- Par Vitaly Shevchenko
- BBC Monitoring
Photo credit, Getty Images
Russian critics and opponents of President Putin are often punished, or even worse.
President Vladimir Putin now rules Russia virtually unchallenged. Many critical voices that once spoke out have since been forced into exile, while other opponents have been imprisoned or, in some cases, killed.
When he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, more than two decades of repression of dissent had all but wiped out opposition in Russia.
From the start of his term, President Putin brought the powerful Russian oligarchs, immensely wealthy people with political ambitions, to heel.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former head of Russian oil giant Yukos, was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in prison for tax evasion and theft following funding opposition parties. Upon his release, he left Russia.
Boris Berezovsky, another oligarch who even helped bring Putin to power, later fell out with him and died in exile in the UK in 2013, apparently by suicide.
All major Russian media gradually fell under state control or followed the official Kremlin line.
Alexei Navalny
Alexei Navalny is by far the best-known opposition figure in Russia. From his prison, he accuses Putin of wanting to smear hundreds of thousands of people as part of his “criminal and aggressive” war.
In August 2020, Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent, during a trip to Siberia. The attack nearly killed him and he had to be flown to Germany for treatment.
Photo credit, Getty Images
In May 2022, Alexei Navalny unsuccessfully appealed a nine-year prison sentence.
His return to Russia in January 2021 briefly galvanized opposition protesters, but he was immediately arrested for fraud and contempt of court. He is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence and was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary.
In the 2010s, Mr Navalny actively participated in mass anti-government rallies and numerous revelations from his main political body, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), attracted millions of views online. In 2021, the foundation was banned for extremism and Mr. Navalny has repeatedly dismissed allegations of corruption as being politically motivated.
Many of his associates came under pressure from the security services and some fled abroad, including former FBK chief Ivan Zhdanov, former FBK senior lawyer Lyubov Sobol and most, if not all, of the heads of Mr. Navalny’s extensive network of offices across Russia.
Navalny’s right-hand man, Leonid Volkov, left Russia when a money laundering case was launched once morest him in 2019.
Another key critic of Putin behind Russian bars is Ilya Yashin, who has been a vocal critic of Russia’s war. In a YouTube livestream in April 2022, he urged an investigation into possible war crimes committed by Russian forces and called President Putin “the worst butcher of this war”.
This live broadcast earned him eight and a half years in prison for violating a law banning the dissemination of “deliberately false information” regarding the Russian military. This law was hastily passed by parliament shortly following Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Photo credit, Getty Images
Ilya Yashin was arrested in June 2022 following speaking out regarding alleged Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
Mr. Yashin entered politics in 2000, at the age of 17, the year that Mr. Putin came to power.
In 2017, following years of opposition activism, he was elected head of the Krasnoselsky district council in Moscow, where he continued to express views critical of the Kremlin.
In 2019, he spent more than a month behind bars for his active role in protests once morest authorities’ refusal to register independent and opposition candidates in Moscow City Council elections.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Cambridge-educated journalist and activist, was twice the victim of a mysterious poisoning that left him in a coma, in 2015 and once more in 2017. He was arrested in April 2022 following criticizing the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was charged with spreading “fake news” regarding the Russian military, organizing the activities of an “undesirable organization” and high treason.
His lawyer says he faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
He is the author of numerous articles critical of Mr. Putin in leading Russian and Western media, and in 2011 he led the opposition’s efforts to secure the adoption of Western sanctions targeting the perpetrators of human rights violations in Russia.
These sanctions imposed by many Western countries are known as the “Magnitsky laws”, in reference to whistleblower lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Russian prison in 2009 following exposing fraud committed by officials.
fight for democracy
Mr. Kara-Murza served as vice-president of Open Russia, a prominent pro-democracy group created by fugitive ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
It was officially designated as “undesirable” in Russia and was eventually shut down in 2021. Open Russia President Andrei Pivovarov is serving a four-year prison sentence for his involvement in an “undesirable organization”.
Kara-Murza may face a long prison sentence, but he is at least alive, unlike his close friend and main Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov.
Photo credit, Getty Images
Boris Nemtsov was followed by an agent linked to a team of political assassins for nearly a year before being shot.
Before the Putin era, Nemtsov served as governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, energy minister, then deputy prime minister, and he was also elected to the Russian parliament. Therefollowing, he became increasingly vocal in his opposition to the Kremlin, published a number of reports critical of Vladimir Putin, and led numerous marches in opposition to him.
On February 27, 2015, Nemtsov was shot four times as he crossed a bridge outside the Kremlin, hours following calling for support for a march once morest Russia’s initial 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
Five men of Chechen origin have been convicted of Nemtsov’s murder, but it remains unclear who ordered it or why. Seven years following his death, an investigation revealed that, in the months preceding the assassination, Nemtsov was being followed throughout Russia by a government agent linked to a secret team of assassins.
These leading opposition figures are just some of the Russians targeted for speaking out.
Since the start of Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine last year, independent media in Russia have been subject to further restrictions or threats.
The TV Rain news channel had to move abroad, joining the Meduza news site which had already left Russia. Novaya Gazeta remains in Moscow but has stopped publishing its newspaper. Others, like the Echo of Moscow radio station, have been shut down by the authorities.
Countless commentators have gone into exile, such as veteran journalist Alexander Nevzorov, branded a “foreign agent” in Russia and sentenced to eight years in prison in absentia for spreading “fakes” once morest the Russian military .
But you don’t have to have a multi-million audience to be targeted. In March 2023, Dmitry Ivanov, a math student who ran an anti-war Telegram channel, was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, also for spreading “false information” regarding the military.
Meanwhile, single parent Alexei Moskalev has been sentenced to two years in prison for dissenting on social media, following an investigation sparked by an anti-war cartoon drawn by his 13-year-old daughter at the school.
It took more than twenty years for Vladimir Putin to ensure that no formidable opponent was free to challenge his power. If that was his plan, it worked.
