Russia causes the death of Kharkiv teacher illegally held in solitary confinement in Crimea (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 6th)
54-year-old Serhiy Diachuk has multiple rib fractures after two years in secret Russian FSB captivity (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 6th)
Could Ukraine have made a deal with Russia in 2022? Former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba on negotiations (Ukrainska Pravda, November 2nd)
Oil on the water: How Russia avoided accountability for the Black Sea tanker disaster caused by its sanctions evasion efforts (The Insider, November 2nd)
Valentyn Vyhivsky endured torture, years in solitary confinement and is still captive in Russia after his sentence (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 4th)
Ukrainian POW ‘dies’ in Russian prison as Moscow abandons vital convention against torture (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, November 3rd)
TUESDAY 10 NOVEMBER, 6.30pm Life Under Russian Occupation: Stories from Ukraine. Meeting with Anhelina Zinovieva (Donetsk), Sofia Naumenko (Mariupol), Daniil Shapovalo (Luhansk). Queen Mary, University of London. Hosted by Ukrainian Society and the Centre for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies (CEREES)
WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER, 7.00pm. Public meeting: Stand with the people of Ukraine. Meeting with Oleksandr Kyselov (Sotsialnyi Rukh Ukraine). Somers Town Community Hall, 150 Ossulston St, NW1 1EE. Hosted by Anti-Capitalist Resistance
FRIDAY 13 NOVEMBER, 6.00pm. Meeting: The US midterms, Ukraine and the fight against fascism. with Tanya Vyhovsky, Vermont State Senator (Progressive / Democratic), and Dylan Burns, journalist, streamer and founder of Track Ukraine. Hosted by Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. Register here
This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. To receive it by email each Monday, email us at2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.
The Network Case defendants, during their trial in Penza. Photo courtesy of Yan Shenkman
Around this time nine years ago, the so-called Network Case kicked off in Penza. It was a harrowing case concocted by the FSB against antifascists, whom they tortured. Eleven young men were convicted and sent to prison. Some have already served their time and been released. The key defendant, Dima Pchelintsev, has served half of his sentence and remains in prison. He was sentenced to a total of eighteen years.
While in custody, Pchelintsev has written a book entitled Shooting Fireworks (Strelba iz feierverka). I highly recommend it, since it provides a detailed account of the entire story.
A lot has happened since then: covid, war, exile. Criminal cases based on confessions obtained by torture have become routine, commonplace. People are imprisoned in large numbers, for any reason at all.
It is important to remember that if the sadists at the FSB had been stopped in their tracks back then, in 2017, we would be breathing easier today.
Evil must be battled before it’s too late. Its victims must have our backs when it matters.
You hesitated, you harbored doubts, you were too busy, and before you knew it, you were living under a dictatorship, missiles were raining down on civilians, and you were forced to flee the whole mess.
Back then, public opinion still meant something. Now, it means nothing at all.
All you have to do is show concern when it counts.
SOURCE: Yan Shenkman (Facebook), 20 October 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader. For a list of all the articles on the Network Case that I have published since January 2018, go here. |||||trr
According to Mediazona, [o]n October 16, 38-year-old Vasily Kuksov was released from Penal Colony No. 16 in the Nizhny Novgorod region. [On the] 17th of October he arrived by train in Serdobsk, in the Penza region, where he [was] reunited with his family.
In 2020, Kuksov, a musician and design engineer, was sentenced in Penza to nine years in a penal colony in the case of the “Network organization” (the defendants in this case received sentences of up to 18 years in prison).
The criminal case was opened in October 2017. At the time, FSB officers accused anti-fascists and anarchists, many of whom shared an interest in airsoft, of creating a “terrorist organization” and planning to “mobilize the masses to further destabilize the political situation in the country.”
Over the course of that month, security forces detained Kuksov, as well as Ilya Shakursky, Dmitry Pchelintsev, Andrey Chernov, Arman Sagynbayev, and Yegor Zorin. The formal grounds for initiating the criminal prosecution were Zorin’s confession. The young man had been detained with drugs and gave testimony about a terrorist organization. The case against him was subsequently dropped. In January 2018, Viktor Filinkov and Igor Shishkin were detained in St. Petersburg in connection with the same case. On April 11, another St. Petersburg resident, Yuly Boyarshinov, was also charged.
Initially, most of the defendants made confessions, but later retracted them, stating that they had been tortured. Viktor Filinkov, Dmitry Pchelintsev, Ilya Shakursky, Arman Sagynbayev, and Andrey Chernov reported violence and electric shocks inflicted by security officers. The Investigative Committee did not open a criminal investigation into any of the defendants’ allegations of torture. Five witnesses in the case also reported torture and pressure from security forces.
Vasily Kuksov told the court that FSB officers beat him during his arrest, saying, “You’re screwed, your life is over,” and threatened to cut off his finger. Despite this, he never made a confession.
During the investigation, while being held in Penza’s Pre-Trial Detention Centre No. 1, he was diagnosed with active tuberculosis shortly before his sentencing. He was not hospitalized and continued to be held together with other defendants in the case.
After the verdict in the Network case came into force, Kuksov was transferred in November 2020 to Medical Correctional Institution No. 3 (LIU-3) for tuberculosis patients in Nizhny Novgorod. He was discharged from the medical facility in January 2022. After that, at Penal Colony No. 16 in the Nizhny Novgorod region, he was repeatedly placed in a punishment cell.
Anarchist Black Cross Moscow
You may find the contact addresses of all prisoners in Russia supported by Anarchist Black Cross Moscow here. If you want to make a donation to a particular prisoner or case, please contact us beforehand via e-mail to make sure that the supporters of the prisoner or case are currently gathering donations, our e-mail is the same as the listed PayPal account. We are present in Telegram and Facebook, you may sign up to our e-mail newsletter here.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) is preparing a new case, for high treason, against Ruslan Siddiqi, the Russian-Italian anarchist serving a 29-year sentence for sabotaging a train carrying munitions to the Ukrainian front.
Siddiqi wasconvictedin May last year, and the Military Court of Appealupheldthe sentence on 1 July this year. In 2023 he blew up railway tracks in the Ryazan region, derailing a freight train carrying munitions, and organised a drone attack on the Dyagilevo military airfield.
Ruslan Siddiqi in court last year
Siddiqi confessed to these actions and told the court he sees himself as a partisan, opposing Russia’s war on Ukraine. He denied a further charge of preparing another attack. He was tortured extensively during questioning, but the authorities have refused to investigate.
Fires of Freedom, who give legal and other support to Siddiqi,saidthat, although he should have been transferred to prison after conviction, he is being held at a pre-trial detention centre (SIZO) in Ryazan. Transfer has now been delayed because of the new case.
Here isa Facebook postabout the new charges by Ivan Astashin, who campaigns in defence of political prisoners, translated by Giuliano Vivaldi:
“Isn’t that enough for them?” is the first thought that automatically springs to mind upon hearing the news of a new criminal case against anarchist Ruslan Siddiqi, who has already been sentenced to 29 years in prison for two anti-war acts of sabotage and has now also been charged with treason.
And yet for the security forces, everything is much more mundane, has a more practical raison d’etre. The sentence itself plays no role here.
It was the Investigative Committee [a federal agency answerable directly to the Kremlin] who took on the first case against Ruslan. And not just some district department, but the central bureau of the Investigative Committee — or, to be precise, the department for investigating war crimes, genocide, and the rehabilitation of Nazism, which [Investigative Committee chairman Aleksandr] Bastrykin established in 2022.
At the same time, under the Code of Criminal Procedure, only the Federal Security Service (FSB) can investigate cases of high treason. So if the Investigative Committee had “discovered” signs of high treason in Ruslan’s actions, it would have had to hand the case over to the security services.
Naturally, the Investigative Committee did not want to give such a juicy case to anyone else, so they “didn’t discover” high treason, but only terrorism, terrorism, and once again terrorism … which the Investigative Committee has the right to investigate on an equal footing with the FSB.
At the same time, the version that Ruslan was cooperating with Ukrainian military intelligence, which has now become the basis of the treason charge, was always foregrounded. Indeed, it was one of the central elements of the prosecution’s case.
The investigation explicitly proceeded on the assumption that Siddiqi coordinated his actions with representatives of Ukraine’s Chief Directorate of Intelligence. It was precisely through this framework that his actions were classified, among other things, as having been committed by an “organised group”.
So the evidence on which the FSB is now building a new treason case was already there in the materials of the first case. But turning this evidence into a separate charge based on the violation of Article 275 [on high treason] would have meant transferring the case to another agency, the FSB.
The central office of the Investigative Committee took on a high-profile case, “investigated” it itself, gathered the “evidence” itself, brought nine (!) criminal charges, and saw the case through to a conviction. There was absolutely no reason for it to hand such a case over to another agency.
Now the Investigative Committee’s work is finished. The verdict has been handed down; the appeal has been heard. And this is where the baton is already passed to the FSB Directorate for the Ryazan region.
For them, it’s a perfect case. The accused is already in custody. The skeleton of the case has been assembled by colleagues from another agency. All that remains is to rewrite the Investigative Committee’s material to fit the structure of the article of the criminal code on treason, and receive a ready-made crime against state security that has already been “solved”.
I have already told a similar story about Aleksander Leleko: he was convicted as a teenager for setting fire to railway relay cabinets, and several years later the FSB began reworking those same events into a new treason case. [Leleko, from the small Siberian town of Sharypovo, was arrested in 2023, then aged 16, and sentenced to six-and-a-half years. In April this year it was reported that he was in prison hospital, and being administered psychtropic drugs, while investigators sought to put together the new case.]
Therefore, the question “Really, is 29 years not enough for them?” hardly makes sense here. It’s not about the sentence, but about the crime-solving rate, which our investigative authorities so badly need to improve. Especially now, when generals are being blown up and shot at home.
This situation illustrates my point very well that a repressive system has rules. It can produce an utterly monstrous result, but internally it still remains a bureaucratic machine with jurisdictional boundaries, departmental interests, reporting requirements, and its own rules.
An all-powerful security official cannot simply take any desirable article of the Criminal Code and put it into his casework. Even when the decision to imprison someone has already been taken, you still have to properly document who exactly is supposed to imprison them and under which article.
Perhaps, in Ruslan’s case, there also exists a more personal motivation on the part of the Ryazan security services officers. They could not find Ruslan after the first action, caught him only three weeks after the second, and subjected him to brutal torture.
But a much more mundane and so perhaps more frightening mechanism is quite enough to explain the emergence of a new case: the agency needed a criminal case of its own; a ready-made defendant was available with a “body of evidence” already sitting on their desk.
For the security agencies, the people involved in these cases are primarily numbers in a report, not human beings.
□ Fires of Freedom, which supports Ruslan, is on Telegram (Russian only). In English, there are reports on Ruslan Siddiqi’s case, and information about how to give support, on the Autonomous Action site e.g. here, here and here. Ivan Astashin was interviewed here.
□ Ruslan Siddiqi’s final statement in court, and letters describing his anti-war action and arrest, are included in the book Voices Against Putin’s War, free to download here. The letters were published by the Russian Reader here.
Svetlana Savelyeva. Photo courtesy of Mediazona via Sever.Realii and the Savelyeva family
A translator from the Irkutsk Region wanted to visit her boyfriend in Ukraine. She was detained, tortured, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
A court in Kursk has found Svetlana Savelyeva guilty of attempted treason and conspiring to cross the border illegally.
Savelyeva was detained in October 2024 in the Kursk Region and then held under administrative arrest until mid-December on the pretext that she had disobeyed the police’s orders. In December, she was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center on criminal charges.
According to the FSB investigators, Savelyeva had undergone “military training” in Kazakhstan, after which she planned to join the Ukrainian army during its partial occupation of the Kursk Region.
The translator herself said that she wanted to travel to Ukraine to reunite with her boyfriend, a Ukrainian army soldier named Alexander.
“We tried many ways to get her here to where I was. When Ukrainian troops entered the Kursk Region, Sveta was in Armenia, if I’m not mistaken. And then suddenly she says, Here I am, I’ll try to get into the area controlled by Ukraine. The biggest mistake was that I did, after all, let her go to Kursk,” the Ukrainian soldier told reporters.
FSB officers tortured Savelyeva to obtain a confession: they kept her naked in a cold room, beat and choked her, subjected her to electric shocks, and threatened her with murder and sexual violence.
In addition to Savelyeva, criminal charges were filed against driver Igor Sandulyak, who agreed to drive her to the front line. The regional court fined him 150,000 rubles [approx. 1,600 euros].
Source: Mediazona (Facebook), 2 April 2026. Translated by Thomas Campbell, who asks our fellow translators, wherever they are, to share this post in solidarity with Ms. Savelyeva.
This year’s Berlin Film Festival is showing only one film from Ukraine: the documentary film Traces was tapped to represent the country. Traces tells the stories of women who survived rape and violence during the war in Donbas and Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine.
The Traces team on the stage of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, 16 February 2026. Source: Berlinale
“I always wished one thing for my pupils: that they would never be forced to take up arms,” Liudmyla Mefodiivna, a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature, says in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
The elderly woman, who taught school for forty-five years, was tortured and raped by a soldier after pro-Russian militias arrived in her village. As he was leaving, her tormentor left a bullet on the table as a warning and a threat: “I’ll come back and kill you if you so much as peep.” The teacher’s story, along with [five] other stories of violence and horror, is recounted in the documentary film.
“The occupiers came, and the majority of my pupils rose to Ukraine’s defense. Many of them have been killed, while others have been taken captive or returned from the front severely wounded. It’s terribly painful to witness and survive this. Ukraine is now flowing with blood, and mothers weep over the bodies of their sons, husbands, and family members. Four men have been killed in our family alone, leaving behind young children,” says Mefodiivna.
She recalls that she was unable to talk about her experience for a long time. Her family insisted, though, that her testimony of the atrocity must be heard.
“They beat me, choked me, cut me, knocked out my teeth, and broke my ribs,” Mefodiivna says. “They robbed me of my health. Thanks to the support of these wonderful women I met, I was finally able to start talking. I began to tell my story. I want the whole world to know about the crimes Russia has been committing, about how it has tortured and abused Ukrainians.”
Directors Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk, along with six of the film’s protagonists, have traveled to the Berlinale to present the film, a testament to their pain. All of them are members of SEMA Ukraine, an organization which helps women who have survived violence. As they sit down for interviews, it is particularly noticeable how nervous they are: their hands are shaking.
Olga from Kherson spent one hundred days in captivity with her son and her husband.
“I was ashamed to talk about [the Russians] did to me. Getting to know the organization was like a breath of fresh air for me,” Olga says. “Now we help other women, and men too. Because men have also been victims of sexualized torture, and yet this is hardly ever discussed.”
Seventy-two-year-old Nina is the most emotional during the interview. She almost immediately begins to weep as she recalls how the war first destroyed her home, and then her life.
“I thought I would have a quiet life in the village, planting trees and waiting for grandchildren. But then the tanks came and the earth burned. And then the monsters came. . . .”
Nina’s face is wracked by sobbing, shame, and grief.
The voice as a weapon
It is shame that prevents victims of violence from testifying against their aggressors, meaning that wartime victims of sexual violence are effectively ignored in the official statistics. When talking about civilian casualties, the focus is usually on those who have been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
“Those who have survived sexual assault, including in captivity, often go unnoticed and do not receive housing, medical, or mental health assistance from the state. Many suffer from stigmatization, and some cannot cope with what they have experienced,” says the SEMA Ukraine booklet.
The women are fighting to be heard.
“Our voices are the weapons that will punish the perpetrators,” the organization tells victims of violence.
“When I started talking about what I’d survived (this was before the full-scale invasion), I often encountered people seemingly switching off. When I would try to tell them about the most terrible things which had happened to me, their eyes would go blank. They would stop hearing what I was saying. It was like an internal defense mechanism, when what you’re listening to is too painful and unpleasant that you just don’t take on board what’s being said. I believe that this film can break down this barrier, and that after seeing it, people will no longer be able to shut their ears again,’ says SEMA Ukraine founder Iryna Dovhan.
The film opens with Dovhan’s story. In 2014, she was captured by pro-Russian armed groups in Donbas for aiding Ukrainian soldiers. After torturing and abusing her for several days, the pro-Russian militiamen tied her to a pole in downtown Donetsk, wrapped her in an Ukrainian flag, and hung a sign on her that read, “She is murdering our children.” The city’s residents visited the captive to hit, spit on, and insult her.
Dovhan was lucky in some sense: a picture of the helpless woman tied to a pole was taken by a western photographer covering the conflict in Donbas. The photograph was picked up by international media outlets, and Dovhan’s captors were forced to release her.
“I hope that the world will stand with us. I hope that the world will understand that we don’t need sympathy—‘oh, those poor women’—but a joint campaign to make sure this does not happen again in the future and the perpetrators are punished. Otherwise, evil will return again and again,” says Dovhan.
After what she survived, she found the strength to unite and support other women who had suffered.
How the film Traces came to be
The film’s co-director Alisa Kovalenko was also tortured and raped, but she found help at SEMA Ukraine.
“My journey to this film took twelve years. In 2014, I was captured in Donbas and suffered violence. For a long time, I couldn’t talk about it. When I first gave my testimony to human rights activists from the Helsinki Group, I asked, ‘Have you heard many stories like this before?’ They replied, ‘No. You are the first’. It was a shock. I knew there were many more of us, the people whom I had seen with my own eyes in captivity—both men and women.”
The filmmaker describes meeting other women who had gone through the same ordeal as a turning point.
“We sat down together for the first time and started talking. We experienced healing. We felt that we were not alone. And we began to break down the wall of silence step by step.”
It became clear that the traces of the atrocities had to be preserved, but for the filmmakers—Alisa Kovalenko was soon joined by Marysia Nikitiuk—it was extremely important to settle on the right narrative form to preserve the dignity of the victims and not traumatize viewers. Many things in the hours-long filmed accounts of torture, rape, and humiliation did not make it into the final cut.
“We wanted to shove all the worst things in the audience’s faces and shout, ‘Look what they’ve been doing to us!’ But we tried to strike a balance. This film is not meant to shock the viewer. It’s about dignity, about the light that is born in spite of evil. We learned to talk about it the right way, without retraumatizing either the protagonists or the audience. It’s a victim-centered approach,” says Kovalenko. “Some stories were left out due to limited running time—for example, how women in captivity were starved and would share one dumpling a day between four of them, or were forced to sing the Russian national anthem to be allowed to go to the toilet. But these testimonies exist—in books, in human rights reports, in memory.”
Laying the foundations for memory was the goal of the filmmakers. That is why, in Berlin, the women come onstage and recount their experiences once again to the audience, thus overcoming their pain.
“The war gradually fades into the background. Tragedy turns into statistics, and statistics become routine, and that is terrifying,” the filmmakers note. “Traces resurrects the names. They are no longer numbers, but flesh-and-blood women who look the viewer in the eye and speak. A tragedy should have names, not be turned into statistics.”
“My friends died at the hands of Russian soldiers. Why can’t I talk about it?”
This question will cost Varvara Volkova 7 years in a Russian penal colony. Here’s her story.
Varvara was a flight attendant, not an impassioned political activist. In a neighbourhood chat, she stated the obvious: Russian forces are killing civilians in Ukraine. The prosecution framed it as “fake news” motivated by hatred toward the armed forces, and the court accepted it.
The mechanism used to go after her relies on a Soviet-style culture of snitching: a Russian tank driver complained about her comments, then a professional informer, who intentionally hunts dissidents, amplified the case and demanded she be jailed.
In fact, there’s a whole network of these informers — they call themselves “SMERSH.” For those who don’t know Russian history, it is a reference to Stalin’s WWII counter-intelligence service. It means “Death to Spies” — a direct revival of the terror methods of the 1930s. They published screenshots of her messages everywhere trying to ruin her life; claimed she called the soldier a “fascist”; said she offered to make tea for Ukrainian soldiers if they reached the Moscow region. For words spoken in anger, the system decided to smash her life to pieces.
There is a grim irony in this tragedy: the regime destroyed Varvara to protect the “honor” of the military and her accuser. But the tank driver who reported her is already dead: he was killed in the war earlier this March.
Observers abroad often underestimate the price of resistance in today’s Russia. It is not just a fine anymore, but years and years of one’s life. Varvara Volkova shows us the true bill — and it is devastating.
I track the consequences of speech in modern-day Russia, make sure to follow for more updates.
Preface by the Editorial Board: Below we publish the translation of an article of our Russian comrades about state repression in their country. The article reports, among others, about the situation of comrade Felix Eliseev. He has been in prison for 2.5 years as part of a 14-year prison term. Felix was sentenced for “treason” as he was accused of making propaganda against Putin’s imperialist war against Ukraine and sending money to Ukraine to buy weapons. While the prison authorities do everything to break him, Felix does not lose his spirit and endures his imprisonment stoically. (See https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/felix-eliseev-a-revolutionary-communist-in-russian-prison/)
We call readers to support Felix by spreading this information about a communist and anti-fascist serving an unjust sentence!
According to the human rights organization Memorial, there are currently over 1,000 political prisoners in Russia, while other groups estimate the number could be as high as 2,500. This number is three times higher than in 2020, more than twice as high as in 2022, and continues to grow. In 2025, there was a sharp increase in criminal cases under articles on “justification of terrorism,” “sponsoring terrorist activity,” and “treason.” This is not due to increased terrorism, but to the fact that the security forces, having perfected their repression mechanisms, have begun to intensify their crackdown on “sponsorship” cases, such as those of the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation, recognized as an extremist organization in Russia) or cases related to money transfers to the Ukrainian army, which occurred back in 2022. The term “terrorism” itself has become so vague that even the average person doesn’t always understand what it actually means.
Among political prisoners are many individuals with progressive leftist views, serving time for anti-war activities or “inaccurate” public statements online. The “Foundation for Support of Left-Wing Political Prisoners” provides support to at least some of these individuals. Among them are: defendants in the “Tyumen Case”; defendants in the “Chita Case”; Anton Orlov, a trade union and leftist activist, coordinator of the independent medical workers’ union “Action” in Bashkortostan; Daria Kozyreva, an activist from St. Petersburg known for her anti-war protests and criticism of the Russian army; Gagik Grigoryan, a young activist imprisoned in 2023 at the age of 17; Azat Miftakhov is a Russian mathematician and anarchist, sentenced in 2021 to six years in prison for allegedly setting fire to the United Russia office in 2018. After serving this sentence, he was arrested again in 2023 on charges of “justifying terrorism” in a private conversation with a prison cellmate and sentenced to four years in prison; defendants in the “Kansk teenagers case”; defendants in the “Network case”; Boris Kagarlitsky is a left-wing publicist known in many parts of the world; Ruslan Ushakov is the author of articles published on opposition Telegram channels, sentenced to eight years in prison for posts in a public chat.
The case of the communist Felix Eliseev
Another political prisoner is Felix Eliseev, a Russian communist, blogger, and administrator of the Telegram channels “She Fell Apart” and “Kolkhoznoye Madness.” He was arrested in December 2022 and charged with justifying terrorism. According to investigators, Eliseev posted two anti-war posts on his Telegram channel, one of which endorsed a Ukrainian Armed Forces helicopter strike on an oil depot in Belgorod. The charges were later upgraded, and Eliseev was charged with “treason”. The court alleges that he transferred funds through a cryptocurrency account to a “curator,” who used the funds to purchase equipment and weapons for Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers.
Felix, like many other political prisoners convicted of “terrorist and extremist” offenses, is serving his sentence under intense pressure from the prison administration. He is regularly placed in solitary confinement cells, where they do everything they can to break him mentally and physically.
However, political repression in Russia involves more than just horrific criminal cases of “terrorism,” “treason,” and other “betrayals of the nation.” It also includes the persecution of undesirable and dissenting youth who dare publicly speak out against the war and the ruling elite, thereby gathering many other concerned young people around them.
The “Stop Time” case
One example of such government abuse is the “Stop Time” case. The “Stop Time” case concerns the persecution by Russian authorities of members of the St. Petersburg street music group “Stop Time” – Diana Loginova (pseudonym Naoko), Alexander Orlov, and Vladislav Leontyev – for their participation in impromptu concerts, including one near the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station, where they performed anti-war songs by artists designated by the authorities as “foreign agents.” On October 16, 2025, Loginova was arrested and sentenced to 13 days of administrative arrest for performing a song by an artist unpopular with the authorities. The other members of the band were also arrested and sentenced to 12-13 days. These events resonated in the media (both pro-government and opposition) and society, becoming a topic of discussion in the context of artistic freedom and the tightening of censorship in modern Russia.
On October 29-30, the musicians received another 12-13 days of arrest, and on November 11, two of them were arrested for another 13 days. On November 23, the musicians were released from arrest. The lead singer and one of the band members left Russia that same day.
In many Russian cities, street bands followed “Stop Time’s” example and performed opposition songs by artists-foreign agents to large audiences in public squares. They also faced pressure from the authorities and harassment from Z-Neanderthals.
Also, recently, spiders in a jar have started eating each other. Criminal cases have been brought against several well-known military Z-bloggers for discrediting the army! More than two years after Strelkov’s imprisonment and Prigozhin’s murder, a new steamroller of repression is purging those loyalists who are too undesirable.
All of the above demonstrates that Russian society has no legal means to publicly express its attitude toward the events unfolding around it. For any word “against,” the sword of Damocles of Russian justice hangs over every citizen. Despite this, concerned Russians, especially young people, are finding ways to rally together and show the world that not all is lost in this country.
Meanwhile, cowardly security officials and government officials tremble at the mere thought that the masses will sooner or later awaken from their slumber and rise to deliver justice to the imperialist oppressors in the Kremlin. In Russia, literal punishments are being introduced for thought crimes. Thus, in September of this year, an administrative law punishing “searching for extremist materials” came into force. This law allows the FSB to view any citizen’s internet search history, and if it contains views of materials deemed extremist or terrorist, the user faces a visit from masked officers and a fine. The first cases under this law have already been filed.
Furthermore, the country is introducing a so-called “white list” for the internet—only those websites approved by Roskomnadzor are permitted to be accessed; others are inaccessible, and VPNs cannot be connected. So far, in the spirit of Russian tradition, this system is poorly functioning and flawed, but the day is not far off when Russian society will find itself locked in a “cheburnet.” (*)
Freedom for political prisoners!
For freedom of speech, conscience, and the internet!
Down with political repression!
Radical democratization of the country, not the fascist regime of a dictator!
All power to the working class and the working masses, not to a handful of oligarchic monopolists!
(*) Cheburnet is a mixture of two words: Чебурашка (Cheburashka) and internet. Cheburashka is a character from Soviet cartoon for children. Despite it is kind and helpful, in modern mass consciousness it is associated with Soviet censorship. So cheburnet basicaly means internet under the censorship of Russian government and intelligence agencies.
My name is Elena Nikolaevna Bogatova, and I am the mother of political prisoner Ilya Alexandrovich Shakursky. I am crying out for help to save my son so that he does not rot away in solitary confinement.
They took my only son away when he was twenty-one years old. He is now twenty-nine. He has been tortured. He has serious health problems that we still cannot solve. He still has eight years to serve, and they could turn him into a disabled person. I cannot help him on my own, so I am asking all caring people to help us.
It is impossible for a mother to know that her child is being destroyed, and that she cannot save him!
Although he committed no crime, he is in prison under the harsh Article 205 [of the Russian Criminal Code; Article 205 proscribes “terrorist acts”], enduring all the hardships of prison life, without ever receiving any encouragement; we cannot even hope for parole. Right now, [the prison authorities] want to turn him into repeat offender so that he cannot have any visits, phone calls, letters, or packages. They want to take everything away from him.
I ask you to write an appeal. I understand that there are many of us now, and everyone is exhausted. But we must stand together for the sake of our loved ones, for the sake of the younger generation, which is currently being destroyed. Hear the cry of a mother who cannot bear the pain for her son and for all those behind bars. If we push with our shoulders, the walls will collapse….
OVD-Info Faces a Critical Situation: We Have Lost All Our Ruble Donations
26.11.2025
Russian payment services have refused to continue working with us, without providing any explanation, and have cut off our ability to accept one-time and recurring donations. This has severed our connection to our main source of support—the 12,000 individuals who regularly transfer money to OVD-Info.
The services’ refusal to cooperate with us is one of the many manifestations of state pressure on human rights organizations and independent media. Some of them even had to close due to the loss of donations in rubles.
This is a severe blow to our work. With these donations we were able to pay for the work of defense lawyers and legal experts, travel to the regions, maintain our free hotline, and help those who are politically persecuted in Russia. Furthermore, regular donations allowed us to plan our long-term work and development.
We do not plan to close or reduce the scope of our work, because repression is not diminishing. Any political activity, expressing a view against the invasion of Ukraine, or criticism of Putin instantly becomes grounds for persecution. We simply cannot abandon Russians to face this brutal, repressive system alone. We are defending over 90 defendants in criminal cases, almost every day we send lawyers to police stations, courts, searches, penal colonies, and pre-trial detention centers. We answer dozens of messages and calls daily—and we want to continue doing this.
However, now everything depends on whether we can find another 12,000 people who will regularly support OVD-Info.
Yulia Lemeshchenko. Photo from the Memorial website
The Second Western Military District court in Moscow last week sentenced Yulia Lemeshchenko to 19 years’ imprisonment for high treason, sabotage, and preparing and training for an act of terrorism.
Yulia, 42, is a Russian citizen, born in Staryi Oskol, in Belgorod region. She lived in Voronezh in southern Russia, until 2014. Then she moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine, with her son and her husband, who had found work there. Later on the couple separated.
Yulia took up powerlifting and in 2021 was named Ukrainian women’s champion.
In 2024 Yulia did military training in Kyiv – firearms, explosives and flying drones – and returned to Russia, via a third country. She sabotaged power transmission infrastructure near St Petersburg, and in Voronezh conducted surveillance on Aleksei Lobodoi, an air force commander responsible for bombing Kharkiv.
Yulia was arrested in January this year. She did not deny the facts outlined in the prosecution case, but told the court that “from a moral standpoint” she considered herself not guilty. This is a translation of her final statement to the court, published by Mediazona.
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Ukrainian Champion in a Russian Court: Yulia Lemeshchenko’s Final Statement
As you see, I don’t have any sheets of paper and I haven’t especially prepared, but I think I will improvise. I will now probably say a few things that were already said during this hearing, but let this be a sort of summing-up, in a monologue.
So I already spoke here about the fact that, in any war, two sides clash, and each side insists that it is right and that its cause is just. I took one of these sides. I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but, all the same, for me, Ukraine is home. I love that country. And I love Kharkiv, with all my heart.
There is a district in Kharkiv called Severnaya Saltovka. About 500,000 people lived there. Half a million. A few people I knew lived there. My hairdresser lived there. After the Russian shelling and bombing, not a single house in that district was left undamaged. Not a single one. And I am not just talking about a few broken windows. I am talking about whole blocks of flats in ruins.
Right next to the block where I lived, there were explosions. In my block, on the ground floor, my neighbour Anya lived with her four-year-old son Nikita. A shell exploded right under their window. Their apartment was completely destroyed. What has happened to Anya and her son I don’t know. I don’t know whether they are still alive.
Friends of mine have died in this war, one relative – my second cousin – and colleagues of mine. War is monstrous. I could not stand aside. When war comes, people who are affected can either try somehow to fight, or they can flee. People flee – I don’t know – maybe because they are cowardly or weak. I don’t consider myself to be a cowardly or weak person. So I decided to fight back – to fight against Russian military aggression.
It is possible that, by saying these things, I am getting myself still deeper into trouble. But my honour, and my conscience, are important to me. I did what I believed to be necessary. I did what I could. To regret, to repent – who knows, maybe I will do that on my deathbed. But for now, what will be, will be. I have nothing further to say.
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When the court hearing began, Mediazona reported that the judge, Vadim Krasnov, read out evidence that Yulia gave after being arrested in January. After the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Yulia at first moved to Germany. In 2023 she returned to Ukraine and made contact with the “Free Russia” legion, but did not join.
In 2024, when she did her military training, the instructors – who did not answer questions about which part of the armed forces they served in – said that, by way of payment for her work, she could receive Ukrainian citizenship.
The judge asked if she had done so, to which she replied, with a smile, “not yet”.
During the hearing, Judge Krasnov asked Yulia why she had chosen such a radical method of struggle, rather than, for example, providing medical help to the wounded.
“I can only answer that question with another, rhetorical question”, she replied. “Why did Russia decide to use violent methods to destroy Ukrainian cities? A war had started. Do you understand?”
The judge responded that, by 2022, the war had already been underway for eight years. Yes, but it had become frozen, Lemeshchenko said. After the invasion, she wanted to help Ukraine however she could, and was invited to become a saboteur.
“How far were you prepared to go?” asked the judge. “I did not want to do anything that would take human lives”, Lemeshchenko replied. “They accepted that point. On that we had an agreement.”
The judge said that the sabotage Lemeshchenko carried out near St Petersburg left hospitals without electric light. She replied that the aim had been to paralyse a drone factory, that she was sincerely sorry if anyone in Petersburg had suffered. And that she and her son had many times sat in their apartment, without light, when Kharkiv was being bombed.
Lemeshchenko also told the court that, during interrogation, agents of the federal security service (FSB) had threatened to murder her, and pushed her head against a wall. She had tried to tell them the truth. She said that she did not retract her evidence – and nor would she complain about her treatment, as she did not believe that those responsible would be punished.
□ Here is Yulia’s statement in court, recorded with English interpretation. Yulia is recognised as a political prisoner by Memorial, and her case was reported by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
□ The last word in court by Anton Khozhaev, a trainee officer accused of desertion to the Ukrainian side, and more on Russian anti-war protesters
Some of Ukraine’s youngest defenders (clockwise from upper lefthand corner): Serhiy Dodurov, Oleksandr Romanuk, Deniz, Ivanna Tsimerman, and Sofiya Yanchevska
As Russia’s full-scale war enters its fourth year, a generation raised under air-raid sirens is now old enough to fight. Despite not yet being subject to conscription, these young Ukrainians are voluntarily joining the military, trading lecture halls for dugouts, or trying to balance both worlds.
Their decision comes at a time when Ukraine is facing mounting pressure to address critical manpower shortages. In 2024, the government lowered the mobilization age from 27 to 25 and later introduced one-year “special contracts” aimed at 18 to 24 year-olds, with Hr 1 million ($24,000) pay and free higher education.
Meanwhile, many young Ukrainians are making another choice — to leave the country — heightening fears of a looming demographic crisis.
The Kyiv Independent spoke to five young Ukrainians about why they enlisted, how they balance study and service, and what they hope for after the war.
On 22 April 2025, Voronezh police raided the homes of activists believed by Center “E” [Russia’s “anti-extremism” police] to be connected to the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh. The searches also involved severe beatings and threats, and some of the activists were forced to record videos supporting Putin and the war in Ukraine. Almost all the activists had previously been prosecuted on political charges, but now they feel so intimidated that they are afraid to file a torture complaint against the police.
A 38-minute video was posted on the Free People of Voronezh channel on 16 April 2025. The video itself was viewed by less than three hundred people. In the video, four activists—Grigory Severin, Nadezhda Belova, Yuri Avsenyev, and Alexander Zheltukhin—discuss the news before jogging along an embankment of the Voronezh River. The genre is the “coffee klatch”: using the news as a springboard, the friends talk about the problem of alcoholism, apathy in society, increasing drug use, and the overall sense of doom and gloom.
Activists of the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh: Grigory Severin, Alexander Zheltukhin, Yuri Avsenyev, and Nadezhda Belova
Nadezhda Belova sums up the video’s content at the very beginning.
“To cut it short, everything is bad, but it will get worse. To put it in a nutshell, the situation in this place is at the terminal stage,” she says.
She argues that Russia is inevitably moving in the direction “North Korea”—toward a mothballed, rotten dictatorship, because Russians “somehow still support it and want to live in it.” Belova has reason to be pessimistic: even before the war, the state had charged her with “condoning terrorism” for comments she had made on social media in the wake of Mikhail Zhlobitsky‘s [suicide] bombing of the Arkhangelsk FSB. in 2020, a military court sentenced Belova to pay a fine of 400,000 rubles. She was on Rosfinmonitoring’s list of “terrorists and extremists” for several years, and her family had to leave their home village and rent a flat in Voronezh, as their fellow villagers did not support Belova in her fight against the unjust charges.
The video posted on the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh on 16 April 2025
“Again, the whole of Voronezh is covered with drug adverts. The law enforcement agencies run protection for [the illegal drug trade], and if they didn’t run protection for it, there wouldn’t be these adverts. At my neighborhood Pyaterka [convenience store], right at the entrance, there is a graffito painted in color on the doorstep: ‘Buying a stash is like going out for bread,'” says Alexander Zheltukhin. In previous years, Zheltukhin was fined for picketing against Belova’s persecution and arrested for protesting in support of Navalny. “And if it was not protected, I would argue, by the selfsame FSB, who probably take a percentage from it—”
“Watch out! You are discrediting the FSB,” Belova says, interrupting him. “I don’t agree! It cannot be!”
Caveats and omissions run through the entire conversation. The activists know that any free speech is potentially dangerous in today’s Russia, and they try to cover their bases whenever possible. (Spoiler: it didn’t work).
“They say it’s impossible not to confess”
A few days later, on 22 April, police raided the homes of all four people involved in the run, as well as those of other Voronezh activists. Searches were done at eight locations, allegedly connected with Free People of Voronezh. In most cases, the law enforcers acted extremely harshly. They used handcuffs and stun guns, beat people, intimidated the activists and their families, and emotionally abused them.
A photo posted by Nadezhda Belova
All the members of Belova’s family were shot with a stun gun. Belova later posted photos of her own bruises and the bloody marks on the bodies of her husband and son on Facebook. The police confiscated all their electronic devices and turned upside down their rented flat, which the landlady demanded that the Belovs vacate immediately after the search. The police threatened to send the son, a university student, to the war, and after the search, a policeman recorded a repentant video featuring Belova.
“Off camera, the [policeman beating Belova’s husband] says, ‘Do you support the [special military operation]?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘Do you support Putin?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ It’s light fare, but disgusting, especially when I saw a stun gun pressed against my son’s leg,” Belova told Okno.
The police recorded similar video “confessions” by several other people [caught up in the raids].
After the searches, Zheltukhin ended up in hospital with five broken ribs and several damaged vertebrae. He told OVD Info that he had tried to escape from the “punitive operation” and fell from the roof of a village house: “I broke my ribs when I fell, apparently, and they hit me [on those ribs]: it hurts a lot.” The police put a bag over his head and shocked him with a stun gun. His friends later photographed Zheltukin at hospital: his face was covered with bruises.
Fyodor Orlov, 36, was also beaten; after the experience, he says that he “did it all to himself.” He inflicted all the bruises and abrasions on himself, blindfolded himself with a scarf and sat like that for two hours, and fell into a briar bush on his own; there are photos of his back, entirely covered with flecks of blood. “Then someone—that is, I—drew a sex organ on my bald head just for fun,” he told OVD Info. The law enforcers also threatened to cut off one of his fingers, leaving behind telltale scratches.
Fyodor Orlov’s finger
“It was quite rough. As rough as possible, to the point that they say that now they understand why people confess to crimes they did not commit. Because, they say, it’s impossible not to confess. Orlov has several hundred stun gun marks [on his body]. Several hundred! They drove him into the woods. He thought they were taking him there to kill him,’” says Pavel Sychev, 38.
Sychev is a Voronezh activist and political consultant. He knows the administrators of the Free People of Voronezh channel from his past work as an activist: they crossed paths at pickets, but do not keep in close contact. Sychev’s home was also searched on 22 April, but there was no violence.
“[The police] search my home, as a rule, without breaking the law, and they never use force against me or my family. They have been coming to my home every year since 2022. These are just routine searches. I have always been searched as a witness in criminal cases to which I don’t even have an indirect connection,” says Sychev. “There is a federal case [for example, the case against Grigory Melkonyants and other activists of the Golos movement—Okno], and they do a series of searches all over the country, and they come and search my house for good measure.”
“Evil loves silence”
It is unlikely that the new series of searches was occasioned by the latest video posted on the Telegram channel. Our sources suggest, rather, that the reason for the raids was that Free People of Voronezh constantly writes and speaks about people convicted on charges of high treason and terrorism (for sabotaging railroad switch boxes, cell towers, etc.). The channel admins treat these people as anti-war resisters. For law enforcers, on the contrary, they are criminals convicted of violent crimes.
The formal pretext for the series of searches on 22 April was the criminal case, on charges of repeated discrediting of the army, brought against Grigory Severin. As follows from the indictment, while serving his sentence in a penal colony [he had been sentenced to two and half years in prison for “publicly calling for extremism”; he served his time and was released last autumn—Okno], Severin discredited the Russian armed forces. After the search, he was detained and placed under arrest.
Sychev believes that this criminal case was “canned.”
“You see, in Russia we have the practice of ‘desk drawer cases.’ Meaning you already have a criminal case against you: the entire case file is ready in advance, and it is lying in a desk drawer, waiting for its day to come. In the case of Severin, his first case was also ‘in a desk drawer.’ When he was arrested, it transpired that the entire case file had been readied a year earlier.”
It is not known what prompted the police to pull the case file from the drawer right now. But the fact that Severin faces prosecution does not surprise Sychev in itself.
“Everyone who knows Grigory, even in passing, realizes that he is a man who will not stay quiet. If anyone asks him directly how he feels about this or that situation, he will answer directly, even if the answer risks criminal charges. He is a man who will always try to prove to everyone the viewpoint which he espouses and defends. As far as I know, the first ‘discrediting of the armed forces’ case against him came from his explaining his philosophy of life to traffic police officers who had pulled him over. The second charge came from telling his cellmates about his stance. This in the order of things for him: he does not keep silent; he speaks openly, directly. So it was a matter of time. When a person speaks openly about a very dangerous and sensitive topic—and in our country the ‘special military operation’ is a sensitive topic—there are many chances that sooner or later they will be prosecuted.”
On the same day, a criminal case was opened against 65-year-old activist Yury Avsenyev, another person involved in the run along the Voronezh River embankment. His home was also searched on 22 April, but he was released on his own recognizance. Avsenyev is suspected of “publicly calling for extremism.”
Yuri Avsenyev
The Voronezh activists who fell victim to the police brutality have not yet worked up the courage to file complaints, and they fear excessive publicity.
“They are really spooked,” says Pavel Sychev. “The information I have now is that they will not file torture complaints, but I don’t know, maybe someone will persuade them to do it. They are very much afraid that if they do it, the law enforcers won’t be reprimanded in any way, but will just come and take revenge on them. They are all convinced that they will be killed. I told them that evil loves silence, and if you don’t react now, there is a greater chance of a repeat than if you do. But they said it’s very easy to judge from the outside when you haven’t been tortured. ‘We are afraid that they might do something to us,’ [they say].”
Our sources note that such official lawlessness had not previously occurred in Voronezh. Usually, searches at the homes of political activists and arrests were carried out by the book, without violence. The only widely known case of official lawlessness ended in criminal charges against the police officers involved and monetary compensation for the victims. In May 2018, criminal investigators Sergei Kosyanenko and Oleg Sokolovsky tortured university students Maxim Grebenyuk and Sergei Troyansky, hoping to force them to confess that they had stolen a mobile phone. The students were held at Police Station No. 4 in Voronezh’s Comintern District for six hours in handcuffs and strangled with a plastic bag. They refused to incriminate themselves, and afterwards they documented their injuries and filed a torture complaint with the Investigative Committee. In 2021, Grebenyuk was awarded one million rubles, and Troyansky, 500,000 rubles, in compensation for their suffering.
The Voronezh police’s current brutality may be due to the proximity of the front, suggests a source who requested anonymity. The fact is that, since the start of the full-scale invasion, Voronezh law enforcers have regularly been seconded to the so-called new territories, the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“There are quite big problems with the law in those ‘new territories.’ And the practices that are used there are inhuman, I think. When they come back here, to their native land, they simply do not reconfigure themselves,” says our source, who is not connected with the Free People of Voronezh Telegram channel. “They consider themselves above the law. They think that they are involved in a good cause, and they can torture bad people for the sake of the good cause. When a person has tried their hand at it once, when they realize that they can get away with it absolutely scot-free, then it is quite difficult to put the brakes on, and it will grow.”
A Russian and Italian citizen, an electrician from [the Russian city of] Ryazan, an industrial tourist, a bike traveller, an anarchist and a partisan — all this can be said about 36-year-old Ruslan Siddiqi. In the summer of 2023, he dispatched four drones with explosives to attack the Diaghilev military airfield near Ryazan, and in the autumn, he decided to act “from the ground” — damaging railway lines with two bombs and derailing 19 freight train wagons. Siddiqi is currently awaiting trial in a Moscow pretrial detention centre, with the prospect of a life sentence hanging over him. In these letters to Mediazona, he explained why he decided to “take up explosives”, how a fox spoiled his first sabotage, and how torture by field telephones (known as “tapiki” in slang) differs from torture by tasers. (The security forces used both against him.)
Attacking a military airfield: “I took four drones with explosives to the field on a bicycle”
The hum of the Tupolev Tu-22 and Tu-95 aircraft outside my window coincided with the strikes on Ukraine, and this determined my choice of target: Diaghilev military airfield, just ten kilometres from home. I lived with my 80-year-old grandmother and understood how hard it was for the elderly and sick without heat and light in winter. As I filled a tub with hot water, I thought about those deprived of basic amenities a thousand kilometres away, because of someone’s geopolitical ambitions. Yet at the same time they talk about “fraternal nations” and say that “Russia is not at war with civilians”.
