Russia’s Pyervy Kanal has been caught using a Belarusian fake for a propaganda program aimed at proving that Euromaidan brought only hardship and suffering to Ukraine, and that Kyiv is trying to attribute its problems to “Russia’s mythical aggression”.

21-year-old Gulsum Alieva, an activist from the Crimean Solidarity civic initiative and daughter of political prisoner Muslim Aliev, has become the latest – and youngest – Crimean victim of persecution to be added to Russia’s huge List of Terrorists and Extremists

World headlines remain focused on Moscow’s aggressive lies about its attack on Ukrainian naval boats on 25 November and seizure of 24 naval officers. Repressive measures and hate speech against Crimean Tatars and other Ukrainians appear to be much too ‘ordinary’ to get a mention

Although Russia stopped short of actually imprisoning 68-year-old Mykola Semena for expressing his opposition to Russian occupation, the two-and-a-half year suspended sentence imposed still means that he is effectively imprisoned in Crimea and prevented from receiving urgently needed specialist medical treatment

Russia’s FSB has banned Alyona Savchuk from entering occupied Crimea for 10 years, claiming that the young freelance journalist poses a threat to Russia’s defence capability, security or public order

Alexei Nazimov, the Chief Editor of a newspaper in Alushta in Russian-occupied Crimea, has been sentenced to nearly five years on ‘extortion’ charges probably linked with his criticism of members of the ruling United Russia party. 

The Lviv and Zhytomyr Regional Councils have imposed a ‘moratorium’ on the public use of something referred to as ‘Russian-language cultural products’, with the fact that this term does not exist in Ukrainian legislation only part of the problems such a ban brings .

Anonymous denunciations of neighbours or workmates are no longer a bad memory from the Stalin era, but encouraged by the Putin regime in Russia, and in occupied Crimea

Valeriya Ivashkina, the journalist whose name was on a cynical attempt to defame Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, has announced her resignation from Strana.ua, expressing regret that she took part in the efforts to slur Sentsov’s name

Russia is treating Ukrainians in Ukrainian Crimea as ‘foreign migrants’.  Those who refused or were unable to take on Russian citizenship after Russia’s annexation of Crimea are systematically penalized by the occupation regime, with an ever-increasing number even deported

Without any court verdict, Russia has added a young Crimean Tatar woman Elina Mamedova to its huge ‘List of Terrorists and Extremists’ over three social media reposts from 2014 and 2015.  She is one of five Ukrainians added to this list recently, all of whom are people whose prosecution has been condemned by the Crimean Human Rights Group as politically-motivated

Russia’s Union of Journalists has declared Kyrylo Vyshynsky, a Ukrainian journalist accused of treason for his propaganda support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its laureate for the ’Anna Politkovskaya Kamerton Award’, in a move condemned by one journalist as “plummeting the depths on a cosmic scale”

FSB documents in the prosecution of Crimean Tatar activist Suleyman Kadyrov appear to be written by the same person as the ‘court’ rulings. This is only one of the features of a prosecution described by the defence as “fabricated from start to finish”

Russia has been caught brazenly fabricating a ‘scandal’ around invented praise of Adolf Hitler by Andriy Parubiy, speaker of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada.  Moscow probably doesn’t care, and a quick Google check will explain why

A year after Ukrainian journalist Mykola Semena received a two-year suspended sentence for an article opposing Russia’s occupation of Crimea, the 68-year-old is unable to receive acutely needed medical treatment for heart and spinal issues in Kyiv without special permission

Civic activist Marlen Mustafaev has been jailed for 12 days over a Facebook post dating back to 2014, and may be facing a much longer term of imprisonment on an absurd charge of ‘inciting enmity’

A court warrant allowing Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office access to the mobile telephone data of a journalist who has exposed the authorities’ corruption has elicited outrage and succeeded only in placing Ukraine’s respect for press freedom in question

Olha Pavlenko has become the latest activist from the Ukrainian Cultural Centre to come under attack in Russian-occupied Crimea.  A search was carried out early on 29 August, with Pavlenko later summoned to the FSB for interrogatio

Crimean Tatar poet Aliye Kenzhalieva is facing possible criminal charges over poems about the tragedy of war, which the Russian-controlled Investigative Committee is trying to claim falls under the article of Russia’s criminal code on ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’

15 months after being seized by Kremlin-backed militants, Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev has been shown on a Russian state-controlled television channel ‘confessing’ to working for Ukrainian military intelligence