As Russia’s campaign to terrorize the daily lives of Ukrainians continues, the arrests of individuals for their political views, poetry, and any expression of dissent at home are so regular they are barely mentioned.
Some high-profile cases have turned heads, the most obvious being the murder in February of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison colony.
Days after his burial, queues were still snaking out of the cemetery where he was laid to rest as Muscovites paid their respects to the anti-corruption activist and opposition politician, despite a heavy police presence and reports of facial recognition systems being deployed.
It wasn’t long before the first accounts emerged of people being arrested for attending.
It remains unclear what Elena Gribkova, one detained attendee, might be charged with. Another woman was fined for displaying prohibited symbols, but Russian authorities have no shortage of means or options for deterring opposition.
“Over the six years of Putin’s latest term, more than 10,000 people have been tried under repressive criminal articles, and more than 105,000 under administrative articles,” according to analysis published by Proekt.media.
Administrative offenses are generally considered less serious than criminal offenses, but the ease with which authorities can impose them on individuals, means they tend to be deployed more widely; and in some cases, penalties can be similar. People tried on administrative offenses also have no right to a lawyer, and the “standard of proof” is very low, according to Amnesty International.
“The real motives of the state can be hidden behind a wide variety of offenses,” the organization said.
In modern Russia, people can easily be tried for offenses that bear little relation to their actions. The rock band Pussy Riot, for example, were prosecuted for hooliganism motivated by supposed religious hatred. Navalny too, was first targeted with claims of financial crimes. He received his first politically motivated “economic” conviction in 2013 under Article 160 (Misappropriation or Embezzlement.)
The Proekt analysis found more than 13,000 Russians have been tried in connection with legislation introduced since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including 4,500 military personnel.
The vast majority of criminal cases involving people punished for speaking out against the war fall under “Public Dissemination of Knowingly False Information about the Armed Forces,” under which 147 criminal cases have been launched. A further 8,446 have been charged with the administrative offense of Discrediting the Armed Forces.
The deliberately vague wording of a variety of laws allows their arbitrary application. Extremism, for example, is “a complex concept that is not clearly described in the law, and any action or statement that the authorities do not like can be labeled extremist,” Proekt said in its report.
More people have been tried for “extremism” and criticizing Russia’s authorities than were cumulatively tried for “anti-Sovietism” in similar six-year periods under both Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the researchers found.
There has also been a rise in the number of cases under Article 205.2 on the justification of terrorism and authorities have increasingly targeted the population for incitement of hatred.
But there are many other ways people can be persecuted, and legislation censoring negative discussion of the armed forces isn’t necessarily the authorities’ first port of call.
Rules on gatherings, imposed during the Coronavirus pandemic, have also been used to prevent political dissent. In Moscow, crowds of more than 1,000 were prohibited during the crisis, for example, and the authorities have continued to penalize people for breaching the rule after other restrictions were ended.
Between April 2022 and late 2023, some 159,000 people were fined in Covid-related cases, Proekt said.
These numbers do not include those punished for disobeying orders, abandoning an army unit, or falsifying an illness – punishments for which were tightened following the full-scale invasion.
Proekt, a media project specializing in investigative journalism, has been labeled a foreign agent by Russia and declared “undesirable” after publishing a report about illegally logged Siberian timber finding its way to the Swedish furniture giant Ikea via Indonesia.
It has also published revelations about Putin’s daughter and property owned by one of the wives of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
Despite the scale of repression in Russia, a significant proportion of Russians continue to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. While accurate polling remains difficult, it seems at the very least 30% to 40% of the population support the country’s war on Ukraine; other sources have put the numbers much higher, at consistently around 75%, while indicating a “patchwork of contradictions” and a variety of conflicting viewpoints.
Aliide Naylor is the author of ‘The Shadow in the East’ (Bloomsbury, 2020). She lived in Russia for several years and is now based in London and the Baltic states, working as a journalist, editor, and translator.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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