The second trial is coming to an end of Yuri Dmitriev, historian and head of the Karelian Memorial Society, our friend and colleague.

News only emerged of the arrest of 53-year-old former footballer Vasyl Vasylenko on 6 July 2020, nine months after he was arrested in Moscow

“I am not afraid of criticizing the state. I am not afraid of criticizing the law enforcement system, and of telling the FSB that they are at times wrong. Because I know that it will really get frightening if I don’t say this, if nobody says it” - from Svetlana Prokopyeva’s final address to a Russian court

Ihor Kiyashko, a Ukrainian lawyer imprisoned in Russia on bizarre ‘spying’ charges, has been placed in a prison medical unit with potentially serious health issues, including thrombophlebitis, a blood clotting disorder which has developed in the appalling conditions of Russian prisons and high blood pressure

Syarhey Tsikhanouski, a jailed Belarusian vlogger who is seeking to take part in an August presidential election and facing criminal charges, has been sentenced to additional 15 days in jail on a charge of "disobeying the police."

A Russian body which boasts of collaboration with the Council of Europe has added Rimma Vashchenko, a 90-year-old Jehovah’s Witness to its notorious ‘List of Terrorists and Extremists’, which also contains the names of over 80 Ukrainian political prisoners

Amnesty International has demanded the release of all bloggers and activists recently arrested in Belarus, including three prominent bloggers - Ihar Losik, Syarhei Pyatrukhin and Syarhei Sparish – who were arrested on 25 June.

The co-chair of Putin’s working group on amendments to the Constitution has openly acknowledged that one of the additions is aimed at preventing any legislative initiative that would end Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea.

Two Ukrainians imprisoned in Russia would almost certainly not be there were it not for their nationality, and there may well be many more such victims

International appeal calling on Russian to release Yury Dmitriev, historian of the Gulag and Terror and, since December 2016, a political prisoner

Russia is increasingly reinstating Soviet punitive psychiatry, with the victim this time a Siberian shaman, Alexander Gabyshev who wanted to drive out Russian President Vladimir Putin like an evil spirit

66-year-old journalist, human rights defender and former political prisoner, Sergei Mokhnatkin, has died in Moscow, seemingly of complications from the serious spinal injuries inflicted by prison staff during one of his politically-motivated sentences.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face has – for now – been removed from a mosaic in the new Russian Defence Ministry Cathedral, mass murderer Joseph Stalin remains. This is our history, the Deputy Minister of Defence claims, and what is there to be ashamed of?

On the eve of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, Russian officials have removed plaques commemorating Polish officers executed by the NKVD in 1940, while the Soviet Union was still collaborating with Nazi Germany

Russian scholars, cultural and political figures have addressed an urgent appeal to the head of the High Court in Karelia, asking for the release from detention of 64-year-old Yuri Dmitriev, a world-renowned historian of the Soviet Terror and recognized political prisoner

Anya was just 7 months old when her father, Hennady Lymeshko, was seized by the Russian FSB, tortured into ‘confessing’ to impossible crimes and then convicted on very different charges

Russia’s annexation of Crimea is to form part of the mosaics inside the new Defence Ministry cathedral, together with portraits of mass murderer Joseph Stalin and Russia’s soon-to-be President-for-life, Vladimir Putin

A court in Moscow has only reduced, and not revoked, the prison sentence passed on Konstantin Kotov, a Russian computer programmer who actively helped Crimean Tatar and other Ukrainian political prisoners and tirelessly protested against repression in occupied Crimea

Warnings that a new criminal norm could be used to silence those telling the truth about the coronavirus pandemic were effectively confirmed by the behaviour of enforcement officers in Russia and occupied Crimea in the first days of April

Sergei Koltyrin has died in a prison hospital in Russia, less than a year after being sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment on dubious charges