After being seized by the Russian FSB, savagely tortured and imprisoned for six and a half years, all Andriy Zakhtei wants is to get back to Ukraine, to his wife and their daughter

Russia has carried out mass raids and searches of the office of the Memorial Society and its members, with its co-chair, Oleg Orlov facing criminal charges and a likely prison sentence for supposedly ‘discrediting the Russian armed forces’.

Just as in the worst years of Soviet terror, it has become dangerous to openly speak of the crimes Russia is committing in Ukraine, or even shout ‘Glory to Ukraine’.

This unjust punishment comes in retaliation for 25 years of their human rights work in Belarus

A bill being rushed through parliament extends the scope of draconian legislation criminalizing telling the truth about Russia's war against Ukraine to cover hardened criminals recruited as mercenaries from Russian prisons

Belarusian partisans have, seemingly, pulled off the biggest act of sabotage of Russia’s war against Ukraine, with a Russian A-50 early warning and control aeroplane either destroyed or very severely damaged

Last week in Russia, the recruitment office, the Investigative Committee, relay cases by the railway were all set on fire: Russians are mastering “hot” forms of protest. Meanwhile, one could be put behind bars for a bouquet of flowers or a “Peace” poster.

A Russian court has sentenced journalist and human rights activist Maria Ponomarenko to six years’ imprisonment for a post on Telegram about Russia’s bombing of the Drama Theatre in Mariupol on 16 March 2022

The priest Ioann Koval replaced the word “victory” with the word “peace” in a special prayer about “Holy Russia”. Soon he was forbidden from leading any services.

A closed court in Belarus has passed two more 22-year sentences on two men whose actions probably helped prevent Russia from succeeding in taking Kyiv in the first month of its full-scale invasion.

Oleksandr Marchenko has been fined 30 thousand roubles in a Russian harsh-regime prison colony for supposedly ‘discrediting the Russian army’ by calling Russia’s war against Ukraine a war

Students from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts paint anti-war works, rather than pictures on the topic ‘Donbas’ or ‘Soldier’s Mother’. People continue to bring flowers to spontaneous memorials in honour of those killed in Dnipro, while anti-war graffiti and stickers appear on Russian city streets.

‘I thought / that I was / a Russian / but this maniac / appears to also / think he is.’ The January issue of the Samara literature journal ‘Volga’ published anti-war poetry by German Lukomnikov.

After a Russian missile hit an apartment block in Dnipro, killing over 45 civilians, including 6 children, Muscovites began bringing flowers and children’s toys to the monument to the Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka

Three Belarusians known as the Svietlahorsk Rail Partisans have received monstrous sentences for courageous actions aimed at hindering Russia’s use of Belarus for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Yury Dmitriev, world-renowned Russian historian, head of the Karelia branch of the Memorial Society and political prisoner, is spending his fourth term in a punishment cell in the space of just two months

After Monday 3 October, as the reality of partial mobilisation and the reaction of the authorities sank in, protests in Russia entered another quiet phase. A great many women who went out on the streets to protest were still being held in police stations across the country and in its detention centres.

Protests have been growing against the drafting of tens of thousands of men. The very term “mobilisation” was reworked to incorporate the Russian word for a grave ‘mogila’ (могила): substituting ‘g’ for ‘b’ transformed the partial ‘draft’ into a mass burial movement (“mogilisation”).

Memorial’s so-called ‘destructive activities’ are precisely those for which it received the Nobel Peace Prize, and include its open opposition to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine

A large letter “Z”, a Zwastika as it’s now called, was painted on a hillside opposite Divnigorsk (Krasnoyarsk Region). Beneath the letter, stones were assembled to spell the town’s name. A protestor clambered up the hillside, took one bar off the Z and rearranged the stones to read “No to the War”.