Putin’s long list of political prisoners Four monks killed by rebels in Ethiopia

These were images that were strongly reminiscent of Alexei Navalny: the upright Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Mursa. The jawbones protruding from beneath his emaciated cheeks make his actually round face appear angular. He is wearing a blue criminal suit with a white emblem on the chest, as Navalny wore during a court hearing shortly before his death. In the video from a Siberian prison camp that the Russian broadcaster ‘Sota Vision’ published on Thursday, Kara-Mursa calls on his supporters not to lose hope in the fight against Vladimir Putin’s regime. “If we allow discouragement and despair, that is exactly what they want. We have no right to allow this,” he said.

Kara-Mursa is one of Russia’s best-known critics of Putin, and his imprisonment is not an isolated incident. According to the Russian non-governmental organization OVD-Info, more than a thousand people are currently in prison for political reasons. There are politicians, activists, journalists and often ordinary citizens who have demonstrated against Putin. Many of them were subjected to draconian punishments, sometimes for decades.

The prisoners are proof that Putin’s rule in Russia is becoming increasingly authoritarian. The Kremlin has increasingly restricted freedom of the press and expression and the fundamental right to assembly since the invasion of Ukraine began. The new censorship laws have tightened the noose around the necks of Russian opponents of the regime. Some have fled Russia, others have been arrested.

Who are the people that Putin’s regime has put behind bars? And what are they accused of?

Foreign prisoners as a bargaining chip?

On the one hand, there are foreign prisoners such as American journalist Evan Gershkovich. The 32-year-old editor of the Wall Street Journal was arrested by the Russian secret service FSB in March last year after an investigation in the Urals. He has since been in custody and accused of espionage. Gershkovich faces 20 years in prison. The journalist and the Wall Street Journal deny the allegations; the Russian judiciary has not yet provided any evidence.

In his interview with American host Tucker Carlson, Putin dodged Carlson’s claim that Gershkovich was not a spy. However, the Kremlin chief said it was “more or less pointless” to keep Gershkovich captive in Russia. Observers believe Russia is using Gershkovich as a bargaining chip to trade him for Russians imprisoned abroad. In a conversation with Carslon, Putin indicated a condition for Gershkovich’s release: secret agent Vadim Krassikov, who was imprisoned in Germany and shot a Chechen secret service informant in Berlin’s Tiergarten in 2019, should be released in return.

Former US Marine Paul Whelan has also been in a Russian high-security prison since 2018 for alleged espionage; his sentence runs until 2036. A Russian is said to have given the 54-year-old a USB stick with secret information in a hotel in Moscow. Whelan’s lawyers said he believed the drive contained only church photos. At the time of his arrest, Whelan was head of security for an auto parts company in Michigan.

Censorship laws are designed to silence people

However, the focus of the Kremlin’s judiciary is mainly on Russian citizens. Since Putin came to power, there have been repeated mysterious deaths of Russian opposition figures. In addition, many politicians critical of the Kremlin were arrested. Kara-Mursa is the best known among them. The 42-year-old has been active since the late 1990s in various Russian opposition parties around Boris Nemtsov, one of Putin’s main opponents, who was assassinated in 2015. Nemtsov was considered Kara-Mursa’s mentor and the two were close confidants.

Kara-Mursa survived two suspected murder attempts in 2015 and 2017. Both times he said he had symptoms of poisoning and fell into a coma. It is said that he is currently in solitary confinement – ​​as Navalny recently was. His relatives are concerned about his health; according to his wife, he lost more than twenty pounds in prison.

Authorities justified his arrest in 2022 with a speech Kara-Mursa gave to delegates in the US state of Arizona. In it he spoke about alleged Russian crimes in the war in Ukraine, and later the charge of high treason was added. The verdict: 25 years in prison. This makes Kara-Mursa a victim of the new censorship laws related to the war in Ukraine. These criminalize, among other things, “discrediting” the Russian armed forces. According to OVD-Info, 267 other people have been arrested on these grounds in Russia.

This also applies to local Moscow politician Ilya Yashin (40) from opposition party Solidarnost. His downfall was a YouTube video: in it Yashin spoke about Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, where hundreds of civilians were massacred in March 2022. Everything indicates that Russian soldiers and mercenaries from the Wagner group, which is loyal to Russia, are responsible for the murders, even though Russia denies this. A Moscow court sentenced Yashin to eight and a half years in prison over the video. Yashin had been arrested several times before by the Russian judiciary on flimsy grounds.

Like Kara-Mursa and Yashin, Alexei Gorinov, 62, the first Russian to be jailed under censorship laws, also suffered. At a Moscow district parliament, he described Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a “war” – and not a “special military operation” as the government had specified. His sentence: seven years in a prison camp.

Opponents of the regime declared terrorists

Human rights activist Yuri Dmitriyev (68) has also been serving a fifteen-year prison sentence since 2020 for alleged sexual crimes. His supporters reject these as false accusations, and the European Union also sees the real reason for Demitriev’s criminal prosecution in his political activism.

Unlike Dmietriev, many other activists have actually been directly convicted for their activities because, according to the Russian judiciary, they belong to extremist or terrorist organizations or support their activities. For example, Lilia Tschanyschew (42), Vadim Ostanin (47) and Xenia Fadejewa (31). They were associates of Alexei Navalny and his anti-corruption organization FBK and were sentenced to prison terms of seven and a half to nine years.

Critical press is not welcome

Former journalist Ivan Safronov received a particularly severe sentence in 2022. A Moscow court sentenced him to 22 years in prison for treason. The 33-year-old reported on defense policy before becoming an adviser to the head of Russia’s space agency shortly before his arrest in July 2020. The FSB accused him of passing on state secrets to the Czech and German secret services.

However, research by the Russian investigative media Proekt showed that all this supposedly “secret” information was publicly available in media reports and communications from the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Marina Ovsjannikova (45) also achieved international fame. The editor of the television station Perwy Kana stormed into a live broadcast with a protest sign that read: “No war”. And: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They are lying to you.” She was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for spreading false information about the Russian army. However, she escaped from prison: she escaped house arrest and fled the country with her daughter, where she temporarily stayed in Berlin. Its whereabouts are unknown today.