April 3, the 66-year-old was arrested and charged with “justifying terrorism” for a social-media post about the Ukrainian attacks that damaged the Crimea Bridge that links Russia with the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which Moscow occupied in 2014. The following day, a St. Petersburg court ordered Skobov held in pretrial detention for at least two months.
“If you take any of my articles or YouTube videos, you can find a whole bouquet of possible charges,” Skobov said in the March 31 interview. “Discrediting the army. Inciting hatred and enmity. Justifying terrorism. The rehabilitation of Nazism. I directly equate the actions of the Stalin regime with those of Hitler’s during World War II.”
Another reason for Skobov’s prosecution, his supporters believe, is his leadership role in the Free Russia Forum, a group of mostly exiled opposition figures founded by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and activist Ivan Tyutrin in 2016 that has been declared “undesirable” in Russia. If he is charged with participation in an “undesirable” organization, he could face up to six years in prison.
“I am a member of the forum’s council, and I regularly participate in its broadcasts,” Skobov told RFE/RL. “I help write its statements and official pronouncements. Several of them I have written myself. I am actively involved, and I do not intend to stop.”
Skobov said he was drawn to the group because “it was the only opposition organization that categorically rejected the idea of the peaceful transformation of Putin’s dictatorship toward democracy using the procedure established by that dictatorship.”
“It was the only organization that, beginning with the annexation of Crimea, unambiguously stood by Ukraine as a victim of aggression,” he added. “We try to help the Ukrainian Army and the Russian volunteer formations that are fighting with them.”
Writing on Facebook after Skobov’s arrest, writer and critic Mikhail Berg said Skobov suffered from “an unbearable fear of being afraid.”
“And that is why he chooses the most painful forms of criticizing the authorities,” he wrote. “He shouts even though the authorities have long been destroying people for whispering or even for just opening their mouths.”
Parallel Lives
Born in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was called then, in 1957, Skobov participated in his first anti-government protest when he was 19. He and other members of an underground organization threw about 100 flyers calling for “humanistic socialism” from the roof of a downtown building on the eve of the 25th congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Several of the protesters were kicked out of their universities, but Skobov — a first-year history student at Leningrad State University — got off with a disciplinary meeting of the Komsomol youth group.
In October 1978, he was arrested for publishing an underground, anti-government magazine called Perspectives. He spent half a year in a KGB prison before being sentenced to forced psychiatric treatment.
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s, political prisoners in Soviet psychiatric hospitals were rarely forcibly medicated, although there were such cases, of course,” Skobov said. “But I was treated more or less OK. Most of the doctors that I encountered tried to avoid playing the role of executioners or stranglers.”
He spent three years in confinement.
In 1982, he was again sentenced to psychiatric treatment, this time for a samizdat article he wrote defending Chile’s former socialist president, Salvador Allende, who died in unclear circumstances in 1973, and criticizing the rightist dictator General Augusto Pinochet. That article was deemed “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
This time, Skobov spent five years in the hospital before being released in the summer of 1987 during the initial phase of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization campaign.
In many ways, Skobov and Putin led parallel lives during this period. Putin was born in Leningrad almost exactly five years before Skobov and studied at Leningrad State University just before him. But as Skobov became drawn into a life of opposition to authoritarianism, Putin joined the KGB secret police.
The president’s official biography insists that Putin always worked for the KGB’s First Directorate, which carried out counterintelligence operations. However, rumors have persisted for years that he worked for some time in the Fifth Directorate, which was responsible for suppressing internal dissent and prosecuting political dissidents. At the time, a senior figure in that department was Viktor Cherkesov, a longtime member of Putin’s inner circle who served as his deputy when he headed the Federal Security Service — the KGB successor organization — in the 1990s and who died in 2022.
In 2022, journalist and researcher Konstantin Sholmov published a photograph of a KGB archival document from 1976 that he said was on display at the Political History Museum in St. Petersburg. The document, a protocol of a search of the residence of Leningrad artist and dissident Oleg Volkov, named “Lieutenant Putin” as one of the officers carrying out the search.
In 2013, a series of photographs emerged showing a 1989 Leningrad protest during which KGB operatives roughly detained dissident Valery Terekhov. One of the men in the photograph resembles Putin. The Kremlin later denied that the man was Putin, saying the future president had already been sent to East Germany by 1989.
Prominent human rights activist Aleksandr Cherkasov of the banned rights group Memorial told the news outlet Agentstvo earlier this month that he believes Putin was involved in the investigation of Skobov. He said Skobov had told him Putin staked out his Leningrad apartment in November 1982 when prominent dissidents gathered to celebrate Skobov’s birthday.
Despite the danger growing around him after he was designated a “foreign agent,” Skobov refused to consider emigration.
“I’m not going to quit,” he said.
“Today anyone in Russia who disagrees with Putin’s Nazi regime is taking a risk,” he added, “even if he doesn’t really stick out or act publicly. Since the regime has already made the transformation from ‘hybrid totalitarian’ to totalitarian, it demands not just silence from its loyal subjects, but active participation. And even avoidance can be dangerous.”
Opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s suspicious death in prison on February 16 was “to be expected,” Skobov said.
“Navalny constantly laughed in [Putin’s] face, and a dictator cannot stand that,” he added. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be the last death of a political prisoner in Putin’s Russia.”
Five criminal cases have been launched against Igor Yakunichev, a resident of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. In addition to three cases on charges of “disseminating fake news” about the Russian army and “condoning terrorism,” the security services added two more cases on the same charges. On 1 April, Yakunichev, who started the YouTube channel Infinity Is Not the Limit (about the lawlessness of the police and the courts), was forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic in the Tyumen Region.
Yakunichev’s relatives are convinced that he has been subjected to punitive psychiatry because of his consistent criticism of the current regime. For more than a year, investigators in Yamalia have tried to put Yakunichev in jail on charges of “disseminating fake news” about the military and “condoning terrorism.” However, even a court-appointed defense lawyer could not induce the 35-year-old Yakunichev to “admit everything and mitigate his plight” When the criminal cases began to fall apart, the defendant, who had no psychiatric diagnoses, was shipped off to a mental hospital.
“The police broke into our house twice”
The police started calling Igor Yakunichev and coming to his home (he lived with his mother and father in Pangody, a settlement in Yamalia with a population of 11,000) in early 2023.
Pangody, a village in Yamalia. Photo courtesy of Igor Yakunichev and Radio Svoboda
“They would bring a ‘warning’ for him to sign, or they would summon him for an ‘interrogation’ and question him about his videos and posts. He started the [YouTube] channel when his family was cheated out of their housing,” says Igor’s relative Tatyana (whose name has been changed for security reasons). “Mother and father and son had lived for many years in two rooms in a barracks. Under the dilapidated housing resettlement program they were given a one-room flat. Igor fought against this lawlessness for many years, and he and his mother traveled many kilometers going to the courts. All to no avail. Then he began not only to take an interest in the state system but also to make and post videos about what is going on in Yamalia. He had come head to head with the injustice of the system back in 2015, when he worked at the property management company Our House. Another property management company controlled by them, Garant, was going bankrupt at the time, but for some reason all the employees at Our House were forced to apply to work shorter days (apparently, the whole business was being optimized). Igor refused [to sign], and after three months they up and fired him. He sued them and was reinstated, but he was pressured into leaving anyway.”
The local administration disliked the fact that Yakunichev fought for his own and other people’s rights. Consequently, despite his specialized secondary education, he could only find work as a janitor.
“He helped other residents get their cases through the courts. He became very adept in these matters: he knew all the laws well, especially the Housing Code. But there was no work in Pangody. (Yakunichev graduated from a technical college and worked as a mechanic — Sibir.Realii.) He was promised a job at Gazprom—he is a good mechanic—but then they admitted that they had hired ‘one of their own people,’ meaning somebody’s relative. And that’s how everything goes here. At the time, the cronyism made Igor quite angry, not the fact that he didn’t get the job: his janitor’s salary was enough for him. And in fact, he was already a blogger: he had bought a good camera and set up a studio for editing,” says Tatyana.
All of the Yakunichevs’ expensive electronic equipment was taken away by the police during their first “hard visit.”
“In the summer of 2023, [the police] broke into [the Yakunichevs’ flat] for real and slammed Igor onto the floor. His mother screamed, ‘His spine is broken! Don’t throw him on the floor!’ But what they did care, they hit him as hard as they could. Igor has had an implant instead of one vertebra since he was a student. When he was studying at Omsk University, he lost his keys and climbed through the window in the dormitory. The balcony was dilapidated: it broke off and he fell on his back. Since then he has had a bunch of diagnoses: cervical, thoracic and lumbar osteochondrosis. And when he is worried, he can have a seizure, and it’s like impossible for him to breathe. And so they wrestled this very unwell man, who is practically disabled, and threw him on the floor. Interestingly, the camera that Igor turned on continued to record even after his fall and almost the whole ‘wrestling match’ was captured. Igor later returned from the police station, restored the recording, and posted it on [his YouTube] channel. It made the police squeal to the high heavens!” says his buddy Ivan (whose name has been changed for his own safety). “In the background you can hear them yelling wildly, ‘Hands! Hands on your head!’ Who are they yelling at? A disabled man. And [you hear] Igor asking, ‘The cats! Watch out for the cats!’ so they don’t trample his pets. It’s just brutal!
Igor Yakunichev’s video of the police raid on his family’s flat
After the police’s visit, Yakunichev learned that a criminal case on charges of “disseminating fake news” about the Russian army (per Article 207.3.1 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code) had been launched against him as early as late March 2023. He has published his first social media posts against the war at the very beginning of the war in February 2022.
“He reacted very harshly when someone would voice support for the war in his presence. He would not get into a fight, but he could try and persuade [the person] and talk [to them] until he achieved understanding or until he got tired himself. He was one of those people who never got used to the war. He understood the risks, but he still would stick his neck out. He vented everything to the policeman after [the latter] accused him of disturbing the peace at the [Russia Day] celebrations in June 2023. After [he said] these words about the unjust war with Ukraine, which he threw directly in the face of the ‘representative of the authorities,'” they targeted him specifically,” says Ivan. “They accused him of spreading ‘fake news’ about the army, threatening him with fifteen years in prison for posts on VKontakte about the Russian military’s crimes in Bucha. He and his mother filed complaints about the violations [of his civil rights], about how he had been roughed up during the arrest, how all their electronic equipment, even his mother’s computer and phone, had been cleaned out. Can you imagine, they still haven’t returned it!
As part of the first criminal case, the court banned Yakunichev from performing certain actions. In early March 2024, this case came to court. That was when it transpired that at least four more criminal cases had been launched against Yakunichev. Even prior to this, in the summer of 2023, Igor had been charged with an administrative offense for “discrediting” the army and fined thirty thousand rubles [approx. 300 euros]. Yakunichev and his family were notified about it.
“The grounds [for the charges] were ‘funny’: a video about a memorial featuring a T-54 tank in the village of Pangody. Local vatniks had drawn the letter Z on it. And Igor said in the video[‘s annotation] that it violated the law on the protection of cultural heritage objects,” says Tatyana.
Igor Yakunichev’s silent video condemnation of a WWII memorial in Pangody turned into a pro-war Victory Day display.
Then, in November and December 2023, according to Tatyana, two more criminal cases were brought against Yakunichev under the same article of the Criminal Code (Article 205.2.2, “condoning terrorism”). He faces up to seven years in prison if convicted on these charges.
“The grounds [for the charges] were videos about the Free Russia Legion ([in which a Legionnaire expresses] gratitude for donations in the fight against ‘Putinist Russia’) and about the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. They weren’t even his own videos, but reposts of other media on his VKontakte page,” says Tatyana. “Later, we learned of the case launched under the article on repeated ‘discrediting’ of the army (Article 207.3.1), and then they seemingly merged it with one of the cases under Article 205 into a single proceeding. But the number of cases is frightening, don’t you agree? He regularly received notifications that one video or another had been removed from his page ‘by decision of the prosecutor’s office.’ He did not restore them: although he is a principled man, he was just tired and fed up.”
Free Russia Legion, “The Legion Returns Home” (2023)
His relatives are certain that Igor was deliberately driven to distraction with the interrogations and the notifications so that he would “blurt something out.”
“In June, the local beat cop showed up and made a completely delusional accusation. Allegedly, at the celebrations of Russia Day in June, [Igor] had been seen drunken in a public place and a complaint was filed against him. (That day, by the way, many people had seen him and testified that he was sober and orderly, so eventually the prosecutor’s office canceled this humiliating fine.) He videotaped this wannabe policeman, but he did not hold back and said everything he thought about this unjust war against Ukraine,” says a relative of Yakunichev’s. “I believe that this cop was the one who contributed testimony against him in the first case. Now it has gone to court, and Igor has been put away in a mental institution. Because they couldn’t put him under arrest: there was too little evidence of his guilt and ‘danger to society.’ But for some reason [the police] can take him to the madhouse themselves and obtain the court ruling retroactively. His mother has worn herself out filing complaints about such violations. It is urgent to replace the court-appointed lawyer with a normal one. Although [his mother] works as a cleaner, she is ready to pay all the money she has to a decent lawyer. Because the current one is a disaster: he hasn’t even been able to obtain a meeting with Igor once all month. [His family] receive paperwork about the cases against Igor months later, so they don’t know anything about the new cases against Igor.”
Igor Yakunichev’s confrontation with the local beat cop who showed up at his home to hassle him.
According to relatives, Yakunichev’s family is disappointed with the work of the court-appointed defense lawyer and now fears that Igor’s testimony will be extracted from him by torture in the psychiatric clinic, located in the village of Vinzili, Tyumen Region, a thousand kilometers from home.
“Read the reviews of the institution: former patients write such things it makes your hair stand on end—abuse and ill treatment by staff, medication administered without explaining to family and friends what the drug is and what it is used for,” says Ivan. “I think we need to get him out of there as soon as possible. Only a normal lawyer will help. By the way, this is not the first time [the authorities] have tried to subject him to punitive psychiatry. After his anti-war reposts, they were going to mobilize Igor. Yes, with his twisted spine and numbness in his chest! [Yakunichev’s family] went to the courts, got an independent forensics report, confirmed all the diagnoses, and it seemed to go away. And now this. I’m really afraid [the authorities] are not going to give up on this psychiatric hospitalization thing.”
Yakunichev’s relatives fear that the forensic psychological examination at the psychiatric clinic in the Tyumen Region will not be limited to the case and Igor will be kept there “indefinitely”.
The evidence in the last two criminal cases against Igor Yakunichev (on charges of violating Articles 280.1 and 207.3.2 of the Criminal Code) have still not been made available to his family.
“We found out from independent human rights activists—we don’t really know what he’s accused of,” says the relative. “Now they can’t even send you copies of previous cases, because during the search in April [the police] cleaned the Yakunichevs out: [they confiscated] their computer, which his mother had replaced, the telephone, even the TV set! They virtually robbed them so that they could do nothing at all, neither find a lawyer, nor send an electronic complaint.
Anarchist and mathematician Azat Miftakhov has been sentenced to four years in a maximum security facility on criminal charges of “condoning terrorism.” The young man will spend the first two and a half years of his sentence in a closed prison. Miftakhov was detained in September 2023 as he was leaving the penal colony from which he had been released after completing his sentence on charges related to the breaking of a window at a United Russia party office. The next day he was remanded in custody in a pretrial detention center. According to the security forces, while watching TV with other inmates Miftakhov had spoken approvingly of the actions of Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who bombed the FSB’s Arkhangelsk offices [in 2018].
Why do I need to know this? Miftakhov’s wife, Yelena Gorban, argues that this criminal case was launched by members of the security forces who wanted to “extend Azat’s sentence for his past political activity.” In her statement to the court, she said that her husband was aware of the dangers of wiretapping in the penal colony, and so he had avoided discussing political topics in the company of inmates. “The conspicuousness and brazenness with which they fake evidence doesn’t embarrass them. It even plays into their hands. It’s like they’re telling us, ‘It’s no trouble for us to put anyone away,'” the anarchist himself said in [his closing statement at the trial].
Source: It’s Been That Kind of Week newsletter (OVD Info), 30 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
A video and audio recording of Azat Miftakhov’s closing statement at his trial and his sentencing, 28 March 2024, Yekaterinburg. Source: FreeAzat (Telegram), 31 March 2024
During the years I was imprisoned on the charges in previous criminal case, I failed to fall head over heels in love with the state, and now I again find myself in the dock. I am now on trial for what the security forces have deigned to call “condoning terrorism” by faking the evidence, as they did five years ago. The conspicuousness and brazenness with which they fake evidence doesn’t embarrass them. It even plays into their hands. It’s like they’re telling us, “It’s no trouble for us to put anyone away.”
We see the same brazenness in the numerous incidents of barbarous torture perpetrated by the regime’s guardians, the FSB. These guardians don’t care that their shameful deeds are made public. On the contrary, these deeds are flaunted as a source of pride. In this way, the state shows its terrorist nature, as anarchists pointed out before the previous presidential election by taking to the streets with the slogan “The FSB are the main terrorists.”
What we were saying back then has now become obvious not only in our country but all over the world. We how see how the [Russian] state’s entire foreign and domestic policy has become a conveyor belt of murder and intimidation. While fake witnesses attempt to prove the charges that I “condoned terrorism,” national TV channels broadcast calls for the mass murder of people who disagree with state policy. We see that the state, while paying lip service to combating terrorism, in fact seeks to maintain its monopoly on terror.
No matter how the Chekists try to intimidate civil society, we see even in these dark times people who find the courage to resist the terror that has spilled over the state’s borders. Risking their freedom and their lives, their actions awaken our society’s conscience, whose lack we now feel so acutely, and their steadfastness to the bitter end stands as an example for us all.
One such example for me was my friend and comrade Dmitry Petrov (aka Dima the Ecologist), who died defending Bakhmut from soldiers who had become tools of imperialism. I knew him as a fiery anarchist who, amidst a dictatorship, did everything he could to lead us to a society based on the principles of mutual aid and direct democracy.
As a graduate of the history program at Moscow State University and a PhD in history, he was well versed in the structure of society and was able to argue his position well, something I had always lacked. And yet he was not limited to theorizing but was also heavily involved in organizing the guerrilla movement, which did not escape the FSB’s notice. Because of this, he was forced to continue his work as an anarchist in Ukraine.
When the grim events of the last two years kicked off, he could not stay on the sidelines. An enterprising comrade, he sought to create an association of libertarian-minded people who would fight for the freedom of the peoples of Ukraine and Russia. Unfortunately, no war is without casualties, and Dima was one of them. It would be unjustifiably selfish of me to admire the selflessness of strangers alone and not to acknowledge the sacrifice of those who are personally dear to me. I am well aware of this, despite my regret that all my fellowship with him is now irrevocably a thing of the past.
And yet I find it hard to accept this loss. Knowing that he was one of the best of us, and wanting to do my best to ensure his sacrifice was not in vain, I have to recognize that my contribution will be insignificant compared to what he was capable of.
What I’ve just said was perhaps unexpected for some people. I cannot rule out that some of my supporters could be disappointed, as I find it difficult, to my own regret, to speak out publicly. Perhaps someone will disagree with my beliefs, which are at odds with pacifism.
Striving to be rational about everything, however, I reject a belief in things whose existence has not been proven. Among other things, I do not believe in the world’s justice. I do not believe that all evil will be punished as a matter of course. That’s why I support vigorously resisting evil and fighting for a better world for all of us.
But even if some of my supporters do not share all of my beliefs, I am still grateful for all of their help.
I am grateful to everyone who has written me letters full of warmth and good wishes. Even amidst the desolation of the penal colony, I received stacks of them almost every week. I am certain that such great attention to me was borne in mind by the people who set out to make me submissive. I find it quite pleasant and touching that people share a part of their lives with me, whether the experiences are joyful or sad. Every letter is very dear to my heart, and I read every single one of them.
Many thanks to all those who have supported me financially. Thanks to them I have never lacked anything during all the years of my imprisonment. There have been times when I have run out of money to support me, but as soon as I put out a call for help, within a few days people who cared about me brought my budget back to a comfortable level. This is very pleasant and impossible to forget. Special thanks to Vladimir Akimenkov, who for more than ten years has been organizing fundraisers to support political prisoners, including me.
I am extremely grateful to the activists in the FreeAzat and Solidarité FreeAzat collectives, who have organized campaigns and events in solidarity with me on a scale which boggles my mind. Your recent “1001 Letters” campaign was one of them. After reading all those letters, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that people in dozens of different countries are concerned about me. Thank you very much to everyone who was involved in this campaign, thus showing me how much you support me.
I am extremely grateful to mathematicians all over the world, and specifically to the Azat Miftakhov Committee, for supporting me on behalf of the mathematical community. I am very touched that people to whom I look up, whose scholarly prowess I dream of achieving someday, know about me and voice their solidarity.
Thank you very much to everyone who has spoken publicly about me. And special thanks to Mikhail Lobanov, who was forced to emigrate to France for vigorously supporting me. But even there, despite all the difficulties of exile, his solidarity with me has been as strong as ever.
Many thanks to the Russian activists, including those who don’t belong to collectives mentioned above, who have risked their comfort by showing solidarity with me while living under a dictatorship. I am very grateful to all who came to support me with their presence by attending the trial. Some of you traveled hundreds of kilometers for this purpose, and some of you did it more than once and more than twice. I was once again pleasantly surprised by such a huge attention to me.
Many thanks to all the honest members of the press who, through their work, have been helping the public to follow my trial.
I thank my defense counsel, Svetlana Sidorkina, for her dedication in defending me at my trials. I never cease to admire her professionalism and I am convinced that I am very lucky to have her. Finally, I would like to thank Lena, my main support in my tribulations. She has helped me through her dedication to overcoming all the difficulties of my imprisonment. On top of that, I am blessed to be in love with her.
As I finish my acknowledgements, I am left with the feeling that someone may have been overlooked. This is a consequence of the tremendous, steady support I have received since the moment of my arrest. I am pleased to see I am not the only one who has been the object of your support—that, despite the dark events of recent years, your solidarity knows no territorial boundaries. This is what gives me hope for a bright future for all of us.
