Protesters were detained by Russian riot police at rallies in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk, and Kazan on June 12.

The closed trial has begun in Russia of Yury Dmitriev, a 61-year-old historian and head of the Karelia Memorial Society who has devoted his life to ensuring that the truth is known about the Soviet Terror and that the mass graves of its victims are found

Murad Amriyev, a 32-year-old MMA fighter from the southern Russian region ruled by Kremlin-backed strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, was facing deportation from Belarus on June 8, a transfer that rights activists say would place his life and well-being at risk.

Natalya Sharina, a 59-year-old librarian has received a 4-year suspended sentence with a 4-year probation period, for supposed ‘extremism’ linked with material in the Ukrainian Literature Library, and on a far-fetched charge of squandering public money.

The boy’s father said his son has a speech defect and that his therapist advised him to recite literature in public, which is why he was reading Shakespeare on the street.

You can hardly call the proposed 5-year suspended sentence and massive fine on librarian Natalya Sharina for supposed ‘incitement’ over the content of material in her library good news, but it could have been much worse..

Substantial youth participation in nationwide anticorruption protests organized by opposition leader Aleksei Navalny in March jolted Russia’s political landscape, leaving officials wringing their hands over how to effectively court a demographic that, a new study suggests, is deeply distrustful of the ruling class

Pro-Kremlin outlets share an often-repeated narrative about migrants in the EU Member States. It combines elements of misinformation with a factual background of refugees arriving in Europe in large numbers

18 months after Vitaly Pop, who was just 16, died of appalling injuries on his first night in a Russian ‘corrective’ colony, two prison officers have received 11-year sentences, with eight others sentenced to terms from two and a half to five years

Artur Panov, who is from the Luhansk oblast, has been in Russian custody since his arrest on 5 December 2015, two months before his seventeenth birthday. Although Panov himself, now 19, has admitted to some of the charges against him, there remain major reasons for concern, not least because of his age and certain doubts about his mental health.

It is exactly three years since Oleg Sentsov, Ukrainian filmmaker and single father, was arrested in Simferopol, shortly after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. His trial and 20-year-sentence have been condemned by the entire international community, yet Russian President Vladimir Putin keeps repeating the same narrative, that Sentsov was tried and convicted of ‘terrorism’

It is three years since Oleg Sentsov’s two children saw their father, and could be another 17 years if Russian President Vladimir Putin has his way. There are levers to put pressure on Putin and on those Russians who collaborate in torturing and imprisoning innocent Ukrainians and your help is vital!

Victory Day in Russia was marked this year by state-controlled television appearing to treat Donetsk as a Russian city and photos at the Immortal Regiment march of a notorious Russian mercenary and Ukrainian militant whom Ukraine had wanted to see tried for war crimes in Donbas

The man believed responsible for a chemical attack on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was almost certainly a leader of the aborted attempt in 2014 to seize control in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and form a so-called ‘Kharkiv people’s republic’, like the Kremlin-backed formations in Donbas.

Oleksandr Kolchenko was in his second year at the Tavrida National University in 2014 when he was arrested in the same politically motivated case as filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and two other opponents of Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. His university, now based in Kyiv, has just formally reinstated him, and students and lecturers have begun a campaign to seek his release.

Why would Russia hold a Ukrainian in secret detention for 10 months if there were real grounds for his arrest? Why is it now refusing to allow an independent psychiatric examination which a renowned British psychiatric institute has recognized the need for and even offered to provide?

Russia’s Investigative Committee has initiated a criminal investigation into what it claims was Ukraine’s ‘abduction’ of Russian ‘volunteers’. Ukraine’s position in trying the men for involvement in terrorism is shared by the United Kingdom which is currently prosecuting a Briton on terrorism charges for his believed role in the fighting in Donbas.

PEN America’s honouring of Ukrainian filmmaker and political prisoner Oleg Sentsov at its 2017 PEN Literary Gala would have been a very special event under any circumstances. It was made particularly poignant by the letter from Oleg that was heard for the first time, together with a powerful address from his cousin Natalya Kaplan who accepted the award on his behalf.

Boris Stomakhin, Andrei Bubeev and Rafis Kashapov are all serving prison sentences in Russia for articles or posts / reposts, criticising the Putin regime and Russia’s invasion of Crimea. In each case, the charges could just as well be laid against Russian MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Alexander Dugin, the fascist ideologue with friends in high places, and Putin’s protégé and leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Russia’s FSB has detained yet another Ukrainian on bizarre charges of ‘spying’ for the Ukrainian Defence Ministry – in both militant-occupied areas of Ukraine and in Russia, where the implication is clearly that Kyiv is organizing acts of terrorism