The St. Petersburg-based public human rights organisation Civic Control has issued a report on the persecution of Russians under articles of the Criminal Code that have become a tool of repression for their anti-war stance. Moscow City Duma deputy Alexei Gorinov in court on charges of ‘spreading deliberately false information about the Russian army’. Moscow, 8 July 2022. REUTERS - Stringer A week after the start of the

The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the ‘Human Rights Situation in the Temporarily Occupied Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol’   The document was supported by 81 countries, 14 voted against and 80 abstained. The document condemns the systematic violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms recorded on the occupied territory of Ukraine by the Russian authorities. In particular, it refers to the harassment of Crimean

A teenager has been sentenced in Russia to five years in a penal colony for allegedly taking part in the Russian Freedom Legion. Arseny Turbin, a 16-year-old schoolboy, who was sentenced in Russia to five years in an educational colony under the article on participation in a terrorist organisation (part 2, article 205.5 of the Criminal Code) for allegedly taking part in the Russian Freedom Legion, has lost 17 kilograms

They are courageous: young people who protest in Russia against the war in Ukraine face severe penalties. They serve as a deterrent for imitators. ‘Do you need a president like that?’ These words were written on leaflets by 15-year-old Arseniy Turbin from Livny and distributed through neighbours' letterboxes. On 20 June, he was sentenced to five years in prison by a military court in Moscow. The reason given was that

At the end of February 2023, 16-year-old gymnasium student Yegor Balazeikin smashed a Molotov cocktail against the wall of a military recruitment office in the Leningrad region. This is how the teenager decided to express his protest. In the summer of 2022, Egor's uncle died in Ukraine, who had gone on a special operation as a volunteer. After that, the young man became a convinced opponent of the SVO. The

Correctional Colony No. 19 in Volgograd Oblast, where four colony employees and four convicts were killed in a hostage situation on August 23, had the whole set of problems of the penal system. Convicts were abused here, and they slit their wrists; superiors were caught taking bribes; recruitment for the PMC “Wagner” and the regular army was conducted here - every fourth person died. Lattice under the stairs The high-security

The youngest of them is 16 years old today. Following the Russian prisoner exchange, the OVD organisation currently counts 2747 politically motivated criminal proceedings, including 1015 against opponents of the war, 131 of which were against children and young people. 15-year-old Arsenij Turbin from Liwny was recently sentenced to 5 years in prison for distributing anti-war leaflets. Today he has to celebrate his 16th birthday behind prison walls. The