Political repression explodes in Russia after Ukraine war

Political repression in Russia, which had been building additional muscle since 2020, exploded after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting domestic reaction to the war.

According to the annual report by the NGO OVD-Info, which monitors human rights violations and offers legal assistance to victims, from January 14 to December 14, there were 20,467 political arrests in the country. Of these, 19,478 were related to protests against the conflict or the Armed Forces.

The dimension of the repression becomes clearer when the data is compared with the total number of arrests registered since the NGO was founded, in 2011. From then until 2021, there were just over 40,000 arrests considered political.

The numbers refer both to demonstrators arrested in the street for a few hours and released, the absolute majority, and to people prosecuted in court. The NGO has a total of 8,500 open administrative cases, a milder modality that rarely leads to jail, and 378 criminal ones. At least 11 people were convicted of treason and could spend decades in prison.

The most visible crackdown, with police cracking down on protesters, was evident this year when Putin stormed his neighbor on Feb. 24.

From there, there were some waves of protests against the war, which, according to a law passed after its beginning, has to be called in the media a “special military operation”, under penalty of punishment, even though the president himself has committed a faulty act and called the thing by name last week. She was 1 of the 22 approved by Parliament to instrumentalize the repression.

The media suffered in particular. Classic vehicles of Russian democracy, such as the newspaper Novaia Gazeta, run by Nobel Peace Prize Dmitri Muratov, had to close and migrate to cloud operations based in other countries. There are at least 17 sentences passed, the report says, against journalists. A state TV editor had to flee the country after protesting on national television.

The most famous Russian human rights NGO, Memorial, was outlawed and liquidated. There, the biggest problem was the defense of LGBTQIA+ rights in repressive Chechnya — acts against a new law criminalizing the Kremlin calls “gay propaganda” are responsible for a good part of the other arrests in the year.

Violence appeared. “People were thrown on the asphalt, beaten with truncheons, strangled, had their heads slammed against the wall, their hands twisted and handcuffed”, states the report, which describes some emblematic cases.

Gradually, Putin managed to control the situation, not least because there is popular support for his war, although he seems to have more to do with apathy than with enthusiasm. According to a November survey by the Levada Center, an independent public opinion polling body, 79% of Russians support the president and 74% support the actions of the Armed Forces in Ukraine.

“Putin erected a fortress state, with elements of totalitarianism, forcing parts of society to share responsibility for the war,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a leading political commentator who worked for the Carnegie Center in Moscow.

It worked, in the past, as the center closed its doors after 28 years of intellectual production on Russian life by order of the Kremlin, in April. This year alone, 176 NGOs, people and institutions were branded “foreign agents”, usually for receiving external funding and always for a position critical of Putin, and a good number stopped working.

That said, there were spasms of public reaction throughout the year. The most important one occurred in September, when the president decreed the mobilization of 320,000 reservists to try to solve the problem that cost him the capture of Kiev in February: lack of personnel.

There were protests, with the respective arrests and police repression, in different regions of Russia. Putin, who saw his popularity drop a little with the backlash, sped up the process and soon declared the mobilization over. Again, the situation calmed down and today the rapid training of these forces has caused concern in the Ukrainian leadership.

The war exacerbated a process that had taken shape in 2020, at the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a long-term thing, befitting Putin’s 23 years in power.

Initially, in 2000, the president brought renewal, joviality and hints of integration to the West. He found himself rejected, which he was certainly right, and went on to work on a highly personalist national reconstruction project. He was re-elected in 2004, but did not change the Constitution to stand for more terms at that point.

He preferred to see an allied successor elected, Dmitri Medvedev, who warmed his chair while he dealt with the prime minister’s office. Until then, the regime’s harshness was directed at rival oligarchs and control of TV. The media followed relatively freely, with critical websites and newspapers.

This has changed since the first major protests against Putin, in 2012, against his return to power in an electoral system that is not necessarily fraudulent, but ossified to the point of making opposition that is not consented unfeasible.

In 2017, the blogger named Alexei Navalni tried to denounce state corruption, promoting giant protests in several cities from a diffuse base, on the internet. This continued intermittently until, in late 2020, he was poisoned and had to be flown to Germany.

Navalni’s arrest, on charges of violating a parole upon his return in January 2021, sparked a new wave of —suppressed — protests. He was devoured by the Russian judicial system, which piled up charges against the activist and in March sentenced him to nine years in jail. This year alone, he has spent 90 days in solitary confinement, says OVD-Info, which counts 23 criminal cases against his allies.

Navalni is not a popular leader, nor has he ever been. In the West’s dreams, he would leave jail to challenge Putin for the presidency, something today as illusory as thinking that the elite would overthrow the president as soon as he sent the tanks into Kiev. Still, his judicial martyrdom made him a symbol of the state of things.

Since then, after 2018 in which he was re-elected and celebrated the success of the World Cup in his country, Putin leaned towards rigidity. In 2020, he finally changed the law to be able to contest elections that could keep him in office until 2036 and intensified repression to the current point.