Russia Is Not a Land of Opportunity for Central Asians

Tajikistan has condemned what it called an “ethnic hatred” attack in Russia after a 10-year-old boy from a Tajik family was stabbed to death at a school near Moscow, in a rare public rebuke aimed at a key partner for labor migration and security ties. The killing happened on December 16 in the village of Gorki-2 in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee, which said a minor attacked people at an educational institution, killing one child and injuring a school security guard.

A video of the attack circulated on Russian social media after the incident. According to reporting by Asia-Plus, footage published by the Telegram channel Mash shows the teenage assailant approaching a group of students while holding a knife and asking them about their nationality. The video then shows a school security guard attempting to intervene before the attacker sprays him with pepper spray and stabs him. The assailant subsequently turns the knife on the children, fatally wounding the 10-year-old boy.

A statement released by Tajikistan’s interior ministry said it feared the case could “serve as a pretext for incitement and provocation by certain radical nationalist groups to commit similar crimes.” Tajikistan’s response also drew attention after the foreign ministry said the attack was “motivated by ethnic hatred.” Dushanbe subsequently summoned the Russian ambassador to protest the attack, handing him a missive “demanding that Russia conduct an immediate, objective, and impartial investigation into this tragic incident.”

The condemnation is particularly notable as Tajikistan rarely issues public criticism of Russia, which remains its main destination for migrant labor and a key security partner.

According to Russian media, the attacker, who has admitted their guilt, subscribed to neo-Nazi channels and had sent his classmates a racist manifesto entitled “My Rage,” in which he expressed hostility toward Jews, Muslims, anti-fascists, and liberals, a few days before the incident.

Tajik migrants form one of the largest foreign labor communities in Russia and across Central Asia. Millions of Tajik citizens work abroad each year, most of them in Russia, sending remittances that are a critical source of income for families at home. According to the World Bank, remittances account for roughly half of Tajikistan’s gross domestic product in some years, making labor migration a cornerstone of the country’s economy. Many Tajik migrants work in construction, services, and transport, often in precarious conditions and with limited legal protections. The killing comes as Central Asian migrants in Russia face growing pressure to enlist in the war in Ukraine, with coercion through detention, deportation threats, and promises of legal status having been reported.

The killing has also renewed scrutiny of rising xenophobia in Russia, particularly toward migrants from Central Asia. The Times of Central Asia has previously reported an increase in hate speech, harassment, and violent attacks targeting migrants, especially following major security incidents. Human Rights Watch has warned that Central Asian migrants in Russia face growing discrimination, arbitrary police checks, and racially motivated abuse, trends that have intensified in recent years amid heightened nationalist rhetoric.

Source: Stephen M. Bland, “Tajikistan Condemns Fatal Stabbing of Boy in Russia Citing Ethnic Hatred,” Times of Central Asia, 17 December 2025

It’s curious. I looked through some of the [social media] pages of Russia’s [most prominent] political émigrés—[Ilya] Yashin, [Vladimir] Kara-Murza, [Ekaterina] Schulmann, [Leonid] Volkov, [Elena] Lukyanova, [Dmitry] Bykov, [Marat] Gelman, [Boris] Zimin, [Boris] Akunin—but I couldn’t find a word about the violent death of a Tajik boy in a school near Moscow. They have expressed no sympathy, voiced no criticism of racism and xenophobia. It seemingly should be their direct obligation to speak out on this issue. But for some reason, mum’s the word. I also looked at the Telegram channels of the leading official anthropologists, and there is a mysterious muteness among them too. Surely it is their professional duty not to remain silent on such a matter. They even published a book called Tajiks and themselves speak everywhere of interethnic harmony. But in this case, it’s as if they’ve dummied up.

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

As FB is reminding, there were times I believed I could protect my non-Slavic looking friends, lovers, relatives, foreign students and migrant workers from the nazis marching in the streets, from the nazis working as policemen, from the general xenophobia and unsensibility by magic tricks of art.

Source: Olga Jitlina (Facebook), 18 December 2025

Thomas Campbell just translated our migrant labor board game Russia – The Land of Opportunity!!!

Russia – The Land of Opportunity board game is a means of talking about the possible ways that the destinies of the millions of immigrants who come annually to the Russian Federation from the former Soviet Central Asian republics to earn money play out.

Our goal is to give players the chance to live in the shoes of a foreign worker, to feel all the risks and opportunities, to understand the play between luck and personal responsibility, and thus answer the accusatory questions often addressed to immigrants – for example, “Why do they work illegally? Why do they agree to such conditions?”

On the other hand, only by describing the labyrinth of rules, deceptions, bureaucratic obstacles and traps that constitute immigration in today’s Russia can we get an overall picture of how one can operate within this scheme and what in it needs to be changed. We would like most of all for this game to become a historical document.

Source: Olga Jitlina (Facebook), 17 December 2011

Life for migrant workers is Russia is becoming increasingly difficult after stringent new controls introduced over the past year. These include a registry of “illegal” migrants, restrictions on enrolling migrant children in schools, new police powers to deport people without a court order, and a compulsory app for all new migrants in Moscow and the surrounding region to track their movements.

Working in Russia was already less appealing because of the war in Ukraine and the weakening rouble. Now, with these new restrictions, a growing number of young people from Central Asia are starting to look elsewhere — including to countries in Europe — in search of better opportunities.

Dreaming of Europe in Moscow

Like 89% of young Kyrgyzstanis, 25-year-old Bilal* had always dreamed of working abroad.

Young people in Kyrgyzstan grow up in an environment where leaving the country to find work is common, widespread, economically essential, and socially accepted — and where the domestic economy still cannot offer comparable opportunities.

The average monthly salary in the country is about 42,000 soms (around $480), while in Russia, for example, wages in manufacturing can reach 150,000 rubles (nearly $2,000). Unlike most of his peers, Bilal never planned to work in Russia. “Because many of our people face racism there,” he explains.

Europe was his dream, but without connections getting a job offer from an EU employer seemed nearly impossible. So Bilal turned to “intermediaries” — fellow Kyrgyzstanis who had established ties with European companies that were constantly seeking workers. They advised him to travel to St. Petersburg, where, they said, it would be easier to prepare the paperwork and apply for a visa.

But it was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Schengen countries had stopped issuing visas and temporarily shuttered their consulates. Bilal didn’t want to return home empty-handed, so he decided to stay in Russia — “not by choice,” as he puts it.

“At first I worked illegally at a ski resort. Mostly we chopped firewood and cleared snow around the cabins. They paid us in cash,” he says.

Two months later, Bilal moved to Moscow and obtained a patent — the work permit that allows citizens of visa-free countries to be legally employed in Russia. He found a job as a courier for Yandex.

Bilal speaks excellent Russian — something he says explains why, unlike many of his friends, he didn’t encounter xenophobia all that often. But conflicts still happened. “You’d run into people who’d say, ‘Migrants, coming here in droves…’ Especially when a customer had put down the wrong address and the delivery got messed up — somehow it was always the migrant’s fault.”

Bilal left Russia two months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Back then it wasn’t like it is now,” he recalls. “Yes, the police would stop you on the street, but they’d take some money and let you go. Now my friends talk about Amina (a Russian mobile app for monitoring migrants), about police rounding people up, and about being sent to the war.”

He decided to set his sights on Europe instead.

Watched and bullied

In Russia, the path to legal employment for migrant workers runs through a processing centre known as Sakharovo — located about 60 kilometres from Moscow and notorious for its massive queues, where people often wait for hours. The perimeter is guarded by armed security forces, and inside migrants undergo procedures such as blood and urine tests to screen for “socially significant diseases”. Those who manage to obtain their documents can work legally, but that doesn’t protect them from future problems.

Russians often refuse to rent apartments to migrants. Schools and kindergartens decline to accept migrant children, citing “lack of space,” while the adults themselves face workplace “raids” or frequent “document checks” on the street or on public transport. Even Russia’s war in Ukraine has become a tool for pressuring them: many migrants are pushed to join the military in exchange for various “bonuses,” such as fast-tracked citizenship.

After the attack on Crocus City Hall — which authorities say was carried out by four Tajik citizens —the security services launched large-scale raids. Tajikistan’s government, fearing a surge in xenophobic incidents, even advised its citizens not to leave their homes.

Lawmakers soon joined in. Over the past year, they have restricted the ability to obtain residency through marriage, granted the Interior Ministry the power to deport migrants without a court ruling, required migrant children to pass a Russian-language exam before being admitted to school, and created the Registry of Monitored Persons — a database of foreign nationals who supposedly lack legal grounds to stay in Russia. There are already known cases of people being added to the list by mistake, and effectively losing the right to move freely around the country after their bank accounts were frozen, and their driving permits revoked.

Officials have justified all these measures as necessary to fight illegal migration and prevent crime. In July, the Interior Ministry reported a rise in crimes committed by migrants, but migrants still make up only a small fraction of overall crime statistics. A study by the “To Be Exact” project found that adult Russian men are statistically more likely to commit crimes than migrant workers.

On September 1, a new pilot project went into effect: migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine who are living in Moscow or the Moscow region must install a mobile app called “Amina.” Authorities openly acknowledge that the app’s main purpose is to continuously track users’ locations.

The app that doesn’t work

If a phone fails to transmit location data to Amina for more than three working days, the participant is automatically removed from the system. If the migrant cannot fix the issue quickly, they risk being added to the “monitored persons” registry — which can lead to frozen bank accounts, job loss, or even expulsion from university.

Imran, a 27-year-old Tajik citizen, is worried: “Location services on my phone are on, and Amina shows that everything is being transmitted, but several times a day I get notifications saying the app isn’t receiving my location. The app works terribly. And I have no idea what consequences this could have for me.”

Users report constant problems with Amina. Some can’t get past the first screen; others say the app won’t accept their photo; still others receive alerts that their data failed verification. But the most common issues are related to location tracking.

In comments on RuStore (Russia’s internal apps store), representatives of the developer respond that “specialists are constantly working to improve the app’s stability” and advise users to contact technical support. But migrants complain about waiting on the line for hours.

Anton Ignatov, the director of the Sakharovo centre, claims the programme will improve public safety and help “prevent violations by unscrupulous individuals”. He cites situations in which migrants buy a work patent — a permit to work — for a short period and then disappear “into the shadows,” “vanishing somewhere in the industrial zones of Moscow and the region”.

Such cases do happen, and the most obvious reason is money. Since January 1, the monthly payment for a work patent in Moscow and the Moscow region has been 8,900 roubles (about $115). For many migrants working in low-paid jobs — for example, in construction or warehouse work — this is a significant share of their income, pushing some into the informal economy.

Another factor is wage delays in the sectors where migrants from Central Asian countries most often work. Mukhammadjon from Uzbekistan, works on a construction site outside Moscow, hasn’t been paid in two and a half months. A month ago, he stopped paying for his patent — simply because he had no money left. He sees no tools to defend himself.

Employers, meanwhile, benefit from hiring such vulnerable workers: they can avoid paying social contributions, hand out wages in cash, and rely on employees who are willing to work overtime for low pay.

Getting a job is becoming harder

Kudaibergen, 32, from Kyrgyzstan, worked at a warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow — “to support my family”, he says. His employer provided hostel-style housing for migrant warehouse workers.

“OMON came to our building. They treated us like they were arresting dangerous terrorists. They showed up with batons and tasers, as if storming the place. They drove us all outside. We stood by the door with our hands behind our backs for about two hours while they checked everyone’s documents,” he recalls. “Some guys didn’t understand Russian well — it was very hard for them. If they didn’t understand something, they were beaten. […] Thank God, my documents were in order.”

Russian authorities typically insist that such inspections are carried out strictly within the law and that no unlawful actions are taken against migrants. As evidence, the Interior Ministry points out that migrants rarely file complaints with the police afterward.

As the new year approached — 2025 — the checks intensified, Kudaibergen says. Because of all the new rules and the overall treatment of migrants, he realized that working in Russia had become too difficult, so he returned home.

“But I still have to provide for my family,” he adds. “I’m thinking about Europe now. I ask friends and acquaintances how to leave. But I don’t know if it will work out. They say getting a visa is very hard.”

Gulnura, 35, a mother of three, had lived in Russia with her husband for more than ten years. In the spring of 2025, she flew with her children to her native Kyrgyzstan for a short break. Only after arriving did she learn about the new requirement obliging migrant children to pass a Russian-language exam in order to enroll in school. Her children speak Russian fluently, yet even before the rule change they hadn’t been admitted — schools said there were “no available places”.

“We originally planned to return to Moscow. But my friends who are still there complain that they can’t get their kids into school,” Gulnura says. “One friend has been collecting documents since April, but the school won’t accept them. Another managed to get her child to the test, but after the exam they sent a rejection: ‘Your child doesn’t know Russian well enough.’ Her daughter was born and raised in Moscow, speaks Russian fluently, went to kindergarten and prep classes, reads and writes.”

“Requiring language proficiency provides a pretext for an already widespread practice of arbitrarily refusing to admit migrant children to schools across Russia,” says Sainat Sultanaliyeva of Human Rights Watch. “By depriving migrant children of access to education, Russian authorities are effectively taking away the life opportunities schooling provides. Banning them from school undermines long-term social integration, increases the risk of harmful child labour, and heightens the danger of early marriage.”

Gulnura decided not to return to Russia with her children. “My husband is still in Moscow for now. He’ll come when everything is ready here, when he has work. But we — me and the kids — we’ve come back for good. It’s become impossible to live there.”

A chance to get into Europe

Despite numerous accounts of migrants becoming disillusioned with Russia, it’s impossible to say definitively whether labour migration has decreased in recent years: the available statistics are fragmented, and data from different government agencies often contradict one another.

The picture is further complicated by the Interior Ministry’s decision to stop publishing key data, as well as several changes to the methodology of migration accounting, which make year-to-year comparisons unreliable.

In 2024, researchers at the Higher School of Economics concluded that labour migration to Russia had fallen to its lowest level in a decade.

Since then, the number of entries into the country has grown, but the average annual presence of legal labour migrants has remained stable at around 3–3.5 million — noticeably lower than in previous years.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta writes that foreign workers are less willing to come to Russia for two reasons: tougher migration policies and declining incomes. With the rouble’s depreciation, earnings in dollar terms have fallen by roughly a third.

Yet Russia still remains the most popular destination for labour migrants from nearly all Central Asian countries.

In second place for migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan is Kazakhstan, where most work in construction, wholesale and retail trade, and various service industries.

Third is Turkey, where Central Asian migrants are employed in manufacturing — especially textiles and clothing — as well as construction, hospitality, and seasonal agriculture.

South Korea recruits migrant labor for factories, agriculture, construction, and the fishing and seafood-processing industries.

But for many — like Bilal, who left Russia behind — the dream is still to secure a job offer in Europe. In the end, he managed to do so through the same intermediaries he had relied on earlier, paying them $2,000, he says. They helped arrange an invitation from a logistics company.

“If you don’t have work experience in Europe, it’s hard at first to get a job with a good trucking company. There are bad employers who take advantage of newcomers not knowing their rights. They might underpay you or force you to work overtime. At the same time, the police keep a very close eye on work-and-rest rules and can fine you, so nobody wants to break the law. By law, if your driving time is up, you have to stop and rest,” Bilal says, recalling his first job at a Slovak company.

After gaining some experience, he moved to another company, where he now earns around €2,500 a month.

According to the International Road Transport Union (IRU), more than half of European transport companies cannot expand their business because of a shortage of qualified drivers. Across the EU, Norway, and the UK, more than 233,000 truck drivers are currently required. The crisis is deepened by the fact that the profession is aging rapidly, and young people are not drawn to it, despite decent pay.

Ukrainian citizens once made up a significant share of long-haul drivers in the EU, but because of the war many had to return home for military service. In addition, some European employers terminated contracts with Russian and Belarusian citizens (or their visas weren’t renewed), forcing them to return home as well.

In Slovakia, where Bilal is officially employed, the shortage reached 12,000 drivers last year. As a result, the country simplified visa procedures for several nations — including Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine — for applicants willing to work in freight transport.

Poland actively issues work permits to citizens of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan; the Czech Republic attracts workers from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan by fast-tracking work visas; Lithuania also issues visas to those seeking jobs as drivers.

In 2023, the number of first-time work permits issued in the EU to citizens of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan rose by 30%, 39%, 50%, and 63% respectively compared to the previous year.

But Bilal believes that even with the current labour shortages, getting into Europe from Central Asia is still far from easy. “If you don’t have people here who can recommend you to a company, it’s a difficult process for ordinary working people,” he says.

All the more so because public frustration over migration has been growing across Europe in recent years, pushing some governments to tighten rules for third-country nationals — even in sectors suffering from labour shortages.

Bilal likes living in Europe. He’s satisfied with the good pay and the way people treat him — especially Italians and the French.

He describes his job as demanding. “We spend more time away from home than at home. Years go by, and people hardly see their families,” he says.

Bilal himself doesn’t yet have a wife or children. In a few years, he’ll be eligible to apply for permanent residency in Slovakia, but he hasn’t decided whether he’s ready to spend his whole life driving long-haul trucks across Europe.

*The protagonist’s name has been changed at his request. With contributions from Almira Abidinova and Aisymbat Tokoeva. Read this story in Russian here. English version edited by Jenny Norton.

Source: “Why Central Asian migrant workers are giving up on Russia,” BBC News Russian (Substack), 18 December 2025.

The Russian Opposition in Exile

This isn’t a show of unity but a photo montage from *La Stampa*: (left to right) Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Garry Kasparov, and Vladimir Kara-Murza all lay claim to leadership of the Russian opposition in exile and the Russian antiwar movement.

Vladimir Kara-Murza has resigned from the [Russian] Antiwar Committee after Garry Kasparov’s offensive outburst in Paris.

I was there when it happened.

What happened, exactly?

At a dinner before a morning meeting with the leadership of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Kasparov adopted a mobsterish tone with Kara-Murza, demanding to know why he would not sign the Berlin Declaration. Kara-Murza tried to respond constructively, explaining that he had been in prison when the Berlin Declaration was drafted.

“Aren’t you ashamed to say that you only served two years in prison, when there is a man here who served ten years?” Kasparov said, (referring to [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky. — A.G.).

To which the retort was: “Are you speaking as someone who fled Russia in 2013? As far as we know, you have served five days in jail in your entire life.”

At that point, Garry Kimovich lost it and started yelling that all true militants against Putin’s regime had left [Russia] and were fighting for Ukraine, rather than serving time in prisons.

“Why aren’t you fighting for Ukraine yourself, instead of serving time in a restaurant in Paris?” I asked.

“Why aren’t you fighting?” the chess player blurted out.

“But you’re a man, aren’t you?”

“I’m sixty-two years old!”

***

“You scoundrel!” Kasparov shouted at Kara-Murza. “Who got you out of prison?! I got you out! You’re not signing the Berlin Declaration because you can’t say that Crimea belongs to Ukraine!”

FYI: In 2014, after Kasparov had already emigrated, Kara-Murza declared that Crimea was part of Ukraine during an [anti-war] march in Moscow.

***

But here is the most “brilliant” thing the future member of PACE’s Russian platform said:

“Kara-Murza has a British passport, he swore allegiance to the Queen! But I haven’t sworn allegiance to anyone. I have a Croatian passport… just for traveling.”

He’s a traveler all right.

Croatian, my ass.

This was how PACE’s Russian platform was assembled.

Source: Alexandra Garmazhapova (Facebook), 12 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

PACE has decided to create a Platform for Dialogue between the Assembly and Russian democratic forces in exile.

Participants in the platform – whose composition has yet to be decided, based on a set of criteria – would be able to hold two-way exchanges with the Assembly on issues of common concern. They would also be able to attend meetings of selected committees during part-sessions.

Unanimously approving a resolution based on a report by Eerik-Niiles Kross (Estonia, ALDE), the Assembly said participants in the platform would be “persons of the highest moral standing” who, among other conditions, all share Council of Europe values, unconditionally recognise Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, and are working towards “regime change” in Russia.

The parliamentarians said the new platform – among other things – would help to strengthen the capacity of Russian democratic forces to “bring about sustainable democratic change in Russia and help achieve a lasting and just peace in Ukraine, alongside ensuring the responsibility of Russian actors for the international crimes committed”.

The Assembly said it honours the commitment of “those Russian human rights defenders, democratic forces, free media, and independent civil society who oppose the totalitarian and neo-imperialistic Russian regime, fight for democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and support Ukraine, sometimes at the risk of their lives and freedom”.

However, unlike Belarusian democratic forces, “Russian democratic forces do not have a single, unified political structure”, the Assembly pointed out. It encouraged Russian groups and initiatives in exile to join forces to advocate for democratic change in Russia, expose the crimes of the Russian regime and support Ukrainians.

Source: “PACE creates a ‘platform for dialogue’ with exiled Russian democratic forces,” Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 2 October 2025

On 1 October 2025, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution to establish a Platform for Dialogue with Russian Democratic Forces (RDF). The initiative is intended to provide a framework for exchanges on issues of shared interest. The decision has sparked some controversy, which appears likely to grow.

A “Legitimate Alternative” Without Legitimacy

According to the report presented by the PACE General Rapporteur on RDF, Eerik-Niiles Kross, the Platform is designed to facilitate the participation of Russian opposition representatives in the Assembly’s activities. Approved candidates will form a delegation, gain access to committee meetings, and be able to address them. Yet the nomination procedure remains vague: Russian opposition groups are expected to reach a “common decision” on who will attend PACE sessions and then submit a candidate list to the President of the Assembly. This process is supposed to be completed by early next year.

The report describes Russian democratic forces as “a legitimate alternative to Putin’s regime.” However, the basis for such legitimacy remains unclear. Unlike the Belarusian opposition, which can point to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s electoral mandate from the 2020 presidential race, Russian opposition figures lack any comparable representative legitimacy. Strictly speaking, they represent no one but themselves.

PACE further specifies which actors it considers part of these “democratic forces”: structures associated with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Garry Kasparov’s Free Russia Forum, Vladimir Kara-Murza’s Free Russia Foundation, as well as unspecified “representatives of the peoples of Russia.” The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), founded by Alexei Navalny, is also mentioned, but the report explicitly excludes it from the category of democratic forces. The reason given is that the FBK refused to sign the Berlin Declaration, defined by the rapporteur as a conditio sine qua non for cooperation with PACE. In response, FBK representatives reiterated their lack of interest in working with what they called a “talk shop for expressing concerns” and branded the report “rude and vile.”

Defining Democratic Credentials

However, it is not only about the FBK. Some influencers and activists who denounce Russia’s crimes in Ukraine refuse to sign the Berlin Declaration, viewing it not as a universal document, but rather as an act of swearing personal allegiance to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his Anti-War Committee, which drafted it. Even human rights defenders who did sign the Declaration question why it, in particular, has come to serve as the benchmark of democratic credentials. They regard its inclusion among the criteria for assessing the democratic legitimacy of a potential member as “odd,” since the Berlin Declaration represents “a private statement by one particular segment of the Russian opposition.”

Indeed, it is worth recalling that eight months before the Berlin Declaration, Alexei Navalny’s “15 Points”—a set of principles to which a significant number of Russian political activists still profess commitment—were published. These points outline similar foundations: ending hostilities and withdrawing Russian troops from the occupied territories, compensating Ukraine for the damage caused by the war, condemning imperial policies, committing to a European path of development, as well as dismantling the Putin regime and transforming Russia into a political system that would make the usurpation of power impossible. At the same time, both documents contain elements that appear puzzling. Notably, neither the Berlin Declaration nor Navalny’s 15 Points frames the war in Ukraine as Russia’s war, and both remain silent on the future of captive nations in Russia.

But even if one sets aside the questions raised by Navalnists as to why the “15 Points” are not adopted as the criterion of democratic legitimacy, how will PACE respond if other Russian opposition groups come up with similar declarations of their own?

Ukraine: Scepticism and Restrained Acceptance

Unsurprisingly, initiatives to create platforms involving Russian opposition figures within international organisations are viewed with deep scepticism in Ukraine. Most prominent Russian émigré politicians do not take part in armed resistance against the Putin regime, prefer to shift all responsibility for the invasion onto Putin personally, reject the idea of dismantling the Russian empire, and instead lobby for easing sanctions against “regular Russians.” Increasingly, they blame the west—rather than themselves—for the failure of democratisation in Russia. Nearly four years into the war, the exiled Russian opposition has proven largely irrelevant to Ukraine’s struggle against the invasion.

These arguments were strongly echoed by members of the Ukrainian delegation during the debate. Seven deputies took the floor. None opposed the resolution outright, but all signalled their distrust of the Russian political figures present in the chamber, stressing that they do not view them as a genuine opposition to Putin. Dialogue, they insisted, should be held only with Russians fighting in the Ukrainian armed forces and with representatives of captive nations.

Another concern raised was the lack of clarity in the procedure for determining Russian participants. The Ukrainian delegation succeeded in nearly doubling the criteria for candidate selection, but the Assembly rejected amendments that would have formalised Ukraine’s role in approving the list. This gave the impression that there is no genuine consensus within PACE on the establishment of the Platform for Dialogue with the RDF. As a result, some Assembly members began to doubt the wisdom of the initiative, suggesting that consultations with Russian opposition figures remain at the informal level.

Still, indirect signs suggest that communication between the PACE’s leadership and the Ukrainian delegation had taken place before the resolution was put to a vote. Notably, Ukrainian deputies refrained from openly torpedoing the resolution and instead largely abstained from the vote. Such restraint likely reflected a compromise, which may include the following items. First, the right of Ukraine to nominate representatives of Russian volunteer battalions serving in the Ukrainian armed forces, such as the Russian Volunteer Corps, which has already expressed willingness to join the Platform. Second, a commitment by PACE to establish a separate forum for indigenous peoples and national minorities of Russia, with one-third of seats on the current Platform reserved for them until that forum is created. Third, indirect Ukrainian involvement in controlling the Platform’s activities, possibly through performance indicators such as “feedback from Ukrainian civil society.”

Risks of Division Within the Platform

The creation of the Platform seems to carry potential risks for PACE while offering few tangible benefits. One of the key objectives declared by the resolution’s initiators is to foster greater unity among the highly fragmented Russian anti-Putin forces. In practice, however, it may have the opposite effect—further deepening and cementing the existing divisions among Russian diaspora political groups.

Besides, the inclusion of a diverse array of groups engaged in mutually irreconcilable conflicts raises the question of whether PACE can manage the level of potential tensions within the Platform itself. Frictions are likely to emerge between Russians fighting in the Ukrainian armed forces and well-known dissidents espousing pacifist convictions. Similarly, some Russian émigré politicians—despite condemning imperial policies—still advocate the armed suppression of any hypothetical secession by the North Caucasus. Such a position is unlikely to resonate with representatives of oppressed peoples, who view supporters of continued Russian control over their territories as foes.

It is also unclear whether PACE has a contingency plan should Ukrainian criticism intensify amid internal conflicts within the Platform. Such a scenario could place the Assembly in a difficult position, straining relations with Ukraine, a country whose citizens are dying daily for their independence and the values that the Council of Europe stands for. Were that to happen, the Platform would be remembered alongside PACE’s scandalous decision to restore the credentials of the Russian delegation in 2019 and the leadership’s attempts to shield its disgraced president, Pedro Agramunt—further damaging the Assembly’s image in Ukraine.

Defending his resolution proposal during the debate, Eerik-Niiles Kross drew a parallel with the Soviet occupation, noting that the Estonian diaspora played a vital role by representing the idea of an independent Estonia. By analogy, he argued, Russian democratic forces could play a similar role today, potentially producing their own Willy Brandt or Konrad Adenauer. The comparison, however, is not entirely accurate. Estonian émigrés did not enjoy a formal platform within PACE, but they still managed to convey their message effectively and ultimately saw it realised. Besides, the case of Germany clearly shows that it is not the establishment of a dialogue platform in Strasbourg that increases the chances of Russian Brandts and Adenauers emerging, but Ukraine’s victory on the battlefield. So far, there is scant evidence that prominent Russian emigrants have contributed anything of tangible significance to this cause.

Source: Igor Gretskiy, “Why PACE’s New Russian Platform May Backfire,” International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS), 9 October 2025

Declaration of Russian Democratic Forces

In this darkest hour, we declare our strategic goals – to stop the aggression against Ukraine and create a free, rule of law based, federal Russia. To do this, we consider it necessary to strengthen the coordination of our actions.

We declare our commitment to the following fundamental positions:

The war against Ukraine is criminal. Russian troops must be withdrawn from all occupied territories. The internationally recognized borders of Russia must be restored; war criminals must be brought to justice and the victims of aggression must be compensated.
Putin’s regime is illegitimate and criminal. Therefore, it must be liquidated. We see Russia as a country in which the individual freedoms and rights are guaranteed, in which the usurpation of state power is eliminated.
The implementation of imperial policy within Russia and abroad is unacceptable.
Political prisoners in Russia and prisoners of war must be released, forcibly displaced persons must be allowed to return home, and abducted Ukrainian children must be returned to Ukraine.
We express our solidarity with those Russians who, despite the brutal repressions, have the courage to speak up from anti-Putin and anti-war positions, and with those tens of millions who refuse to participate in the crimes of the Putin’s regime.

The signatories of the Declaration share the values of a democratic society, respectful communication, recognize human rights and freedoms, the principles of diversity and equal rights, rejection of discrimination.

The signatories refrain from public conflicts in the democratic and anti-war movements.

We call on the citizens of Russia to join this Declaration.

We commit to uphold this Declaration until our common strategic goals are achieved.

Berlin, April 30, 2023

Source: “Declaration of Russian Democratic Forces,” Russian Antiwar Committee, 30 April 2023

According to eyewitnesses who spoke to SOTA, the reason for Vladimir Kara-Murza’s departure from the “Anti-War Committee” today was an argument that took place in a restaurant where potential PACE delegation members were seated. The quarrel began with Garry Kasparov accusing Vladimir Kara-Murza of a lack of teamwork.

According to Kasparov, Kara-Murza deliberately brought Yulia Navalnaya and Ilya Yashin to meet the PACE President, bypassing the general meeting—despite neither of them having signed the Berlin Declaration, which implies support for Ukraine. It should be noted that the opposition will receive only 12 seats in PACE, 4 of which are allocated to “decolonizers.”

Alexandra Garmazhapova, who is close to “Free Russia” and heads the “Free Buryatia” foundation created under its protection, omitted the beginning of the conflict with “Free Russia” Vice-President Kara-Murza in her Facebook post.

According to the former journalist, “Kasparov started questioning Kara-Murza in a thuggish tone about why he had not signed the Berlin Declaration. Kara-Murza tried to respond constructively that he was in prison when work on the Berlin Declaration was underway.”

Meanwhile, Kara-Murza himself stated on X (formerly Twitter) today that he and his colleagues from “Free Russia” were allegedly ready to sign the declaration but did not explain why they have not done so yet.

Back in October, Kara-Murza had virtually refused to sign the declaration: “When the criterion for participation in the Russian democratic platform at PACE is signing a document that a significant number of people associate only with one specific political group—that, in my opinion, is a completely clear element of political manipulation, and it is strange, to say the least. Many colleagues feel the same way, including those who were here in Strasbourg last week at the PACE plenary session.”

The “political group” he referred to is the “Anti-War Committee,” which Kara-Murza only left today under the pretense of a conflict with Kasparov, who is only one of its participants.

Garmazhapova further reported that Kasparov accused Kara-Murza of having “only served two years” in prison, unlike Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Garmazhapova then intervened in the conflict on the side of her “Free Russia” colleague, asking why 62-year-old Kasparov is not on the front line but demands it of others.

It should be noted that Natalia Arno—head of “Free Russia”—and Ilya Yashin, who conducts his world tours with funds from this foundation, also joined the public conflict.

Arno stated that “G. Kasparov allowed monstrous insults directed at my colleague Vladimir Kara-Murza,” called it “dirty methods,” called Kara-Murza a hero, and Kasparov someone who fled Russia in 2013. Arno herself emigrated in 2012.

Ilya Yashin, on X, urged Kara-Murza to believe that “he is there for him.”

Thus, the conflict for leadership in PACE between Khodorkovsky and Kara-Murza, as Arno’s protégé, which SOTA previously wrote about, became public today: Kara-Murza’s self-removal from the “Anti-War Committee,” despite the formal conflict with Kasparov—who is only one of its members—only highlighted the brewing contradictions and “intrigues” that Kasparov had mentioned.

Source: “‘Free Russia’ vs. ‘Anti-War Committee’: What Happened Between Kasparov and Kara-Murza,” Sota News (X), 12 December 2025

Julia Khazagaeva: I Am Just a Mom with Three Kids

The statements about the war made by Muscovite political exiles cause public indignation because what they say is at odds with the horror of the situation. Instead of taking to European podiums and demanding decisive action to defend Ukraine, they ask [European officials] to lift sanctions against Russians and mumble helplessly about “one nation.”

It is obvious that, for the fourth year running, Russia has been waging not just a war against Ukraine on the front lines, but a bloody, boundless campaign of terror. Nearly every day Russian missiles kill [Ukrainian] civilians, including children. Ukrainian soldiers who surrender unarmed are executed on the spot by the Russians, or are even ritually beheaded. But you continue to talk about Russia’s “democratic future,” ignoring the fact that the entire country, including schoolchildren, has been slaving away at destroying the Ukrainians.

I am not a politician, just a microblogger who cares about current events. But even I remember InformNapalm’s OSINT investigation which showed that the Russian fighter planes bombing Ukraine are still equipped with French avionics. Without this unique equipment, Russia’s Su-30SM fighter planes are blind and cannot fly. Russia obtains this equipment through Kazakhstan, thus bypassing sanctions. The report came out a year ago. I don’t know what the situation is like now, but warplanes are still taking off from Russian airfields.

Why couldn’t you have talked about that in the French Senate? Especially since, a week earlier, a Russian missile fired from a fighter plane and packed with shrapnel killed twenty people, including nine children, in Krivyi Rih. The photo of a young [boy] in a coffin, whose face had been riddled by the tiny metal shards, is impossible to forget.

The coffins of 15-year-old Nikita Perekrest and his cousin, 16-year-old Kostiantyn Novik. Nikita’s father serves in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and his mother took Kostiantyn in after his parents were killed. The two boys were outside in the yard when the Russian army struck Kryvyi Rih. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP/Scanpix/LETA, via Meduza

I realize that none of Moscow’s so-called opposition activists have the courage of political prisoner [Vladimir] Bukovsky and demand that Ukraine be given missiles to target Lubyanka. But you could launch investigations into the schemes by which Russia circumvents sanctions and obtains not only components for its fighter planes but also foreign chips for its missiles. You could demand that the Bosphorus be closed to Russia’s shadow fleet, which brings Putin the revenue to produce new missiles. Finally, you could show solidarity with Ukraine at least in word [if not in deed] and stop embarrassing yourself by repeating the impersonal and irrelevant slogan “No War.” You could do a lot of things in your safe havens. But instead you just wait for Putin to die and are not even ashamed to say so. Meanwhile, it is not so much the Ukrainians or the decolonizers who are waiting for you to act as it is your own fellow Russian citizens, who have not yet lost their minds and are basically living under occupation in Russia.

///

As for the ridiculous claim that it is easier for non-Russians to go to war and that is why they make up the majority [of soldiers] in the [Russian] army, according to the analytical resource buryatmemorial.org, a total of 2,425 people from Buryatia have been killed in the “special military operation” as of March 2025. And you’ll pardon me, but hardly half of them are ethnic Buryats (as you can see from the photos). This is due to the fact that ethnic Buryats constitute no more than 31% of the republic’s entire population. According to Ukrainian figures, Russian losses have already lost 933,000 men in the war. Even if we multiplied the figures for Buryatia by ten, its war dead would still roughly amount to two and a half percent of the total. I emphasize that the Buryats are an ethnic minority in their own land.

A screenshot of the website buryatmemorial.org, showing the names and faces of Buryatia’s war dead

According to Caucasian Knot, as of March 2025, 233 men from Chechnya, 121 from Ingushetia, 104 from Karachay-Cherkessia, and 112 from Kalmykia have been killed in the special military operation. Again, we can multiply this figure by ten for the sake of statistical rigor, but we still get hundredths of a percent of the total losses.

To put an end to the topic of Vladimir Kara-Murza’s ridiculous misinformation drop, yes, I saw yesterday’s post by the activist Anastasia Shevchenko, from which it follows that she was the mysterious “colleague” who shared with Kara-Murza the “observation” that it may be easier for non-Russians to go to war, while Russians find it psychologically difficult to kill Ukrainians due to their cultural affinity. Anastasia writes that the source of this hypothesis was not even her, but a third party who voiced this conjecture in a private conversation. Do you realize what has happened? This was not a scientific observation; no studies or surveys of Russian POWs were done that would indicate such a trend. This “information” came from the bush telegraph and was repeated by a [Russian] opposition politician in the French Senate, where decisions are made on the basis of the words people utter. And even after the ruckus that this delusional phrase caused among the public, no apology or explanation has been forthcoming from the politician.

Again, I am just a mom with three kids who left Russia to avoid supporting the war. In exile, I wash floors and clean other people’s houses so that I can send at least thirty dollars [a month] to the Ukrainians so they can buy drones. At night I write social media posts and read decolonial literature. I try to do anything I can to stop my former country from murdering innocent people. In my opinion, I have the right to demand that those who call themselves politicians, who have the bully pulpits and the opportunities, do something meaningful to ensure that Russia can no longer wage war.

There is nothing more important right now.

Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 14 April 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Remembering Navalny

There’s shoddy work everywhere. Even great publications suffer ridiculous failures.

This is the cover of the new issue of the New Yorker.

What ridiculous crap.

(You can probably guess who that is supposed to be.)

Source: Sergei Parkhomenko (Facebook), 12 October 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

I wouldn’t want Navalny to be remembered the way he has been remembered this past year.

I haven’t read the book Patriot yet, but I was quite upset by Mikhail Zygar’s review of it. Zygar compares Navalny to Jesus and concludes that by dying, Navalny bequeathed us an idea that would rid future generations of cynicism and teach them to believe.

This is feeble sentimentalization, in my opinion. Navalny didn’t not dream up any particular ideas. He called for action, not faith. The meaning of his sacrifice, in my mind, is practical and political, not abstract and ideological. It can and should benefit the current generation, not some future generation.

Navalny didn’t dream up a new ideal. The “beautiful Russia of the future” is a feeble image, but Navalny understood better than anyone how tyranny operates on the mechanical level. I often complain that the FSB understands better how Russian society functions than do opposition politicians, sociologists and psychologists. Navalny couldn’t be accused of this shortcoming.

He was the only person in Russian politics who talked about power relations as a two-way street. He didn’t talk about the enormous resources Putin has, but about the fact that we give Putin power. It is not the security services, the army and the tanks that give Putin power. We give Putin power.

This view evolved over the course of Navalny’s career, becoming more and more central. As time went by, it separated Alexei more and more from his colleagues in the opposition. Toward the end of his life, Navalny’s writings centered on the idea that power consists in consenting to obedience, in “obeying in advance.” We say to ourselves: I cannot disobey, because if I don’t obey, they will (notice me/file administrative charges against me/fire me/banish me from my profession/send me to jail/kill me).

“The only fear there should be is that we leave our homeland to be plundered by a pack of liars, thieves and hypocrites, that we surrender without a fight, voluntarily, both our own future and the future of our children.”

Only by obeying in advance can governing by unfulfilled threat be scaled up indefinitely, to a country of 140 million people, because this means of governing doesn’t require any resources. We obey without taking resources from the state. Putin’s estimates for the war in Ukraine include every dollar, euro, and pound spent on Ukraine’s defense. They are what counts against Russian budgets, not “faith in democracy” or “anti-war sentiment.” I understand Alexei’s decision to return to Russia in this sense; I see it as logical and unusually tenderhearted on the personal level. By returning to Russia, Alexei was able to provide Russians with one more example of tyranny’s limits: Putin never had power over Alexei. Had he stayed in Germany, Putin’s power would have extended to Navalny.

At the end of his life, Navalny did not call for faith, he called for deeds: “If your convictions are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices. And if you are not willing, then you don’t have any convictions. You just think you do. But they are not convictions and principles. They are just thoughts in your head.”

Navalny was concerned not with the thoughts in our heads, but with whether our deeds matched our thoughts. I appreciate Christian philosophy, but I could never accept the postulate that a second of faith can save a person, no matter their actions — “Now thou shalt be with me in paradise,” and so forth. The Russian opposition, for as long as I’ve been watching it, wants to get to democracy approximately the same way the thief gets to paradise — by believing in it. The notion that we are democrats and decent because we believe in democracy while all remaining Russians are slaves and awful because they don’t believe in it is the main obstacle to democracy in Russia, in my mind, and the Koshchei’s egg of tyranny. A “democracy” in which only “democrats” have a stake and which only they want is an oxymoron that makes democracy impossible and tyranny in Russia perennial. Democracy cannot be for Muscovites alone. It cannot be built via media outlets in which only Petersburg and Moscow have a voice. It cannot be built without equal representation of activists, issues, and interests from other regions and ethnicities.

Late in life, Navalny hated talk about the “freewheeling ’90s” and the good Chekists/bad democrats dichotomy, which doesn’t prevent his supporters from remaining stuck in this selfsame paradigm.

“I hate the authors of the authoritarian [Russian] constitution, which was sold to us idiots as democratic, even then granting the president the powers of a full-fledged monarch. […] I hate the ‘independent media’ and the ‘democratic community,” which fully supported one of the most dramatic turning points in our new history — the fake presidential election of ’96.”

Navalny was able to cringe at his former self: “I repeat that back then I vigorously supported all that stuff. Not election fraud, of course — I didn’t like that even then — but I did everything I could to ignore it, and the general unfairness of the elections didn’t fluster me one bit. Now we are paying for the fact that in ’96 we thought that election fraud was not always a bad thing.”

Alexei started his career in Russia’s faux democracy project, which was unfair from the get-go. He entered politics as a “democratic nationalist,” desiring greatness and a better elite for Russia. It was within this same paradigm that he pursued the most successful project of his life: “fighting the regime by legal means.” By the end of his life, however, he came to realize that Russian power is held by a hypocritical elite which justifies its obedience by talking about white coats, and is not willing to share power. It is not even willing to think about being the equals of other Russians, let alone the equals of Ukrainians, for example.

This, in my opinion, is what Navalny left behind. It pains me to see how the legacy he left at such a high cost is being frittered away by films about traitors, stupid speeches, and sentimental religious comparisons.

Source: Vladimir Ponizovskiy (Facebook), 23 October 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Alexander Podrabinek: Opposition Politicians Must Live in Russia to Do Their Jobs

The recent prisoner swap has suddenly and quite vividly clarified the emotions and motives of the militant segment of the Russian emigration. Those who did photography in the old days will remember how you would dip a blank sheet of photographic paper into developer and gradually an image would appear on it. At first, the image would be vague, just outlines, but then it would become clearer and clearer, until finally you would pull it out from under the red lamp and hold it up to the white light: wow, you could see everything clearly!

I will avoid beeing politically correct and say everything I think. Emigrants from the so-called liberal crowd went abroad because they were afraid of going to prison in Russia. It’s an understandable fear—a valid reason, one might even say. The issue of personal security, their personal well-being and that of their families, was more important to them than Russian freedom and democracy, about which they spoke with such pathos and fervor at protest rallies, in the independent press, and on the internet. They did not have the guts, and such things happen. There is nothing laudable about it, but nothing catastrophic either. No one obliges them to sacrifice themselves, and they themselves were willing to be heroes on the podiums, but not in a real showdown with the repressive regime. All right, so they left: it’s no great loss. In any case, it is better to leave in time than to spill your guts later during an investigation.

I think most of those who have left Russia feel fine, but a certain segment of the emigration, the most militant and vocal, experiences emotional discomfort. They sense their own political inferiority, especially amidst what has happened in Russia to those who stayed, to those who have been resisting and are now in prison. To prove to themselves and others their insightfulness and to confirm the correctness of their choice to emigrate, they portray those who have remained in Russia as naive fools who don’t understand life. The very existence of political prisoners irritates them. They believe that people have been imprisoned by mistake or because they overestimated themselves. But they themselves didn’t overestimate!

Alexei Navalny’s decision to stay in Russia cut them to the quick. A month before his death, Navalny wrote in a letter from prison camp: “I have my country and my beliefs. I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs. I can betray neither the first nor the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be ready to stand up for them. And if necessary, to make sacrifices.”

The bombastic Ekaterina Schulmann just doesn’t get it. “The context of events is such that the first thought that comes to mind upon hearing the news is how he could have failed to leave [Russia] after the first [guilty] verdict, and almost the only emotion is amazement at this fact.” She is amazed: isn’t personal well-being the most important thing?

Dmitry Gudkov, a politician who is quite nimble in all respects, was even more definite at the time. “Almost all public figures, including well-known opposition figures, have been allowed to leave. But in case they didn’t get the signal, they go to jail. So if you don’t want to go to jail, you don’t have to wait for mercy from the Investigative Committee—there are flights to Tbilisi and other beautiful cities. At the slightest hint of danger, save yourself. The decision to take care of your life is always the right one.”

Gudkov and Schulmann are simple people, and they write about the benefits of cowardice in a straightforward, uncomplicated manner. But some others feel uncomfortable in such situations. They don’t like to feel as if they are fugitives saving they own skin—they need decent arguments. They want to remain on top, preferably at the heights they commanded in Russia, where everyone listened to them.

And what arguments are these? The most murderous one is that Russia is a lost country and the whole nation supports the fascist regime. As if there were not hundreds of political prisoners in camps and prisons who have chosen resistance rather than escape. As if there had not been rallies and marches throughout Russia, attended by many thousands of people, when such events could still be organized. As if the authorities didn’t have to falsify election results to avoid revealing Putin’s paltry electoral support.

Anna Rose writes about her Russian acquaintances, but it reads as if she is writing about Russians in general: “My Russian acquaintances didn’t show any sympathy for the real victims of aggression. The fact that in Ukraine, due to Russia’s fault and with their own tacit consent, people were being killed every day, that not only only cities were destroyed but also the basis for civic life in a sovereign country, seemed to them a backdrop, not the essence of what was going on.” What to do with such a worthless people? Clearly, run away from them and denounce them in the crudest possible language. And God forbid anyone should think that you are one of them yourself.

Journalist Victoria Ivleva took it a step further by attacking Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, and Andrei Pivovarov on her Facebook page for talking too little and saying the wrong things about Ukraine at their press conference. “I would very much like to hear a single word of repentance from you, not stories about how Putin is to blame while the nation is wonderful and fresh. Who elected Putin time after time, was it not the nation? The war started by our Motherland has left us all with only one right—to get down on our knees.”

A well-off emigrant, Ivleva expects words of repentance from recent political prisoners who were imprisoned for their anti-war stance! Ivleva herself has nothing to do with it, she has nothing to repent for. It is they, the Russians, who should all fall on their knees as one, while those who left in time are not to blame for anything. But if we are talking about sincere repentance, shouldn’t Ivleva repent for the Soviet Union’s war against Afghanistan? That war was no less bloody than the current one, and Ivleva was then a civic-minded Soviet student and a successful journalist who was published in the Communist Youth Union’s newspaper. She didn’t protest. She didn’t get down on her knees. If we call everyone to repent for the sins of the regime, shouldn’t we turn to ourselves?

No, of course, only the people are to blame, the people who, according to Ivleva, have elected Putin time and time again. That is, the presidential elections, in her opinion, have been fair and transparent time and again: the president was elected by the people, the president is legitimate, and, therefore, the evidence of the people’s worthlessness is clear. And let’s forget about how the ballot rigging has been exposed and pretend that it didn’t happen.

The great thing about collective responsibility is that personal responsibility dissolves into universal responsibility. If everyone is to blame, then no one is to blame. It is a very convenient position. In a debate on Facebook, Konstantin Borovoy denounces the freed political prisoners: “Asking the West to lift sanctions when the regime has gone berserk and the citizens are supporting it is stupid and mean.” To say nothing of playing fast and loose with the facts (they were not talking about lifting sanctions, but about targeting them correctly), claiming that the citizenry supports the brutal regime is a sin against the truth. Some people support it and some don’t. No one knows the exact percentage, but it is certain that millions of people in Russia do not support this regime. Why should we talk about the unity of the party and the people and thus echo Putin’s propaganda? And if we are to blame everyone, shouldn’t we start with ourselves? Borovoy was a member of parliament during the crucial years and had much more sway in politics than the average man on the street. If something has gone wrong in our country, maybe we should think about our place in these processes? Or is everyone else to blame?

The premise of national guilt is not enough for successful self-affirmation. The liberated political prisoners are hysterically pointed to the plight of Ukraine and its prisoners of war in Russia, as if anyone would argue with this. But this generates the illusion that only the political emigrants are concerned about it, while no one in Russia understands any of it and no one in Russia sympathizes with Ukraine. The opinion that there are also Russian problems that require a political solution is jealously disputed: no, today there is only one problem—the war in Ukraine.

Yes, it is true that the war is the most important issue for Ukraine. But for Russia it is not the most important issue. It may be the most painful, but it is not the main one. For Russia, the primary problem is the authoritarian regime, a dictatorship which at a single person’s whim can start a war, murder dissidents, take away all freedoms, and threaten the entire world. The war in Ukraine is a consequence of Russia’s primary problem and this is what the liberated political prisoners were talking about. The fundamental solution to the issues of war and peace depends on the nature of the regime, not on military successes or defeats. Russia’s policy towards other states depends on the kind of regime it has. This is obvious.

Kara-Murza’s and Yashin’s desire to engage primarily in Russian politics and address the interests of Russia’s democratic future is understandable and rational. A democratic Russia will have no need of enemies on its borders or anywhere in Africa. It will return all annexed territories, pay reparations, and atone for and eventually redeem its guilt before Ukraine and the other countries it has attacked.

Opposition politicians must be in Russia to make this all happen. It won’t work otherwise. It’s understandable that this elicits a rabid reaction from political emigrants who label cowardice prudence and prefer glamorously clamoring in emigration to risking resistance in Russia. In my opinion, Kara-Murza explained it all quite clearly to them in an interview which he gave in March of this year while still in prison.

“A politician cannot work remotely. It is not a matter of practical efficacy; for a public figure, it is a question of ethics and responsibility to their fellow citizens. If you are calling on people to oppose an authoritarian regime, you cannot do this from a safe distance—you must share the risks with your community.”

Source: Alexander Podrabinek (Facebook), 6 August 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Mr. Podrabinek is a well-known dissident, journalist, human rights activist, and former political prisoner.

The Good Truth Machine vs. the Russian People

“For our series of reports on relations between Finland and Russia, we head to the border area. The two neighbours were strong trading partners until the 2022 invasion of Ukraine led Helsinki to cut off business ties. Russian tourists are no longer welcome and with EU sanctions in place, Finland is on the frontline in checking goods crossing its 1300 km long border with Russia. FRANCE 24’s Julien Sauvaget and Clovis Casali report.” France 24 (YouTube), 14 June 2023.

People in Russia don’t have time to think about world events, explains a Russian young man at the Vaalimaa border crossing. There are plenty of goods in St. Petersburg, despite the sanctions. This kind of me-centric luxury does not exist for Ukrainians.

If I were an autocrat, I would provide these border crossers with a thorough guided tour of the massacres in Mariupol and Bucha. The price would include a night of experiences, i.e., a month-long air raid simulation every night. I could think of a lot of other empathy exercises, though I don’t think they’ll do any good.

This is a comment on the news report, above, by a Finnish friend of mine, living near the Finnish-Russian border, who wishes to remain anonymous. Translated, from the Finnish, by the Russian Reader

“Steak House”: a still from yesterday’s episode of the MCU, supposedly set in Moscow but clearly not filmed there.

Navalny, as a politician, is making a systemic mistake by hoping to turn people against the war in three to four months, because in a fascistic society the tools of democracy (canvassing, persuasion, solidarity campaigns ) just don’t function.

These tools presuppose democracy, and Navalny has not been a candidate standing for elections for a long time, but a political prisoner. And yet behaves as if it’s 2018 and his team will go door to door campaigning against the war.

“Let’s fantasise a little,” writes Navalny, “if every tenth of the 1.5 million who left the country since the beginning of the war […] and [the] 1 million who stayed in Russia but are not afraid, joined the campaign against candidate War, then this army of 400,000 canvassers could reach 12 million citizens per month […] Such a strong canvassing machine would dramatically change the public mood in the country in three or four months.”

To this end, Navalny wants to recruit “100 pioneer volunteer canvassers” ready to act “according to the laws and techniques of good election campaigns [b]y polling everyone, targeting hundreds of different groups, finding an approach to each and every one of them, identifying the waverers and persuading them to change their minds.”

Navalny is going to defeat the manipulators of public opinion on their own field by using a “canvassing machine” and counter-manipulation (finding an approach, targeting, and persuading), as if it were a matter of finding the right tools of influence and the right political strategies.

These are the illusions of a systemic politician who still hopes to win by following the rules for running elections and interacting with his electorate aboveground, in the open. But there is no “electorate,” no “elections,” and no conditions for “canvassing” in Russia right now. The fascist reality is completely different.

It would have been rather strange to call on “brave Germans” to go door to door canvassing against the war and the Fuehrer in 1943. Heroic people (we know their names) tried to do this in Berlin by scattering leaflets, and they were finished off by the Gestapo. They were heroes, of course, but the effectiveness of persuading people with words and leaflets in a fascizoid society is zero.

Only the regime’s defeat by outside forces, when the failure of the state is translated into “pain and suffering” for the so-called common folk, can reformat Zombieland.

History knows no other way to impact the zombified brains of the “common folk.” The task of the opposition in Russia, therefore, is to call for the destruction of the state and defeat in the war as soon as possible. We need to donate money to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and raise funds for the transfer of cutting-edge weapons to Ukraine, because crazy “Russian women” (the wives and mothers of war criminals) will not be persuaded by leaflets and conversations, but by coffins and funerals.

The losses suffered by the occupiers are the only key to peace.

And the dreams of the systemic politician (with all due respect to Navalny’s steadfastness) cannot come true. The mythical “army of canvassers” will simply end up in adjoining jail cells, like the brave picketers who protested on the streets.

In fact, Navalny proposes to his thousands of supporters the model of behavior he followed when he bet on the system’s sticking to rules of the game when he returned to Russia. By that time, however, there were no rules (as the FSB’s Novichok should have convinced him). We all remember what end his faith in the system (the ability to defend oneself in open court and hold large-scale protest rallies, and reliance on the power of aboveground regional organizing hubs) came to.

Playing at systemic politics with fascism ended with a “life” term in prison. Unfortunately, neither Navalny nor Yashin draw the right conclusions. They are free to make their own decisions for themselves, but daydreaming about “canvassers” who will go out and agitate among the common folk in keeping with the “laws of good election campaigns” is tantamount to being divorced from reality.

Unfortunately, it is clear why. The systemic opposition in Russia still clings to the illusion of “persuading” Russian society without defeating the state. But betting on the “internal forces” of the rotten imperial óchlos (which calls itself a society) is another illusion that renders the opposition’s politics toothless.

Source: Alexander Khots, “The illusions of the systemic opposition,” Kasparov.ru, 20 June 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Alexander Skobov for the heads-up.

Alexei Navalny has launched a big political campaign against Putin and the war. Using modern technology we will create a real truth machine that will help us reach out to Russians.

In this video, Leonid Volkov explains how the campaign will be set up and how you can get involved.

[…]

Source: Alexei Navalny (YouTube), 20 June 2023. The video, above, includes English subtitles, which can be turned on by toggling the "CC" button on the bottom of the screen. Even more curiously, the annotation, above, is also in English.

Hi, it’s Navalny.

Today marks the beginning of yet another trial, which will greatly increase my total sentence. However, I don’t want to use this day simply to draw sympathy for myself and other political prisoners. I want to call everyone to action, and use this day to announce our new, very important project. The big propaganda machine. The truth machine. We don’t just intend to make it, we will definitely create it in order to join forces against Putin’s lies and the Kremlin’s hypocrisy. We really need you. Join us.

Why is today the right day for this announcement? Because my trial itself proves the rightness and necessity of such a project. What is the most important thing about this trial? Not lawlessness, not “phone justice”, not the obedience of unscrupulous judges and prosecutors. The main thing is its format: it is a trial inside a prison. Putin doesn’t shy away from jailing the innocent, and he’s not afraid that I might be taken back by rebellious mobs during a court session in Moscow. However, he is afraid of what I have to say. Even if they are obvious words known to all. He is afraid of the word. Not just mine, of course, which is why Kara-Murza and many others were also tried in a closed trial.

Putin is afraid of any word of truth, he hates speeches that turn into Internet memes, he is furious at the “last words” [i.e., the closing statements of defendants at political trials] that get an audience of millions. In essence, the task of strengthening and prolonging Putin’s power is accomplished by shutting up those who dare to speak the truth. This goal is the subject of almost everything that has been done in Russian politics over the last few years. And since the start of the war, the regime has not thought about anything else. People get jailed for their posts, for defamation, for spreading misinformation, there are endless arrests and blockings, everyone gets labelled as “foreign agents” or “undesirable organisations”. Why not let people talk though? When the government fights rallies that it considers dangerous, there is some logic to it, but what exactly is the problem with chatter on the Internet or even over the phone?

It may even seem that this way, discontent goes to waste. Keyboard warriors spend their time leaving likes instead of building barricades. But that’s not really how politics works.

Putin has proven to be a fool in the military sphere, a talentless military leader, but he is no fool when it comes to politics. He knows that the backbone of any political action is an idea and a word. Canvassing and persuasion. This is very evident during elections, especially those that are highly competitive. Whatever the specifics of the state, its political traditions and agenda issues, during elections it still comes down to canvassers going door-to-door, making phone calls, persuading people on social media and messengers. And during every US presidential election, with all their high technology and huge budgets, the candidates themselves volunteer at call centres to encourage their supporters to also come there and call, explain and persuade.

Because in terms of the power of persuasion, nothing has or will ever beat the most basic kind of campaigning – simply talking to people, providing them with examples and arguments.

People like to claim that they are not influenced by election campaigning, that they already know exactly what they want and that they cannot be persuaded. But this is not true. A large part of the electorate makes their choice at the polling station, so a good canvasser can sow doubt, persuade, and change their minds. This has long been proven. And we ourselves have conducted experiments in this field.

So what is there to campaign for when there is no election? There is actually plenty to campaign for, and the stakes are very high. We will campaign against the war. And against Putin. That’s right. We will conduct a long, hard, exhausting, but fundamentally important campaign to turn people against the war.

Against war and everything related to it. Against the deadlock that Putin so madly and stupidly spiralled into on February 24, 2022: deaths, casualties, mobilisation, war crimes, isolation, sanctions, tens of thousands dead and millions leaving the country. Degradation of the economy and decline in living standards, criminals fighting at the frontlines and penniless mobilised soldiers, lots of wounded and killed.

This is a very precise task, and I have no doubt that our work will be successful. Here is the most important table and the main figure from one of our surveys:

Every fifth person has relatives or acquaintances who died in this war. Sadly, these figures will only continue to grow, changing public perceptions. Tens of thousands of wounded and disabled people. Hundreds of thousands of mobilised men who have seen Putin’s war for themselves: the talentless thieving generals, the shortage of everything from socks to shells. They return home, their stories are listened to and retold. This does not at all mean that these people automatically become anti-war activists. But it certainly means that they can become them with our help. We have a good reason to talk to them about important issues, and many will be willing to talk.

We will change many people’s minds and raise doubts in almost all of them. This is a campaign against the candidates War and Putin. And we will do it according to the laws and techniques of good election campaigns. By polling everyone, targeting hundreds of different groups, finding an approach to each and every one of them, identifying the waverers and persuading them to change their minds.

I strongly doubt the huge numbers of “war support” reported by Kremlin sociologists. The main reason is that it is unclear what the term “support for the special military operation” actually means. I ask to be sent everything that Strelkov and Prigozhin write and say, I read it very thoughtfully. Are they pro-war? Of course they are. But despite all their mutual dislike, I can’t find any clearer anti-Putin and anti-Kremlin statements from anyone else. And frankly, some of their statements are already close to anti-war. Have you seen Prigozhin’s interview? As savage as it is, it’s still anti-war. Putin’s cook says expressly the war is already lost. A scenario of victory – in his words, the “optimal” scenario, in which we manage to keep what we have already grabbed – is hardly possible. The elites have stolen everything and their children are abroad. The generals are stupid thieves. Our weapons are bad, there are no shells. This is actually the style that the ACF has always spoken in, but now this comes from the main supporter of the war and one of its main commanders who is speaking.

So whenever a voter repeats all this to us, our task is to ask him ingratiatingly: well then, maybe to hell with this war? Why did we even start it? Yes, many people dislike not war itself, but a lost war, or a meaningless war. OK, any anti-war campaign relies on that too, as was the case with the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

I agitate the cops the best I can over here. Naturally, they say they are pro-war. That’s to be expected: our conversations are recorded on their body cams. It is useless to talk to them about war crimes, Bucha, aggression, and sanctions. They do not care about those suffering. But when I ask: “Where are the shells though? Where has your Putin, who has been in power for 23 years, having a ton of money, wasted all the shells, socks, bulletproof vests and quadcopters?” – they have no answer. “It wasn’t me who asked about the shells first. It was your Prigozhin, whom you were kowtowing to when he came here to recruit prisoners for the war. And if your government is so fucked up that there’s no intelligence, no commanders, no border, no air defence, no shells, no socks – then why the hell did you start this war? To bury a million people in the ground?” They don’t put me on a pedestal after such talk, but they do start thinking and having doubts.

So we are going to find a personal approach to everyone, without using the same language to talk to a programmer from Moscow, a young mother from Orel, and a retired serviceman from Chelyabinsk. This is a campaign against candidate War, and it can only be conducted successfully with the support of an army of tens, and preferably hundreds of thousands, of motivated, diligent, hard-working people who believe in success. People who don’t burn out every five minutes, who don’t faint when their interlocutor tells them to piss off, who don’t get demotivated when facing an average voter and don’t expect them to be logical, intelligent, educated, polite, and quick to change their minds. This is a smart, subtle and difficult long term job, and I encourage those who want to do some real work and make a real contribution, rather than endlessly whining on Facebook and Twitter where we try to re-convince ourselves, to join us.

We already oppose the war, there are already several million of us, we have already learned how to organise and finance our own actions. Let’s fantasise a little: if every tenth of the 1.5 million who left the country since the beginning of the war and mobilisation, 1.5 million who left after 2014 and 1 million who stayed in Russia but are not afraid, joined the campaign against candidate War, then this army of 400,000 canvassers could reach 12 million citizens per month, even if each of them only makes one contact a day, i.e. does not overwork in the slightest. Such a strong canvassing machine would dramatically change the public mood in the country in three or four months.

But let us stop imagining things now. Because this is not likely to happen in practice. People are lazy, they have their own things to do. The most vociferous of them, those who demanded “real action”, will be the first to disappear. The idlers, as always, will find excuses for themselves along the lines of “that’s no real action, I would gladly derail some trains, but this is rubbish”. And they will concentrate on criticism without ever derailing a single train. And so on. These things happen during any election campaign. Nevertheless, we do realise that there are tens of thousands of people who are prepared to devote at least one hour a day to work diligently and persistently for the common good. This is a colossal force. It will not be easy to organise such a canvassing machine – one of the largest in the world. However, all things are difficult before they are easy. I am confident that we can set ourselves the first task of reaching 10 million voters with our campaign against the war and Putin. That will already guarantee a noticeable shift in public opinion. No one can predict what effect this will have on the political situation. But our work will certainly not be in vain.

Let’s move on to specifics. What instruments of persuasion are available to us within Russia? Rallies or pickets – no. Door-to-door visits – no. Calls from one’s own phone if the caller is inside Russia – no. Call centres inside Russia – no. As you can see, the basic arsenal of traditional election campaigns is not available to us. We rationally acknowledge this.

However, there are new opportunities, new technologies. Offshore call centres, decentralised call centres. Messengers – campaigning through them can be amazingly effective, given that every granny already has WhatsApp and Telegram. Campaigning on Kremlin-controlled social networks is also possible if the risks are properly avoided. Thus, a rough description of the campaign machine that we will be building is as follows: it will be a system that will allow you (the canvassers) to join it at any convenient time, from anywhere, and (while preserving your anonymity if you wish) communicate with voters within Russia that fit the required parameters (gender, age, city, occupation, etc.) by voice or text. The system will teach you how to canvass, drawing on previous experience and suggesting a pattern of conversation, facts and phrases. In a way, it’s like creating and training artificial intelligence. We have to create and train a system of collective intelligence, convincing voters to oppose the candidates we hate – War and Putin.

«Woah!», — you might say.

Well, yes, it is an ambitious task. However, it is nothing unrealistic or previously unseen. Marketers, advertisers and political strategists have been doing this for decades. All those cold calls, warm contacts and sales funnels are well known to all. It is just that, more often than not, marketers do not go to prison for such things. Our activities, of course, will be declared illegal and subversive. All the forces of the state apparatus will be rushed to combat it. Very well, we will throw all our energy into the fight against the apparatus of war, corruption and stupidity.

There is a lot of technical work to be done. Nothing like this exists yet. The system must be very flexible and have qualities that would appear to be mutually exclusive. It should be a user-friendly database of contacts, but it must be designed in such a way that would rule out any possibility of it leaking out and causing problems for people. Anyone should be able to get involved quickly, but we need to be able to weed out the provocateurs, the crooks, the stupid, the hotheads and so on as quickly as possible. A large number of one-time accounts will have to be created, but this should not turn into a spam machine. The propaganda machine should be able to adapt instantly to blockages and any opposition, and be as creative as possible. My colleagues and I have been doing or trying to do some elements of such a thing since 2012 – old-timers may remember the Good Truth Machine project, which I announced at one of the rallies back in the day.

However, the scale of this project is such that there has always been a lack of time, knowledge, money and staffing. I think this is one of my biggest political mistakes: I did not make the Good Truth Machine a priority and we did not manage to build it after the 2013 elections, being constantly distracted by other things. And now we simply don’t have a choice. Neither political (what could be more important than stopping a war and a government living a war?) nor organisational (hundreds of thousands of the most active and literate citizens have been forced into emigration). They are ready to do something, but what? We get thousands of messages: “Guys, give us some work, useful work that can be done from abroad or in Russia, but without too much risk.”

So, we start inventing, we start building, we start hiring, we start raising money. We need you very much. First and foremost, we need those who understand the technical, logistical and organisational side of what I have described. We are collecting opinions, expertise and ideas. We will soon organise hackathons in various cities. And, of course, we need the most resilient and the most patient, the most understanding, those who will become the heart and essence of this system. A technical shell is being built, but must be filled with people.

In order to campaign successfully, we need to have conducted thousands of hours of conversations by the time we build and launch a full-fledged machine. We need to listen through them and analyse them, determine micro-targeting parameters, create, try, modify and improve hundreds of scripted conversations for different target groups.

We’re looking for 100 pioneer volunteer canvassers who are ready to tackle this awesome, but challenging, task, especially amidst the inevitable chaos and mess of the first steps.

Email antiwar@navalny.com if you are:

– an IT specialist willing to invest a lot of time into creating technology solutions for our campaign system;

– a marketer, sociologist or political scientist willing to invest a lot of time into creating conversation scripts, engagement funnels, etc.;

– a supporter willing to donate a substantial amount of money to this particular canvassing project;

– a volunteer willing to be in the first hundred people who will invest a lot of time conducting conversations, working out scripts and finding the words and approaches that take voters away from candidate Putin and candidate War.

Write about yourself in sufficient detail, stating where you are from, where you live now and how much time you have for this job. We will get back to you shortly.

This is a long-term project. Putin’s military defeat is inevitable. But no one knows what it will look like or what its consequences will be. Those at the very top of power, the ones who are ready to wage war for the sake of money and strengthening their position, are not going anywhere. They will not pack up and fly off to the moon. Their response to a lost war will be hysteria and preparation for a new war. That is what they will brainwash the citizens with. No one but us can enter this fight for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. So, we must enter it and win it.

Source: Alexei Navalny, “Campaigning Against Candidate War,” Google Docs. This is the English original referenced in the Leonid Volkov video, above, not my own translation. ||| TRR

While thousands of Ukrainians were fleeing their submerged homes after a catastrophic dam explosion last week, high-society Russians gathered for a glitzy restaurant festival in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, just 500 miles away from the devastating flooding.

The event, called Gastreet, saw some 5,000 citizens pay up to $2,000 dollars for the opportunity to listen to some of Russia’s top businessmen, restaurant owners, and influencers over the course of five days. The event also included concerts, lavish nightlife experiences, and gourmet dinners.

If there’s one thing that was made clear at the Sochi resort, it’s that no amount of Western sanctions, Kremlin restrictions, or spillover violence within Russia can stop the country’s rich and famous from living large—despite the raging war in neighboring Ukraine.

Take Ksenia Sobchak, Putin’s rumored goddaughter and one of the VIP Gastreet guests who spoke at the Sochi resort last week. The Russian influencer—who reportedly made over $3 million from her media holding company, Careful Media, last year—has continued to promote products on her Instagram page in the lead-up to the event, even though the app has been banned in Russia.

One of her latest marketing campaigns is for Primepark, a luxury real estate complex in the heart of Moscow.

“Just imagine, valet meets you in the parking lot, bellmen carry your shopping bags to your apartment, housekeepers help with all your routine around the house—I always said that comfort is made by details,” Sobchak wrote under photos of herself in designer outfits, wandering around luxury apartments. (The comment sections are flooded with responses blasting Sobchak with “reminders” of the countless missiles descending on Ukraine.)

[…]

Source: Anna Nemtsova, “The Alternate Reality of Filthy Rich Russians in Putin’s War,” The Daily Beast, 19 June 2023

“Mikhail Ivanov: ‘A million have left. 139 million stayed,'” Tell Gordeeva (YouTube), 20 June 2023. In Russian, with no English subtitles

Mikhail Ivanov is a star of the Russian book market and the subject of the new episode of Tell Gordeeva. Ten years ago, he reinvented the old Soviet bookstore Subscription Editions and made from St. Petersburg fashionable. Why write, read and sell books in a world where there seems to be no cultural values left anymore? And who needs books when a war is underway? We talk with Ivanov about why he continues to live and work in Russia and on whose behalf he does it.

Contents:

00:00 How Misha visited the store he now owns for the first time 2:48 “Books smell of danger, freedom, and freshness” 4:27 “On my fifth birthday I ran away from home to see the battleship Aurora” 5:47 “She likes it, but she didn’t believe it until the bitter end”: how Misha’s grandmother handed him control of Subscription Editions 7:27 “It was hard for me to concentrate on reading” 9:24 Harry Potter’s graphic art secret 13:46 Subscription Editions’ business model 14:59 “Here you could drink tequila from someone’s navel right at the bar”: what happened to Subscription Editions in the 2000s? 17:02 “Mom and Grandma gave me 2.5 million rubles to buy the store in 2013” 18:12 How to get round all the restrictions 20:57 “I’m Mikhail Ivanov: I work in a bookstore and publish books. I have nothing to do with it” 24:30 “I promised to stay with my employees. I can’t leave” 26:12 “We know who owns what fur coats, buildings and planes, but we were not offered an alternative”: on the opposition 28:03 “I am a citizen of Russia, I pay taxes here. But I don’t associate myself with the Russian Federation” 30:09 “How can you do public opinion polls when they can inform on you?” 32:26 “I’ve been dreaming of going to a Monatik concert for 10 years” 33:22 Top 5 books of 2022 in Russia 34:09 Why do some bookstores hide books by “foreign agents” and do they have to do this by law? 37:26 “The employees of Subscription Editions treated me like my grandmother’s grandson” 40:30 Who Katerina Alexandrovna is and why her favorite books are important to us 42:12 “4,000 people come to our store every day” 43:02 “We had our biggest earnings in March and April 2022” 44:27 “We will close the libraries and smuggle out the books” 48:02 “Where to find a haystack?”: how Subscription Editions’ unique Instagram is created 52:18 What did people do in the bookstore behind a closed grate? Yes, yes! 53:08 “We are a catalogue of the good books published in Russia” 55:05 “We are from Petersburg, and only then from Russia” 1:00:04 Installing a lift in a bookstore for 6 million rubles: what???!!!! 1:02:42 “Our growth strategy doesn’t allow us to stumble”1:04:05 “Do your job and sell books” 1:06:45 “A long strange courtyard that no one knows about”: Mikhail Ivanov gives a tour of Petersburg’s pass-through courtyards 1:08:36 “We show that you can live differently” 1:12:02 St. Petersburg’s Books Quarter 1:15:05 Why is Margarita Simonyan’s book selling so badly? 1:17:24 “I won’t say and do things I don’t believe in” 1:20:01 “How can I lose the meaning of what I am myself?”: on emigration 1:21:09 How Ivanov came up with the postcard “From Petersburg with apathy and indifference” 1:23:55 “There is a separate room with padded walls for bookmen in paradise”

[…]

Source: “Mikhail Ivanov: ‘A million have left. 139 million stayed,'” Tell Gordeeva (YouTube), 20 June 2023. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader, who must have shopped at Subscription Editions hundreds of time between September 1994 and January 2019, but never remembers it looking so luxurious and spacious as it does now. This is profoundly disturbing at a time like this, but it’s par for the course in the escapist faux-petit-bourgeois kingdom that Petersburg has become under Putin.

Expert in a Dying Field

The Beths, “Expert in a Dying Field” (2022)

[…]

On the first episode of his Twitter show, Tucker Carlson concluded that Ukraine was most likely the culprit.

“If this was intentional, it was not a military tactic. It was an act of terrorism,” he said. The dam was “built by the Russian government, and it currently sits in Russian-controlled territory. The dam’s reservoir supplies water to Crimea which has been, for the last 240 years, home of the Russian Black Sea fleet. Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more. And for precisely that reason, the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it. In December, The Washington Post quoted a Ukrainian general saying his men had fired American-made rockets at the dam’s floodgate as a test strike.”

“So really, once the facts start coming, it becomes much less of a mystery what might have happened to the dam,” Carlson said. “Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up. Just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream… and in fact, they did do that. As we now know.” But the American media has wasted no time “in accusing the Russians of sabotaging their own infrastructure.”

[…]

Source: Isaac Saul, “The Ukraine counteroffensive (and the dam attack),” Tangle, 7 June 2023

“Villages flooded as Moscow, Kyiv trade blame.”
A screenshot of the front page of the 7 June 2023 *Monterey Herald*, as sent to this subscriber

The Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, controlled by Russia, has been destroyed. One consequence is a humanitarian disaster that, had it not taken place within a war zone, would already have drawn enormous international assistance. Thousands of houses are flooded and tens of thousands of people are in flight or waiting for rescue. Another consequence is ecological mayhem, among other things the loss of wetland and other habitats. A third is the destruction of Ukrainian farmland and other elements of the Ukrainian economy. So much is happening at once that the story is hard to follow. Here are a few thoughts about writing responsibly about the event.

1. Avoid the temptation to begin the story of this manmade humanitarian and ecological catastrophe by bothsidesing it. That’s not journalism.

2. Russian spokespersons claiming that Ukraine did something (in this case, blow a dam) is not part of a story of an actual event in the real world. It is part of different story: one about all the outrageous claims Russia has made about Ukraine since the first invasion, in 2014. If Russian claims about Ukrainian actions are to be mentioned, it has to be in that context.

3. Citing Russian claims next to Ukrainian claims is unfair to the Ukrainians. In this war, what Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests an equality that makes it impossible for the reader to understand that important difference.

4. If a Russian spokesman (e.g. Dmitri Peskov) must be cited, it must be mentioned that this specific figure has lied about every aspect of this war since it began. This is context. Readers picking up the story in the middle need to know such background.

5. If Russian propaganda for external consumption is cited, it can help to also cite Russian propaganda for internal consumption. It is interesting that Russian propagandists have been long arguing that Ukrainian dams should be blown, and that a Russian parliamentarian takes for granted that Russia blew the dam and rejoices in the death and destruction that followed.

6. When a story begins with bothsidesing, readers are being implicitly instructed that an object in the physical world (like a dam) is really just an element of narrative. They are being guided into the wrong genre (literature) right at the moment when analysis is needed. This does their minds a disservice.

7. Dams are physical objects. Whether or how they can be destroyed is a subject for people who know what they are talking about. Although this valuable NYT story exhibits the above flaws, it has the great merit of treating dams as physical rather than narrative objects. When this exercise is performed, it seems clear that the dam could only have been destroyed by an explosion from the inside.

8. Russia was in control of the relevant part of the dam when it exploded. This is an elemental part of the context. It comes before what anyone says. When a murder is investigated, detectives think about means. Russia had the means. Ukraine did not.

9. The story doesn’t start at the moment the dam explodes. Readers need to know that for the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive.

10. The setting also includes history. Military history offers an elemental point. Armies that are attacking do not blow dams to block their own path of advance. Armies that are retreating do blow dams to slow the advance of the other side. At the relevant moment, Ukraine was advancing, and Russia was retreating.

The pursuit of objectivity does not mean treating every event as a coin flip, a fifty-fifty chance between two different public statements. Objectivity demands thinking about all the objects — physical objects, physical placement of people — that must be in the story, as well as all of the settings — contemporary and historical — that a reader would need in order to come away from the story with greater understanding.

Source: Timothy Snyder, “The Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine: Ten guidelines for writing about catastrophe,” Thinking about…, 7 June 2023. Thanks to Mark Teeter for the heads-up

Vladimir Slivyak (far left and on screen), speaking at the European Parliament earlier this week. Mikhail Khodorkhovsky, who made his fortune selling oil and gas, is seated the second to Mr. Slivyak’s left. Photo courtesy of his Facebook page

At the beginning of the week, an important conference, “The Day After,” was held at the European Parliament. I would not call it a “congress” of the Russian opposition, but rather something like a big meeting of Russian civil society. Some of the participants were those who are termed “opposition politicians” and their support groups. There were also human rights activists, women’s rights activists, LGBT+ rights activists, and many others. Environmentalists were extremely poorly represented (three out of the approximately 250 people in attendance). At the dozen or so panel discussions, in which more than fifty people took part, only one person addressed environmental issues—me.

Despite the fact that, as I observed, there were fewer politicians in attendance than non-politicians, the panel discussions were dominated by the topics that only the politicians talk about. Very rarely did anything different get talked about, but when it did the audience was usually quite supportive. I have no quarrel with the gist of what the opposition politicians said. Almost everyone spoke about supporting Ukraine, democratizing Russia, and the horror of the war, which must be stopped and all Russian troops withdrawn. There was a lot of discussion about what the political system of the new Russia should be, how to prevent a repeat of the dictatorship. This is all well and good, and I don’t think anyone in the audience disagreed with the main arguments. The big problem was something else. The vast majority of the speeches seemed to merge into a single digested mass: it was difficult to distinguish among people who, one after another, talked about the same thing in similar terms. If the audience expected just this, then that’s fine. But the audience were definitely expecting more. And they didn’t get it.

On the second day, the wonderful Karina Moskalenko organized a protest for women’s rights, threatening to leave the auditorium if the middle-aged white men in suits continued to dominate the panel discussions. Periodically, women did appear among the participants of the discussions, but not always. I fully supported the protest because the gripe was warranted: those who dominated the discussions (who had been involved in organizing the conference, of course) objectively had no desire to take into account the interests of other groups. This was the reaction of only one of the movements represented at the conference, but similar emotions (about the ignoring of all other interests) were also manifested by representatives of the other groups. Often one had the impression that there were the bearers of the truth, whose important cause everyone else should follow, while all other interests would be dealt with later (maybe). Someone said, How does this differ from Putin? No one else’s interests matter to him either.

There is no doubt that the opposition talked about important things, and I don’t think anyone at the conference questioned this. The topic of unifying the opposition was broached repeatedly. But it’s just that uniting people who don’t feel that their interests are taken into account won’t work. This is the answer to those who are always wondering why the opposition is fragmented. If you want someone to stand beside you, you have to make room for them.

On the morning of the second day, I spoke on the same panel with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Sergei Aleksashenko, Mark Feygin, Fyodor Krashennikov, and one of the European MPs. It was all per usual until my turn came. Briefly put, I argued that climate policy and the transition to green energy were extremely important, and that it was necessary to deal with this now if you were thinking about how to set up a new democratic Russia: you couldn’t get by without it, because for any civilized country today it was one of the priorities and its importance would only grow. No one would ever take Russia seriously if it was run by politicians who did not understand climate issues. The demand for fossil fuels would decline, and this would become a big economic problem; it would not be possible to employ the previous economic model (which enabled Putin to save money for the war). Also, the opposition needed the support of voters and, most importantly, young people, because it was they who would have to vouchsafe democracy in the future and prevent a new dictatorship. It was young people who would have to face much more terrible manifestations of climate change than those we were witnessing today. So, young people needed politicians to understand the climate agenda and work on it. If you wanted young people to vote for you in the future, you wouldn’t get anywhere with them without it. Nothing would ever happen if you put it off for later. In the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, dealing with environmental issues was always postponed.

Despite the fact that the audience applauded my remarks loudly and more than once, the moderator, Feygin, could not hold himself in check no way no how. He made a brief comment to the effect that of course it’s important, but it’s not important. He went out of his way to show his disrespect for the opinion of the people in the audience who obviously supported my arguments, let alone the climate and environmental agenda. Well, okay, we’ve seen worse things in our lives. But what really struck me was how many people (not a few, but dozens) came up to me during the day to thank me for my speech and say that it was important. About half of those who approached me mentioned how the reaction from the other panelists (I think they meant Feygin) had been ugly.

My conclusion in the light of all this is simple: there is nothing wrong with people, but there is something wrong with the leadership. It is vital to learn to feel what your target audience wants. If you are a politician who, albeit sometime in the future, not now, wants to build a democratic Russia and get people’s support, you not only have to talk about what you stand for. You also need to hear people and respect their interests. It’s not a one-way street. And this is not only my opinion (among the participants of the conference). Within Russian civil society there is an enormous desire to work to change Russia and a huge potential for unification. We can’t let this moment slip.

Source: Vladimir Slivyak (Facebook), 7 June 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. See Tomsk TV2’s recent interview with Mr. Slivyak, as part of its project Eyewitnesses.

The offices of a subsidiary of Russian oil giant Lukoil on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, 7 June 2019
Photo by the Russian Reader

There is a phenomenon that, by the way, unites us Ukrainians with Russians—a burning irrational hatred for Greta Thunberg. I can’t understand this phenomenon. Basically, she’s never wronged anyone. But yesterday, social media was just bursting at the seams with hatred for her, including from people who went to her Twitter account to tell her that she was a “juvenile slut.” The conservative momma’s boys at Tyzhden (The Ukrainian Week) even knocked off a column about it.

They don’t hate Tucker Carlson, who yesterday released a video claiming that Ukraine bombed the hydroelectric power station itself. They don’t hate Elon Musk, who reposted it. They don’t hate fucking Ben Shapiro or the Trumpists, who have been stumping against Ukraine from the get-go and at the same time are readily published here in Ukraine, in translation by Our Format, because “we must respect different opinions.” No, for some reason, the hatred is reserved for Greta Thunberg.

The irony here is also that the RePlanet movement, which she represents, just yesterday quite promptly condemned Russia for the situation with the hydroelectric power plant and once again called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine’s sovereign territory. But who cares? Greta Thunberg, bitch, you’re going to answer for everything.

Source: Dmytro Rayevsky (Facebook), 7 June 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

Surrender

“A Declaration of Russian Democratic Forces”

Declaration Russian Democratic Forces started this petition

In this tragic hour, we declare our strategic goals to be the cessation of aggression against Ukraine and the creation of a free, law-governed, federated Russia. To accomplish this, we deem it necessary to coordinate our actions more vigorously. We declare our commitment to the following principled positions:

1. The war against Ukraine is criminal. Russian troops must be withdrawn from all occupied territories. Russia’s internationally recognized borders must be reinstated. War criminals must be brought to justice, and compensation must be paid to the victims of the aggression.

2. The Putin regime is illegitimate and criminal. Therefore, it must be eliminated. We envision Russia as a country in which the rights and freedoms of individuals are guaranteed, and in which the possibility of usurping state power is excluded.

3. The pursuit of imperialist policies inside and outside the country is unacceptable.

4. Political prisoners and prisoners of war should be released, forcibly displaced persons should be able to return home, and abducted Ukrainian children should be returned to Ukraine.

5. We express our solidarity with those Russians who, despite the monstrous crackdown, have had the courage to publicly voice anti-Putin and anti-war stances, and with those tens of millions who refuse to be accomplices in the regime’s crimes.

The signatories of the Declaration espouse the values of a democratic society and respectful discussion. They acknowledge human rights and freedoms and the principles of diversity and equality, and they reject discrimination.

The signatories refrain from public conflicts within the democratic and the anti-war movements.

We commit ourselves to supporting this Declaration until our common strategic goals have been achieved.

Berlin, 30 April 2023

Signed publicly by:

La Asociación de Rusos Libres (Spain)
Stuttgart Activist Group
The Flame of Freedom Movement
Мedia Partisans
Russie-Libertés (France)
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, politician
Yevgeny Chichvarkin, member of the Russian Action Committee
Garry Kasparov, co-founder of the Free Russia Forum, Russian Action Committee
Boris Zimin
Yevgenia Chirikova
Anastasia Burakova, founder of the Ark
Sergey Aleksashenko
Yulia Latynina, writer, journalist
Alfred Koch
Mark Feygin
Sergei Guriev
Dmitry Gudkov, politician
Yevgeny Kiselyov
Kirill Rogov
Ivan Tyutrin
Maxim Reznik
Elena Lukyanova
Andrei Illarionov
Leonid Gozman
Demyan Kudryavtsev
Yuri Pivovarov, historian
Marat Guelman, SLOVONOVO Forum of Russian Culture in Europe

[and 64 other signatories]

Source: Change.org. Thanks to Boris Romanov for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Cheap Trick, “Surrender” (1978)

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
Mother told me, yes, she told me
I'd meet girls like you
She also told me, "Stay away
You'll never know what you'll catch"
Just the other day I heard
Of a soldier's falling off
Some Indonesian junk
That's going 'round

[Chorus]
Mommy's alright
Daddy's alright
They just seem a little weird
Surrender
Surrender
But don't give yourself away
Hey, hey

[Verse 2]
Father says, "Your mother's right
She's really up on things
Before we married, Mommy served
In the WACS in the Philippines”
Now, I had heard the WACs recruited
Old maids for the war
But Mommy isn't one of those
I've known her all these years

[Chorus]
Mommy's alright
Daddy's alright
They just seem a little weird
Surrender
Surrender
But don't give yourself away
Hey, hey

[Verse 3]
Whatever happened to all this season's
Losers of the year?
Every time I got to thinking
Where'd they disappear?
But then I woke up, Mom and Dad
Are rolling on the couch
Rolling numbers, rock and rollin'
Got my KISS records out

[Chorus]
Mommy's alright
Daddy's alright
They just seem a little weird
Surrender
Surrender
But don't give yourself away
Hey, hey
Away
Away

[Outro]
Surrender (Mommy's all right)
Surrender (Daddy's all right)
But don't give yourself away
Surrender (Mommy's all right)
Surrender (Daddy's all right)
But don't give yourself away
Surrender (Mommy's all right)
Surrender (Daddy's all right)
But don't give yourself away
Surrender (Bun E.’s alright)
Surrender (Tommy’s alright)
But don't give yourself away (Robin’s alright, Rick’s alright)
Surrender (We’re all alright)
Surrender (We’re all alright)
But don't give yourself away (We’re all alright, We’re all alright)
Surrender (Mommy's all right)
Surrender (Daddy's all right)
But don't give yourself away
Surrender (Mommy's all right)
Surrender (Daddy's all right)
But don't give yourself away

Source: Genius

You Don’t Speak for Us

A Statement by the Free Nations League

Regarding the Convocation of a Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation in Poland

From open sources, we have learned about an undertaking to convene a Congress of People’s Deputies in the town of Jabłonna, Poland (November 4–7, 2022). The delegates to the Congress are parliamentary deputies of different years and different levels who were elected in internationally recognized elections. Rejection of the war between Russia and Ukraine that began in 2014 and a willingness to change the socio-political system established in the Russian Federation are their common platform. The event’s organizers have announced that they will adopt a “Declaration on the Constitutional Principles of a Free Russia after the Putin regime’s overthrow,” a “list of priority decisions by the post-Putin Russian government,” etc.

In the light of this news:

We cannot but note the fact that [free and fair] elections in the Russian Federation disappeared long before 2014. Ethno-national political parties were banned thirteen years before Ukrainian region of Crimea was annexed. Thus, despite the fact that the Russian Federation, according to its own constitution, is a federation, and most of the ethno-national republics within the Russian Federation are nation-states with their own constitutions, parliaments, and governments, we have been deprived of the opportunity to represent and defend our interests in representative bodies for decades.

We acknowledge that the Russian Federation as a state has gone too far both in its ethno-national policy (extolling the Russian nation as chosen and endowing it with a special status in the Russian Federal Constitution) and in its foreign policy, thus completely destroying the legal space of the federation. The Russian Federation currently has no clear and legitimate borders, nor does it have legitimate representative bodies, since there are “deputies” and “senators” seated in the Federal Assembly who were, allegedly, delegated by illegally annexed foreign territories.

In light of the above considerations, we, representatives of the ethno-national and regionalist movements united in the Free Nations League, declare the following:

1. We do not recognize any political forces and hubs that would justify maintaining the Russian Federation in its current form. We have no need of arbitrators from Moscow, neither from the authorities nor from the opposition. We are open to dialogue and contact only with those who publicly support the right of enslaved peoples to establish independent States.

2. The Russian Federation cannot be re-established by cutting off what was seized by force and holding new elections. It is not elections that are at issue, but the very nature of Russian statehood: it is imperialist and exudes aggression towards its neighbors. This means that we, representatives of ethno-national republics and regions, have the right to shape our own destiny. If there is a discussion of independence for certain lands, let the people themselves hold this discussion, let them decide which confederations or unions to join, free from the intervention of federal forces, be they the government or the opposition. Any attempts at “peacekeeping,” attempts to teach us how to exercise our right to self-determination, will be rejected by us, and if they are intrusive, they will be met with a forceful response.

3. The process of forming a new Russian state should be voluntary and undertaken exclusively by those federal subjects whose legislative bodies vote to join a new federation. All federal parties currently represented among the federal authorities should be banned since they profess a misanthropic ideology that has produced thousands of victims and millions of refugees. The legislative bodies of the former federal subjects must be re-elected democratically, by open and secret ballot, with the involvement of ethno-national and regional political parties. There can be no automatic entry into the “renewed” Russia, no joining it “by inheritance.”

This appeal has been signed by representatives of the following national movements:

Bashkir

Ruslan Gabbasov, head of the Bashkir National Political Center (BNPC)

Ilshat Kinzyabayev, member of the BNPC

Buryat

Ra d jana Dugar-DePonte, representative of the Erhatan Buryat Democratic Movement in the USA

Cossack

Vyacheslav Demin, elder of the Cossack National Liberation Movement

Oirat-Kalmyk

Arslang Sanjiyev, chair of the Oirat-Kalmyk People’s Congress

Erentsen Dolyayev, deputy chair of the Oirat-Kalmyk People’s Congress

Batyr Boromannayev, deputy chair of the Oirat-Kalmyk People’s Congress

Vladimir Dovdanov, deputy chair of the Oirat-Kalmyk People’s Congress

Albert Sharapov

Tatar

Rafis Kashapov, deputy prime minister of the Government of Independent Tatarstan in Exile, co-founder of the Free Idel-Ural Movement

Farit Zakiyev, chair of the Tatar Public Center

Nafis Kashapov, deputy prime minister of the Government of Independent Tatarstan in Exile

Irshat Khabi

Chechen

Khamzat Grozny, a political exile in France from the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria

Erzya

Bolyayen Syres

Vitaly Romashkin

Ozhomason Kirdya

Source: Free Nations League, Facebook, 31 October 2022. Thanks to Sergey Ogurtsov for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

“Nations represented in the League: Buryats, Cossacks, Kalmyks, Erzya, Bashkirs, Tatars”

The FNL’s Principles

The Russian Federation is an empire that keeps its colonies in servitude by force. It is impossible to liberate them by holding a referendum, just as a referendum on the observance of human rights is impossible under conditions of state terror.

The peoples of the Russian Federation should be able to exercise their right to self-determination. Further federations or confederations can be established only a voluntary basis, not by diktat of the former federal center.

We declare the principle of the presumption of identity and agency [sub’ektnost’]. Accordingly, with the collapse of the current political regime in the Russian Federation, the regions have no need to appeal to anything to endow themselves with sovereignty. By definition, all regions acquire complete sovereignty and full independence from Moscow, and only then, as free territories, do they decide their future: whether they want to maintain independence, unite with other regions and republics, or create a confederation of states.

All subjects of the Russian Federation have the right to independently determine their future.

Source: “About Us,” Free Nations League. Translated by the Russian Reader

Ilya Yashin Is Standing His Ground

Ilya Yashin (center), at a recent court hearing. Photo: Alexandra Astakhova

Every morning, Radio Russia turns on in my cell at the temporary detention center. At 6 a.m., the national anthem plays, and then the brainwashing begins.

The news items don’t differ much from one another. Russian troops have inflicted another “surgically precise strike” on the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, destroying more than three hundred “nationalists” and about a hundred pieces of military equipment. The Ukrainian butchers responded by once again shelling residential neighborhoods in the DPR with American (emphasis on “American”) weapons. A rocket hit a kindergarten. Miraculously, there were no casualties.

Audio letters to the editor then come on the air. “Maria from Saratov” or “Elena Nikolayevna from Kirov” read out their original poems dedicated to our heroes who, fighting in Ukraine, have put themselves on a par with the “veterans of the Great Victory.” For dessert, there are “songs of the Russian spring” — amateur ensembles twanging about Mariupol’s return to its “home port” or about the crimes of the Maidan.

And so on — wash, rinse, repeat — every single day. Sometimes I feel like the character in the movie A Clockwork Orange who is seated in front of a screen, his eyes held wide open with clamps. It seems to me that the UN should deems forced listening to such broadcasts a form of torture.

But seriously, my observations suggest that fewer and fewer people are taking this brainwashing at face value. Surprisingly, despite the aggressive war propaganda, I haven’t encountered any manifestations of hatred on this side of the bars at all. Quite the opposite. A detainee escort guard, snapping the handcuffs on me, whispers “Hang in there, Ilya.” The woman on duty at the temporary detention center gives me an extra blanket, “so that at least you can sleep more comfortably.” A bailiff in court thanks me for my video about Kadyrov. Such moments reinforce one’s sense of being morally right.

Even now, sitting in a cell facing the threat of a ten-year prison sentence, I understand that my decision to stay in Russia was the right one, although it was a very difficult decision. Because it knocks out Putin’s main trump card about the opposition’s foreign affiliations and that we would all flee at the first sign of danger. But now people see that we are not fleeing, that we are standing our ground and sharing our country’s fate. This makes our words weightier and our arguments stronger. But the bottom line is that it leaves us a chance to get back our homeland.

After all, the winner is not the person who is stronger right now, but the person who is willing to go all the way to the end.

Source: Ilya Yashin, Facebook, 26 July 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader

“Opposing Putin but Staying in Russia”
Yuri Dud’s interview with Ilya Yashin was posted on YouTube on 16 June 2022. With English subtitles.
As of today (26 July 2022), the video has been viewed over 8.5 million times.

Russian authorities have launched a criminal case against Ilya Yashin, one of the last [prominent] opposition figures remaining in the country, for allegedly spreading false information about the army, his lawyer said Tuesday.

“I got a call from an investigator — they are beginning to search his home,” lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said on Facebook.

Prokhorov was later quoted by Russian news agencies as saying the probe was launched because his client spoke of “the murder of civilians in Bucha” on his YouTube channel on April 7.

Russian forces have been accused of committing war crimes in the Kyiv suburb after civilian bodies were discovered there following their withdrawal.

Another of Yashin’s lawyers, Mikhail Biriukov, said a search had been carried out at his home and that Yashin was taken out of prison to attend.

In June, Yashin, who is a Moscow [municipal district] councillor, was sentenced to 15 days in jail for disobeying police. He was set to be released in the early hours of Wednesday.

Yashin has been a prominent opposition figure in Russia since the mass protests against President Vladimir Putin in 2011-2012. He has denounced Russia’s offensive in Ukraine.

He is an ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and was close to Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.

After Putin sent troops to Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russia introduced legislation imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading information about the military deemed false by the Russian government.

Writing on social media earlier Tuesday, Yashin, who turned 39 in jail, said he was supposed to be released at 1:20 a.m. Wednesday (22:20 GMT Tuesday).

“Maybe they will let me out. Maybe not,” he said. “What do you think?”

[…]

Source: Moscow Times (AFP), “Russia Opens Criminal Case Against Activist Yashin,” 13 July 2022