Tag: Russian anti-war movement

Reclaiming Whiteness: In Search of the “Good Russians”

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

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

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

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

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

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 What it lacks in ambition—the grand tour of yesteryear has been replaced by the more modest Mykonos beach jaunt, Milan shopping spree or week’s skiing in Courchevel—it makes up for in numbers.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

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

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

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

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

From Russia with visas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: GW Events Calendar

[…]

War-related news from Russia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please don’t leave me alone again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two sentenced for murder of Kherson Oblast man who criticised war

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

Stoptime buskers jailed for third time

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

More people sentenced for anti-regime activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Courtroom Rebels Standing Up to Warmonger Putin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voices Against Putin’s War

On May 16, 2022, the Ukrainian artist Bohdan Ziza poured blue and yellow paint – the colours of his country’s flag – on to a municipal administration building in his home town, Yevpatoria, in Crimea.

Ziza posted a video of the action online, with a call to “adherents of graffiti culture, all the vandals of Crimea, Russia and Belarus” to protest against “the most horrific war” unleashed by “[Vladimir] Putin and the machine of state.” He was soon arrested and charged with “committing a terrorist act” and “incitement to terrorism”.

In June 2023, Ziza used his final statement to the Russian military court that sentenced him to fifteen years’ imprisonment to denounce the war again: “My action was a cry from the heart, from my conscience, to those who were and are afraid — just as I was afraid — but who also did not want this war.”

Ziza is one of ten anti-war protesters whose speeches are published this month, in English translation, in Voices Against Putin’s War: protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts. The collection also includes two statements made outside court, related interviews and letters, a summary of seventeen other anti-war speeches in court, and a survey of the anti-war protest movement and the repression against it.

In Russia, dissenters since the Populist rebels of the 1870s have used their final statement in court to urge resistance to power. The tradition flourished in the workers’ movements that preceded the 1917 revolution, was broken by the 1930s Stalinist show trials with their formulaic confessions, and reborn after the 1950s “thaw”, with dissidents such as the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yulii Daniel.

In 2022, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine was followed by a brutal crackdown on civil society in occupied territory, Crimea included, as well as repression of domestic dissent. Protest was driven off the streets. Individual non-violent direct actions like Ziza’s, or writing or speaking against the war, were punished with long jail sentences, such as those now being served by most of the protagonists in Voices Against Putin’s War. 

Ruslan Siddiqi, the Russian-Italian anarchist, went further: he is serving twenty-nine years’ imprisonment for derailing a train that was carrying munitions to Russian army units in Ukraine.

In court, he declared himself a prisoner of war, rather than a political prisoner: “My targets were Russian military equipment and the logistical chains used to transport military hardware and fuel. I wanted to impede military operations against Ukraine.”

Acting according to one’s conscience, in a dystopian world of militarism and big lies, was a central consideration for many of the protagonists.

Alexei Rozhkov, who firebombed a military recruitment centre in Sverdlovsk region, fled to Kyrgyzstan while on bail, before he was kidnapped by Russian special forces and returned to be put on trial.

He told the court that sentenced him to sixteen years: “Although I have never been a politician or a statesman, I could not remain indifferent when the war began. I have a conscience, and I preferred to hold on to it.”

The book’s protagonists oppose the war from a wide range of political viewpoints. On one hand, there are pacifists such as Sasha Skochilenko, the artist jailed for seven years for replacing labels in a supermarket with handwritten anti-war messages (and later freed in a prisoner swap between Russia and Western countries), who told the court: “Wars don’t end thanks to warriors — they end thanks to pacifists.”

On the other hand, there are political activists who spoke of Ukraine’s right to resist Russia militarily. Aleksandr Skobov, 67, the oldest protagonist, first jailed for activity in the socialist wing of the Soviet dissident movement in 1978, refused to stand when the judge came into court.

Skobov wished death on the “murderer, tyrant and scoundrel Putin.” He said he would never stop calling on honest Russians to join the Ukrainian armed forces, and for air strikes on Russia’s military facilities.

No less adamant in support of Ukraine was the youngest protagonist, Darya Kozyreva, 19, sentenced to two years and eight months’ imprisonment for laying flowers and a poem at the statue of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, in St Petersburg.

In court, Bohdan Ziza denounced not only the 2022 invasion but also the frenzied assault on Crimean Tatar organisations that preceded it in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. “Those who so passionately seek ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine have not opened their eyes to the Nazism in Russia, with its ephemeral ‘Russian world’,” with which the armed forces have “tried to extirpate Ukrainian identity”.

(Last month Ziza, on his own demand, had the Russian citizenship that was imposed on him along with all Crimean residents revoked. He is today in Vladimir Central jail, where “politicals” have been incarcerated since the 19th century.)

Voices Against Putin’s War results from the work of a small volunteer group of translators supporting Russian anti-war organisations, of which I was part, and is supported by the European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine. On top of the speeches published, we have summarised seventeen more from the wonderful “Poslednee Slovo” (“last word”) website.

The trials highlighted in the book also provide a snapshot of Russia’s wartime lurch towards a form of fascism. Against those who take non-violent direct action, charges under terrorism laws were standardised in 2022, with jail sentences of between ten and twenty years. Torture of detainees is routine.

Long sentences are designed to terrorise people into silence: Andrei Trofimov got ten years for social media posts justifying Ukrainian military actions against Russia.

For his two-minute speech in the military court, which ended “Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a dickhead” he was charged with “condoning terrorism” and “defaming the army”: a further three years were added to his sentence.

The monstrosity of Russia’s domestic repression may properly be understood in the context of the bloodbath it has visited on Ukraine, and especially on the occupied territories.

Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and wounded in action, and millions of Ukrainian civilians have been uprooted from their homes by bombing. Added to that, people in the occupied areas have faced enforced imposition of Russian citizenship, mass deportations including of children (the basis of a case against Putin in the International Criminal Court), legal nihilism, and an economic slump.

The primary instrument of social discipline in the occupied areas is enforced disappearances, including imprisonment. In September 2024, Ukraine’s register of persons “missing under special circumstances” counted some 48,324 names, of which 4,700 were confirmed by the Ukrainian government to be in captivity, although the true number may be far higher.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe estimated that 16,000 people on the register were adult civilians. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group identified 5,000 victims of enforced disappearances while preparing material for the International Criminal Court, and the Ukrainian ombudsman is working on 1,700 such cases. (All these numbers relate to civilians detained or missing, as distinct from Ukrainian prisoners of war, of which there are some 8,000–10,000.)

In short, Russia has taken many thousands of civilian prisoners in the occupied territories, whose fates often remain unknown. Many are political prisoners: 585 journalists, community leaders and activists from newly-occupied territories identified by human-rights organizations, 265 counted by the Crimean Human Rights Group, and others.

Furthermore, there are the thousands of civilian prisoners jailed by the so-called “People’s Republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk between 2014 and 2022, including for political offences, who have been transferred to prisons in Russia.

Alongside this orgy of violence, Russia’s machine of domestic repression has gone into overdrive.

A swathe of new censorious laws, for instance penalizing “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian military” (which includes calling the war a war) have been added to the pre-existing laws on “foreign agents”, “undesirable organizations” and “extremism” from the last decade. Deranged police sweeps of people whose critical comments are harvested from social media have intensified.

The leading human-rights organisation Memorial: Political Prisoners Support, now based abroad, lists over 3,000 political detainees today, compared to just 50 in 2015 and 420 in 2021. After the post-Stalin “thaw”, historians reckon the number of political detainees in the Soviet Union fell to 5,000-10,000 in the 1970s (in the fifteen-republic union, with a population nearly twice that of Russia alone).

The trend reflected in these numbers justifies the term we have used in Voices Against Putin’s War: a “21st-century gulag.”

Amidst an international tide of rising right-wing authoritarianism and militarism, culminating in the genocide in Gaza, the speeches in the book are significant far beyond Russia. In his foreword, John McDonnell, a left-wing Labour MP in the UK, calls them “an inspiration to all those across the globe who see an injustice, and who refuse to passively comply”, from Israeli draft refuseniks and Palestine Action supporters in Britain to women demonstrating for life and liberty in Iran. That is where hope lies in our dark times.

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

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

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

Source: Simon Pirani, “Raging against Putin’s war machine,” People and Nature, 20 October 2025. Originally published in Jacobin

Toxicity

School of Rock performs System of a Down’s “Toxicity” (2022)

Actors Martin and Janet Sheen, John Cusack and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek have signed an open letter urging Russian prison officials to end the solitary confinement of jailed activist Mikhail Kriger, who has been on a dry hunger strike for more than a week.

They join Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson, who earlier this week called on the local prison chief to end Kriger’s isolation.

Kriger, 65, first launched a hunger strike in late September. He started a dry hunger strike — meaning abstention from both food and water — last Friday after a planned visit with his daughter was canceled.

Kriger has accused prison authorities of deliberately trying to isolate him to prevent contact with other inmates. 

The latest signatories of the letter to the head of Correctional Colony No. 5 in Russia’s Oryol region claimed Kriger’s condition “has now become critical,” according to the letter published by the exiled news website Mediazona.

“[Kriger’s] speech has slowed, his gaze is unfocused and he is extremely weak. Dry hunger strikes cause organ failure and quickly lead to shock and death,” the Sheens, Cusack and Žižek wrote.

Kriger was in 2023 sentenced to seven years in prison for “justifying terrorism” and “inciting hatred” over anti-Kremlin social media posts. The activist said during trial that he was being persecuted for his anti-war views and open pro-Ukrainian position.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial designated Kriger a political prisoner.

The anti-Kremlin activist group Pussy Riot raised alarm over Kriger’s hunger strike earlier this week, calling on followers to write letters to him and the prison administration. 

It was not immediately clear whether authorities in the Oryol region prison colony intended to respond to the international appeals.

It was also not clear when Kriger was expected to be moved out of solitary confinement and whether his medical condition was being properly monitored.

Kriger’s support group said the activist was taken to a regional hospital on Wednesday for tests, the results of which have not been shared.

Kriger’s lawyer said he was “cheerful, wrote poems and even offered to hop on one leg to show his strength,” the support group said in an update Thursday.

“Forced feeding will only begin if he loses consciousness or doctors deem his condition critical,” Kriger’s support group wrote on Telegram.

Source: “Hollywood Stars Back Jailed Russian Activist on Hunger Strike,” Moscow Times, 17 October 2025

Yegor Shramko holding a placard that reads “No to the war with Ukraine” in Petersburg’s Palace Square

Our correspondent reports that activist Yegor Shramko did an anti-war picket in Palace Square and was detained.

The Petersburg man held a blue-and-yellow placard bearing the slogan “No to the war in Ukraine” and stood this way for around an hour. Shramko told our correspondent that although passersby supported him, the police were summoned by animateurs dressed as Russian emperors and empresses who offer to take photos with them for money on the square.

“I cannot keep silent. A life in which you have to fear everything, keep quiet, and be afraid of every little noise has no value for me,” Shramko explained to Bumaga.

He told RusNews that he had been wanting to stage the protest for four months but only worked up the nerve today.

This past summer, Shramko was jailed for twenty-four hours on charges of “displaying extremist symbols.” The “extremist symbol” in this case was the portrait of Alexei Navalny which Shramko brought to the Solovetsky Stone on the murdered politician’s birthday. At the time, Shramko told Bumaga that Navalny’s own words—”I’m not afraid, and you shouldn’t be afraid either”—had encouraged him to take the plunge and risk arrest by carrying out the proteest.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 17 October 2025. Thanks to Hanna Perekhoda for the heads-up.

The activist held a solo picket for about an hour. St. Petersburg residents approached him—some offered words of support, while others began arguing with him. More than 50 minutes after the picket began, security forces in full uniform arrived and detained Yegor.

Source: “Security forces detained activist Yegor Shramko, who was holding a pacifist picket | St. Petersburg,” RusNews (YouTube), 18 October 2025

As you have probably heard, recently, on a Swiss train, a Russian man (with Latvian citizenship) attacked a family. The family was speaking Ukrainian among themselves. He started threatening to kill them and their baby.

It’s easy to dismiss this as just another “fait divers” (which, in a sense, it is), but I think it says something larger. To understand his actions, you have to understand where it comes from.

For centuries, the inhabitants of the Russian state lived in a situation where order depended on fear and extreme forms of violence. This was true in much of the world, but while many countries began to change over the last century (let’s put aside the reasons behind the change), in the Russian/Soviet empire the situation actually became worse. Much worse.

The rules were never something people agreed to follow together (after all, you need to feel a part of a society and thus to share common imaginary to do it, and it is impossible to do it if you live in the empire, however much some contemporary researchers might wish it). It is something they were imposed from above, by the state, or by whoever had power over you at the moment. People learned that laws only mattered when someone strong was watching. So when a person raised in that kind of world finds themselves in a place like Switzerland, where rules work because the majority respects them voluntarily, they see the absence of fear and coercion as a sign that anything goes.

The man in that train was in a setting where no one was looking as capable to physically stop him and he took that as permission to dominate others, those people that he hates for the mere fact of their existence.

This same pattern plays out on a global scale. The Russian state elites see Europe much like that man saw the train: as a place without explicit “real” (military) force. It looks fake, easy to break, like a house of cards, because it relies on trust, and thus, in their view, on NOTHING.

People and societies shaped by fear and domination can’t imagine relationships built on any agreements (that require trust). They assume that if no one is dominating explicitly, it’s an invitation to act.

The man on the train and Putin’s crew are two versions of the same story. Both come from a social setting that sees respect as submission, peace as weakness, agreements as empty shells and absence of explicit force as an invitation to unlimited violence.

Source: Hanna Perekhoda (Facebook), 18 October 2025

Donald Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday to make a deal with Russia, pouring cold water on Kyiv’s push for Tomahawk missiles as the U.S. leader pursues a diplomatic solution to the war.

Trump said as recently as last month that he believed Ukraine could take back all its territory — but a day after agreeing to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin for a new summit the American had changed his tune.

After meeting with Zelensky at the White House, Trump said on social media that their talks were “very interesting, and cordial, but I told him, as I likewise strongly suggested to President Putin, that it is time to stop the killing, and make a DEAL!”

Trump also appeared to suggest both sides should accept their current front lines. “They should stop where they are. Let both claim Victory, let History decide!” he said.

Zelensky said after the meeting that Russia was “afraid” of the U.S.-made long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, but that he was “realistic” about receiving the weapons from Washington.

He told reporters that while he and Trump talked about long-range weapons they “decided that we don’t speak about it because… the United States doesn’t want escalation.”

‘Get the war over’

Zelensky came to Washington after weeks of calls for Tomahawks, hoping to capitalize on Trump’s growing frustration with Putin after a summit in Alaska failed to produce a breakthrough.

But the Ukrainian left empty-handed as Trump eyes a fresh diplomatic breakthrough on the back of last week’s Gaza peace deal.

Trump has appeared far more upbeat about the prospects of a deal since his two-and-a-half hour call with Putin on Thursday, in which they agreed to meet in Budapest.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to get the war over with without thinking about Tomahawks,” Trump told journalists including an AFP reporter as he hosted Zelensky at the White House.

Trump added that he believed Putin “wants to end the war.”

Zelensky, who came to the White House to push for the long-range U.S.-made weapons, said however that he would be ready to swap “thousands” of Ukrainian drones in exchange for Tomahawks.

Zelensky congratulated Trump on his recent Middle East peace deal in Gaza and said he hoped he would do the same for Ukraine. “I hope that President Trump can manage it,” he said.

‘Many questions’

Diplomatic talks on ending Russia’s invasion have stalled since the Alaska summit.

The Kremlin said Friday that “many questions” needed resolving before Putin and Trump could meet, including who would be on each negotiating team.

But it brushed off suggestions Putin would have difficulty flying over European airspace.

Hungary said it would ensure Putin could enter and “hold successful talks” with the United States despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against him for alleged war crimes.

Since the start of his second term, Trump’s position on the Ukraine war has shifted dramatically back and forth.

Initially Trump and Putin reached out to each other as the U.S. leader derided Zelensky as a “dictator without elections.”

Tensions came to a head in February, when Trump accused his Ukrainian counterpart of “not having the cards” in a rancorous televised meeting at the Oval Office.

Relations between the two have since warmed as Trump has expressed growing frustration with Putin.

But Trump has kept a channel of dialogue open with Putin, saying that they “get along.”

The U.S. leader has repeatedly changed his position on sanctions and other steps against Moscow following calls with the Russian president.

Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, describing it as a “special military operation” to demilitarize the country and prevent the expansion of NATO.

Russia now occupies around a fifth of Ukrainian territory — much of it ravaged by fighting.

On Friday the Russian Defense Ministry announced it had captured three villages in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions.

Source: Danny Kemp (AFP), “Trump Tells Zelensky to ‘Make a Deal’ as Tomahawk Plea Misfires,” Moscow Times, 18 October 2025

All last week, Republican leaders tried to portray the No Kings protests scheduled for Saturday, October 18, as “Hate America” rallies. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers partnered with Atlanta-based science newsroom The Xylom to estimate that as many as 8.2 million people turned out yesterday to oppose the Trump administration. The mood at the protests was joyful and peaceful, with protesters holding signs that championed American principles of democracy, free speech, equality, and the rule of law. As the Grand Junction, Colorado, Daily Sentinel put it in a front-page headline: “‘This is America’ ‘No Kings’ protests against Trump bring a street party vibe to cities nationwide.”

Then last night, after the protests, the president’s social media account posted an AI-generated video showing Trump in a fighter jet with “KING TRUMP” painted on the side. The president sits in the airplane in front of something round that could be seen as a halo. He is wearing a gold crown; weirdly, the oxygen mask is over his mouth and chin, rather than mouth and nose.

Once in the air, the plane drops excrement on American cities, including what seems to be New York City. The excrement drenches protesters, one of whom is 23-year-old liberal political commentator and influencer Harry Sisson. Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who shares media clips that reflect politics, commented: “Trump posts AI video showing him literally dumping sh*t on America.” Historian Larry Glickman noted that media outlets make much of alleged Democratic disdain for ordinary Americans, but have had little to say about the disdain for Americans embodied by Trump’s video.

Several administration videos and images have responded to Americans saying “No Kings” by taking the position “Yes, We Want Kings,” an open embrace of the end of democracy. But they are more than simple trolling. Led by Trump, MAGA Republicans have abandoned the idea of politics, which is the process of engaging in debate and negotiation to attract support and win power. What is left when a system loses the give and take of politics is force.

The idea that leaders must attract voters with reasoned arguments to win power and must concede power when their opponents win has been the central premise of American government since 1800. In that year, after a charged election in which each side accused the other of trying to destroy the country, Federalist John Adams turned the reins of government over to the leader of the opposition, Thomas Jefferson. That peaceful transfer of power not only protected the people, it protected leaders who had lost the support of voters, giving them a way to leave office safely and either retire or regroup to make another run at power.

The peaceful transfer of power symbolized the nation’s political system and became the hallmark of the United States of America. It lasted until January 6, 2021, when sitting president Trump refused to accept the voters’ election of Democrat Joe Biden, the leader of the opposition.

Now back in power, Trump and his loyalists are continuing to undermine the idea of politics, policies, and debate, trying instead to delegitimize the Democratic opposition altogether. Yesterday, during the protests, President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D Vance, and the official White House social media account posted a video of Trump placing a royal crown on his head, draping a royal robe around his shoulders, and unsheathing and brandishing a sword (an image that raises questions about why Trump wanted one of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s swords so badly that he had the museum director who refused to hand it over fired). In the video, Democratic leaders including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and what appears to be Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first kneel and then bow to Trump.

Administration imagery doesn’t simply insult opposition leaders; it undermines the idea of politics by suggesting that Democrats are un-American. Last night the White House continued its racist crusade against Democratic leaders by posted an AI-generated image of Trump and Vance wearing jewel-encrusted crowns positioned above an image of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wearing Mexican sombreros. The caption reads: “We’re built different.”

The administration’s hostility to loyal opposition is translating into direct assaults on our government. House speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to seat a member of the opposition. Voters chose representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) on September 23 to fill a vacant House seat, but Johnson has come up with one reason after another not to seat her. Until she is sworn in, she has no access to government resources and cannot represent her constituents. She also cannot be the 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a vote on whether to demand the release of the Epstein files, the final signature needed.

Grijalva recorded a video reinforcing the political system, saying: “We need to get to work, get on the floor, and negotiate so we can reopen the government.”

But Republican congressional leaders are refusing even to talk with Democrats to reopen the government, let alone to negotiate with them. They are trying to force Democrats simply to do as they say, despite the fact that 78% of Americans, including 59% of Republicans, support the Democrats’ demand for an extension of the tax credit that lowers the cost of healthcare premiums on the Affordable Care Act markets. Lindsay Wise, Anna Wilde Mathews, and Katy Stech Ferek of the Wall Street Journal reported today that more than three quarters of those who are insured through the ACA markets live in states that voted for Trump.

A video of Trump in a bomber attacking American cities carries an implied threat that the disdain of throwing excrement doesn’t erase. This morning, Trump reinforced that threat when he reminded Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo: “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that’s unquestioned power. I choose not to, I’d rather do this, but I’m met constantly by fake politicians, politicians that think that, that you know they it’s not like a part of the radical left movement to have safety. These cities have to be safe.”

That “safety” apparently involves detaining U.S. citizens without due process. On Thursday, Nicole Foy of ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents. She reports they “have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”

On Friday, the Trump administration pushed its attempt to use the military in Democratic-led cities, asking the Supreme Court to let it deploy troops in Chicago immediately. Chris Geidner of Law Dork notes that four judges, two appointed by Democrats and two appointed by Republicans, have rejected the administration’s arguments for why they must send in troops. Now the Department of Justice has appealed to the Supreme Court, asking for a decision on the so-called shadow docket, which would provide a fast response, but one without any hearings or explanation.

The administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court warned that there was “pressing risk of violence” in Chicago—a premise the judges rejected—and said preventing Trump from going into the city “improperly impinges on the President’s authority.”

How much difference will the No Kings Day protests, even as big as they were, make in the face of the administration’s attempt to get rid of our democratic political system and replace it with authoritarianism? What good is an inflatable frog against federal agents?

Scholar of social movements Lisa Corrigan noted that large, fun marches full of art and music expand connections and make people more willing to take risks against growing state power. They build larger communities by creating new images that bring together recognizable images from the past in new ways, helping more people see themselves in such an opposition. The community and good feelings those gatherings develop help carry opposition through hard moments. Corrigan notes, too, that yesterday “every single rally (including in the small towns) was bigger than the surrounding police force available. That kind of image event is VERY IMPORTANT if you’re…demonstrating social coherence AGAINST a fascist government and its makeshift gestapo.”

Such rallies “bring together multigenerational groups and the playfulness can help create enthusiasm for big tent politics against the monoculture of fascism,” Corrigan writes. “The frogs (and unicorns and dinosaurs) will be defining ideographs of this period of struggle.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 19 October 2025

System of a Down, “Toxicity” (2001)

Sunday Reader No. 6: Hell Is Full

On Chaplygin Street in Moscow. Photo by anatrrra. Used with their permission

EXTERIOR: A neo-classical building in Moscow’s old German quarter. A plaque on the wall reads, “Western District Military Court No 2”. A group of actors and journalists mill around on the lawn.

INTERIOR: A large hall with a grand staircase. Through the frame of a metal detector stands a statue of Lady Justice in her blindfold, holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other.

A commotion. Several portly guards in flak jackets, with a dog on a leash, escort two handcuffed women through the hall. One, about 5ft tall with big eyes and curly hair, is Yevgenia Berkovich, a 39-year-old poet and theatre director. She is dressed in a white shirt and black trouser-suit. The other, slightly taller, wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and large owlish glasses, is Svetlana Petriychuk, a 44-year-old playwright.

The two women are led into a courtroom and placed in a cage of bullet-proof glass. A bailiff lets in the spectators, who sit down on the upholstered, green benches. Berkovich mischievously sticks out her tongue as photographers’ cameras flash and click. Yuri Massin, the judge, looks towards Berkovich.

Massin: Are you ready for the proceedings?
Berkovich: Well, it depends on what will happen.

What happened was a show trial that revealed the radicalisation of the Russian state in the past few years. By the time proceedings began on May 20th 2024, Berkovich and Petriychuk had already been in detention for more than a year, having been charged with “propaganda and the justification of terrorism”. In the eyes of the regime, they had committed a crime by writing and staging a play called “Finist, the Bright Falcon”. Part docu-drama, part fable, “Finist” tells the story of the thousands of Russian women who, from 2015, were seduced online by professional recruiters from Islamic State (IS), and travelled to Syria to marry jihadists. Many of these women received lengthy sentences on their return home. The play premiered in 2020 to critical acclaim and was performed across the country.

As with any show trial, this one’s outcome was preordained, and its purpose was to justify the existing system and demarcate the ideological limits of the state. In doing so, it elucidated the ultra-conservative, anti-Western belief system that has expanded across public life since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Berkovich and Petriychuk were the first artists to be jailed since Soviet times for the content of their work—or, more precisely, the thoughts of their characters. But as theatrical professionals, they managed to turn the trial into their show.

Continue reading “Sunday Reader No. 6: Hell Is Full” →

Andrei Khrzhanovsky: Even Tel Aviv Hipsters Can Commit Genocide

Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Source: social media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Karen Shainyan (YouTube), 2 February 2024

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

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

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

Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Source: social media

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

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

Continue reading “Andrei Khrzhanovsky: Even Tel Aviv Hipsters Can Commit Genocide” →

Turning Her Back on Propaganda: Valeria Zotova

Valeria Zotova

Turning Her Back on Propaganda
What does daily life consist of in a prison camp? It consists of work, of course, work which is dull and exhausting. It consists of sleep, which is fitful, as sometimes there are inspections every two hours. And it consists of spending time with people whom you didn’t choose to spend time with. The wardens make sure to burden convicts so that they have nothing that is theirs alone, so that they have no time to think about anything, so that they are entirely subordinate to the powers that be. The goal of prison camp “re-education” is the same: breaking the will of the prisoners, turning them into obedient robots who obey all the orders of their superiors.

This is especially true for political prisoners—people who think independently and have their own principles. The overarching mission of the wardens is to attain voluntary submission, joyful and proactive submission, from political prisoners. But the wardens rarely succeed in this mission.

They have utterly failed with Valeria Zotova, a political prisoner at Kostroma Penal Colony No. 3. The wardens have insistently offered her a path to redemption, that is, cooperating with the authorities and taking part in “civic life.” Zotova has turned it down.

Recently, the prison camp’s club showed a movie, a Russian propaganda film titled Callsign: Passenger. Here is what Wikipedia says about the movie: “The movie is set in 2015. The movie’s main character is Nikolai Ryabinin, a trendy Moscow writer and carefree party animal. His brother volunteered for the war in Donbass and has gone missing. Nikolai goes looking for his brother and joins a separatist unit, the Aurora Battalion, in which his brother previously served. There, he gets the ironic nickname “Passenger” and under the leadership of the commander (callsign: Trigger) reevaluates his own life and comes to support the separatists.”

It’s an unimaginative piece of propaganda based on Alexander Prokhanov’s novel The Murder of Cities. It’s cheap trash, of course, like the writer himself, but the convicts are obliged to drink this cinematic concoction down to the dregs. All of them are herded into the club. Zotova refuses to go. Ultimately, it’s her right to watch the movie or not. But what do rights matter when it comes to Russian patriotism! Zotova is forcibly escorted into the auditorium. Watch our high art: look what talented filmmakers made it, what actors starred in it! But Lera Zotova turns her back on the screen and looks the other way.

Turning one’s back on propaganda is simple—simple but dangerous. The pressure on Valeria continues unabated. The harassment has been endless. The wardens summoned a friend of Zotova’s and stipulated to either: “Either freedom or Zotova—you choose.” They have been trying to create a vacuum around the political prisoner, depriving her of contact with those who are close to her in any way. The young woman is twenty-one years old, but she has been bullied like a hardened criminal. Because, as prison authorities envision it, she should be like everyone else: obedient, involved in the prison camp’s civic life, acting in plays, fulfilling the production quotas, and not smarting off to her superiors.

Source: Alexander Podrabinek (Facebook), 24 August 2025. Thanks to VA for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Yulia Moskovskaya, Terrorist

Twenty-two-year-old Yulia Moskovskaya (née Joban) was detained in Petersburg in mid-June. She is suspected of attempting to carry out a terrorist attack against a drone design company employee. She failed to plant an explosive device [sic], according to the press service of the Petersburg municipal courts.

Moskovskaya was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center. Investigators say that she “espouses a pro-Ukrainian ideology and is hostile to the current Russian government,” and claim that the young woman tried to “impact decision-making” by means of a terrorist attack. Criminal terrorist cases are opened every month, but usually they do not involve harm to specific people. In 2024, seventy-five people, including ten women, were convicted in Russia for carrying out terrorist attacks.

Bumaga has learned that Moskovskaya is not speaking with her family, and that a female friend of her has become her spokesperson. We chatted with this young woman about how the suspect behaved before her arrest, how she got into debt, and when she moved to Petersburg.

The detainee’s family: “Yulia changed her surname: she didn’t want anything to remind her of her kin”

Yulia and I are quite close friends. Her lawyer informed me of her arrest. I was shocked when he contacted me. At first I thought it was some kind of prank. I still can’t believe it has really happened.

I have known Yulia since 2017. We are from different cities and met online in a fan group for our favorite singer. At first, we were pen pals, but then we took our relationship offline and saw each other in person many times.

Yulia wasn’t in touch with many people, so she must have given the lawyer my contact info. She didn’t have many friends. Yulia didn’t speak with her relatives. She has a mother and a younger brother [who live in Moscow], as well as her grandparents, who live in some other city.

Yulia has always had bad relations with her mother. Her mother had a live-in boyfriend who always treated Yulia badly and beat her. Her mother took the boyfriend’s side and didn’t stand up for her daughter.

Yulia Moskovskaya. Source: social media

Yulia’s father died in 2020, and Yulia didn’t have a close relationship with him either. He drank heavily. He regularly brought his drinking buddies home and would get so drunk that he couldn’t stand up. Yulia often escaped to the neighbors when her father, out of his mind, tried to beat her. When we talked on the phone, I could hear her father getting into a fighting mood; he would be saying something to Yulia, and she would scream and run off. The neighbors would even call the police, but they could calm him down only for a while, and only once did take him to the slammer. Yulia essentially had no one to whom she could turn. In difficult situations, she would call the mental health hotline.

As an adult, Yulia changed her surname [from Joban to Moskovskaya]: according to her, she didn’t want anything to remind her of her kin. She sought treatment from psychologists. In the beginning, she had hope that they would help her, but then she just went to them to get things off her chest.

Debts and the move from Moscow to Petersburg: “Creative work was her only stable hobby”

Three times, Yulia enrolled in different [institutions of higher learning]. But she wouldn’t like something about them and would drop out. For a while, she was studying to be a designer. I don’t remember what her other two majors were.

A few years ago, Yulia moved for the first time from Moscow to Petersburg: she had always liked the city. You could say that she flitted between the two capitals.

Yulia originally had her own place to live. After his death, her father left his children an inheritance. Yulia and her brother sold her father’s flat in Moscow and split the money, so she was able to buy her own place in Petersburg. She lived there for a few months, but got bored and bought a flat in another neighborhood. After a while, she went back [to Moscow], buying a flat in the Moscow Region. Soon afterwards she sold her last home and went back to Petersburg, where she lived in a rented flat.

Yulia often changed jobs. The first place she worked was McDonald’s, before it left Russia. She stayed at that job for several years. After that she worked as a courier, then as a consultant in a store. Almost every month she would change jobs if she wasn’t satisfied with something. She didn’t regard any of her jobs as permanent. She said that she would soon leave [Russia] and that she only needed temporary, part-time work.

Yulia Moskovskaya. Source: social media

I know that Yulia had outstanding loans and that she didn’t have enough money to live on. She said that she had been sued by debt collectors. (In May 2025, a Moscow court ruled in favor of debt collectors trying to recover debts from Moskovskaya under a loan agreement — Bumaga.) She had spent the money on surgery [not covered under free public healthcare], and on braces.

Yeah, she’s not a very steady person. She gets bored with things quickly. Creative work was her only stable hobby. (On social media, Moskovskaya followed a lot of literature and Silver Age poetry groups — Bumaga.) She drew and wrote poems. Recently, she had been making her own jewelry and trying to sell it.

Moskovskaya’s views and her abandoned cat: “Before her arrest, she said she wanted to go to the war”

When the war broke out, Yulia immediately supported Ukraine. She said that she didn’t like the regime in Russia. She had a very firm stance. But I wouldn’t say she was always interested in politics. Before the war, I hadn’t noticed that she followed the news. I was surprised when she suddenly became politicized. Moreover, she has no Ukrainian relatives.

Before her arrest — since last summer — she had been saying that she wanted to go to the war. She mentioned that she had visited military enlistment offices and contacted people who could help her get to Ukraine, but everyone, according to her, had turned her down. I tried to warn her about the consequences: what if she died or something? She replied that she didn’t care, that this was her purpose in life and that such a death would be an act of heroism.

All last month, she kept saying that she would be leaving Petersburg for Ukraine and that some people would help her do this.

When Yulia was detained, I was allowed to speak with her for literally several seconds. The only thing she said was that I should go get her cat, which had been temporarily placed in a shelter.

Yulia Moskovskaya’s cat. Source: social media

I had imagined that Yulia would be hysterical, panicked. According to her lawyer, however, she is surprisingly calm.

Source: “‘She attempted to plant explosives under a car’: friend of 22-year-old Yulia, accused of plotting a terrorist attack, speaks of her loneliness and debt,” Bumaga, 30 June 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Cars for Ukraine

Vadim Volkov

The European University at St. Petersburg has purchased and dispatched a UAZ vehicle to the war in Ukraine “for transporting the wounded in the combat zone,” the university’s press service has reported.

It notes that the vehicle was sent to Military Unit No. 11076, which was formed from mobilized residents of St. Petersburg, the Leningrad, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk regions, and the Komi Republic.

The university’s press service posted a commendation to university rector Vadim Volkov from the unit’s commander, who praised Volkov for his “social activism” and support of the military “as it carries out missions in the special military operation zone in Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Zaporizhzhia region, and the Kherson region.”

“Military Unit No. 11076 expresses gratitude to the autonomous noncommercial higher education organization ‘European University at St. Petersburg’ in the person of Vadim Viktorovich Volkov for social activism and support rendered to the soldiers of our unit as they carry out missions in the special military operation zone in Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, Zaporizhzhia Region, and Kherson Region. Victory will be ours! Military Unit No. 11076’s commander, Colonel V. Zyatchin, May 2025.”

The European University is a private university founded in St. Petersburg in 1994. The university was funded by grants from American and European NGOs. In 2016, the university was stripped of its accreditation for a year after an audit undertaken by the Prosecutor’s Office and Rosobrnadzor [the Russian federal education watchdog], after which such audits became routine.

In 2023, the Russian authorities audited the European University “for extremism,” and the university was also fined over books in its library published by “undesirable” organizations. Rector Volkov reported in an interview with RBC on June 24 that the prosecutor’s office had audited ninety-eight programs at the university and twelve master’s theses, after which the university had amended the programs and made changes to its academic advising process based on the recommendations of the authorities.

In March 2024, the European University fired Ivan Kurilla, an Americanist who taught in its political science and sociology departments. Kurilla opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine and was among the signatories of an open letter against the war by Russian academics and science journalists.

Source: “European University at St. Petersburg sends vehicle to war, garnering thank-you from Russian military,” Meduza, 10 June 2025. Photo courtesy of European University at St. Petersburg. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up.

Jesper Lindholt

Where are you from? And where are you now? Doing what?

I am from Aarhus, Denmark, and have lived in Kyiv for almost 20 years. I own a software company, Livatek, which works with clients in Northern Europe.

As a foreigner working and living in Ukraine for many years, what is the best and the worst thing about Ukraine?

The worst thing about Ukraine is that nothing is possible. The best about Ukraine is that everything in the end is possible.

How has the war changed your life? Has the war changed you personally?

With the start of the war, my brother Morten and I reactivated a Danish initiative called “Biler til Ukraine” – “Cars for Ukraine”—which had already helped a Ukrainian NGO bring SUVs to the front for medical evacuation during the war in Donbas. Within a week of the full-scale invasion in 2022, we were back in Ukraine with the first three cars.

Since then, we have scaled up tremendously and delivered more than 400 vehicles to the Ukrainian military for logistics and tactical purposes, including 75 buses for personnel transports. These days, we are managing more than one car per day. All in all, as a rough estimate, the value of these cars is somewhere close to $2 million. The money comes from absolutely average, normal Danes and private companies. I am often surprised by people’s generosity. They often donate their car and even drive it with us to Ukraine!

Growing a business has become more difficult with the war. With “Cars for Ukraine,” I have found another outlet for my professional energy to defend Ukraine. It has allowed me to work with some unique people in Denmark and Ukraine. Their strength and dedication inspire me.

What has surprised you most about Ukrainians these past couple of years? Good or bad?

I was not surprised to see the tenacity of the Ukrainians as they resisted Russia’s efforts to eradicate their culture. On the negative side—and here I am probably a bit naïve—I can still be disappointed by corruption. I know it is good news that corruption and the people who commit it are discovered and prosecuted, but I would prefer things to be nipped in the bud instead of cracked down afterward.

What are your plans?

I think I am like most Ukrainians in that “the future” does not exist anymore. We have a war to fight and win—after that, there is a future—and it is bright and open.

How do you see the war ending and Ukraine returning to a normal life?

Forces at play now do not point to a happy-end scenario for Ukraine. The dynamics need to change. Specifically, more political leaders of the West must do “a Macron” — to understand that Ukraine is fighting for every country of the liberal, Western world. (French President Emmanuel Macron underwent a radical change in his view on Russia’s war from dovish to hawkish and insisting on Russia’s defeat.) Because, honestly, for Ukraine to have a normal future, Russia not only needs to be beaten back to within its borders. It needs such an educational wacking that it will give up on its aggressive ways – and never again even consider attacking Ukraine or other states.

Tell us one thing people abroad do not know about Ukraine but they really should.

For too many centuries, Russian culture has defined itself as being unique, and outside rules and measures apply only to other countries. The mere existence of an independent Ukraine is a challenge to that myth. And, when Russia is attacking its neighbor, it is fighting its own demons and inferiority complexes.

You can learn more about the work of “Cars for Ukraine” (in Danish “Biler til Ukraine”) here.

Source: “BLITZ INTERVIEW: Jesper Lindholt, a Danish tech executive bringing hundreds of cars to the Ukrainian army,” Two Grumpy Old Men on Ukraine, 20 May 2024

Andrei Trofimov: “Try Me for Treason”

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.)

Source: “‘Try me for treason: I betrayed your deranged state’: a statement by 58-year-old Andrei Trofimov in a military court,” Mediazona, 6 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader