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Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to secure his fifth term in power this month on the heels of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death in prison, which devastated Kremlin critics and spurred concerns about the safety of other imprisoned dissidents.
Putin’s attitude towards opposition has shifted from tolerance to repression in the 24 years of his reign. In the last ten years, his administration has imposed limitations on freedom of expression and assembly, targeted individuals deemed as threats to the Kremlin, and curtailed access to numerous independent media sources.
Many opposing politicians are currently incarcerated or living in exile, while the 71-year-old leader of Russia is facing only symbolic competitors.
There are several notable critics who are currently incarcerated:
Vladimir Kara-Murza has a 25-year sentence.
In April 2023, a notable member of the opposition, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was found guilty of treason and given the harshest punishment ever given to a critic of the Kremlin in present-day Russia.
The charges against Kara-Murza, who has been behind bars since his arrest in 2022, stem from a speech that year to the House of Representatives in Arizona, where he denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The 42-year-old political activist, who started out as a journalist, was an associate of Russian opposition leader and fierce Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.
During 2011 and 2012, Kara-Murza and Nemtsov advocated for the adoption of the Magnitsky Act in the United States. This legislation was a reaction to the death of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitsky while in prison, after he brought to light a tax fraud scheme. The law has empowered the US government to impose penalties on individuals in Russia who are considered to have violated human rights.
Kara-Murza has been poisoned twice and holds the Russian government responsible. He denies the accusations and believes he is being targeted for opposing Putin. He has compared the legal proceedings to the staged trials of the Soviet era under Josef Stalin.
Starting from September of 2023, Kara-Murza has been imprisoned in solitary confinement in the Siberian town of Omsk. In January, he was transferred to a different penal colony in the city and was once again placed in solitary confinement. This relocation is widely believed to be a tactic to intimidate a man who, despite being imprisoned, continued to voice his opposition to the Kremlin and its involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.
ILYA YASHIN, SERVING 8 ½ YEARS
One of the few well-known Kremlin critics to stay in Russia after the start of the war, Ilya Yashin, 40, was arrested in June 2022 while walking in a Moscow park. He was sentenced to 8 ½ years in prison after he was convicted for spreading false information about Russian soldiers.
The charge stemmed from a YouTube livestream in which he talked about civilians slain in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. After Russian forces withdrew from the area in March 2022, hundreds of corpses were found, some with their hands bound and shot at close range.
Yashin, member of a Moscow municipal council, was a vocal Navalny ally and a close associate of Nemtsov’s. He is serving time in Russia’s western Smolensk region.
Yashin’s sharp criticism of the Kremlin persisted despite his harsh sentence, as his associates constantly post his messages from prison on his social media pages. His YouTube channel boasts over 1.5 million subscribers.
In September 2022, while in prison, he wrote to The Associated Press stating that the authorities have yet to silence him.
ANDREI PIVOVAROV, SERVING 4 YEARS
At the age of 42, Andrei Pivovarov served as the leader of the opposition group known as Open Russia. The government deemed the group as “undesirable” and it was officially dissolved in 2021. Shortly after this, Pivovarov was stopped from boarding a flight from St. Petersburg to Warsaw while attempting to leave the country.
He was charged by the government for participating in activities deemed by them as those of an unwelcome organization. He stated that the charges were motivated by politics and were a result of his intention to run for a parliamentary seat in the upcoming 2021 election. Despite being detained before the trial, he was able to continue his campaign but ultimately was not able to be on the ballot. In July 2022, during the height of the war in Ukraine, Pivovarov was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.
During a written interview in December 2022 while serving time in prison, Pivovarov stated to the AP that he was not taken aback by his sentencing.
“In the summer of 2022, the political landscape had been completely cleared out. Those who had not departed ended up imprisoned, including myself,” Pivovarov stated.
He has been confined to solitary confinement in a distant correctional facility located in Russia’s northwestern region of Karelia.
LILIA CHANYSHEVA, SERVING 7 ½ YEARS
In November 2021, Lilia Chanysheva, a 42-year-old who was previously in charge of Alexei Navalny’s branch in the Bashkortostan region of Russia, was taken into custody. Several months prior, a court had declared Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and its regional branches as “extremist organizations.”
After a trial held in private, Chanysheva was convicted in June 2023 and received a prison sentence of 7 and a half years for charges of advocating extremism, establishing an extremist group, and creating an organization that violates human rights. Additionally, she was ordered to pay a fine of 400,000 rubles (equivalent to approximately $4,700).
Chanysheva denies the accusations, claiming they are fueled by political reasons. According to Russian news outlets, the government is currently pushing for a longer prison sentence of 10 years for the ex-activist.
Cannot reword – this is a person’s name and term of imprisonment.
Oleg Orlov, a long-standing advocate for human rights, was found guilty by a Moscow court of “repeatedly damaging the reputation” of the Russian military. As a result, he was given a prison sentence of 2 and a half years in February.
A 70-year-old individual, who serves as co-chair for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights organization Memorial, has been accused for publishing an article condemning Russia’s involvement in the war in Ukraine.
In 1995, Orlov was one of the human rights defenders to volunteer as a hostage in the city of Budyonnovsk, where thousands of people were being held by Chechen rebels at a hospital. Their goal was to secure the release of innocent civilians.
Orlov was found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of 150,000 rubles (approximately $1,500 at the time) in October 2023, which was considerably less severe than the lengthy prison sentences given to some other Russians for speaking out against the war. This highlights Putin’s intolerance for any criticism of the invasion of Ukraine. As a result, the prosecution appealed the fine and requested a more severe punishment.
According to a release from Memorial, the verdict against Orlov is seen as a deliberate effort to silence the Russian human rights movement and stifle any dissent towards the government.
Alexei Gorinov has been serving for a period of 7 years.
Alexei Gorinov, a council member in Moscow, was the initial individual to receive a prison sentence based on the law that punishes the dissemination of “false information” regarding the Russian military following the invasion of Ukraine.
In April 2022, he was apprehended for speaking out against the war during a city council assembly. A YouTube recording captured him expressing doubt about organizing a scheduled art contest for children in his district while there were “casualties among children every day” in Ukraine. His punishment was a seven-year jail term.
The long sentence for a low-profile activist shocked many. In written comments to AP from behind bars in March 2023, Gorinov, 62, said “authorities needed an example they could showcase to others (of) an ordinary person, rather than a public figure.”
Gorinov, who suffers from a respiratory illness, had one of his lungs surgically removed prior to his imprisonment. His state of health worsened during the six weeks he spent in solitary confinement at a penal colony located in the Vladimir region to the east of Moscow. He is currently in the process of recuperating.
Source: independent.co.uk
