Abducted from hospital, tortured and held in Russian detention for 10 months on totally fictitious ‘war crimes charges’, Serhiy Lytvynov has been awarded ‘compensation’ - about 15 US dollars worth

It seems that breaking the arm of a young disabled Russian activist was not enough, with Viktor Kapitonov now also fined for a fictitious ‘repeat infringement of the rules for holding a picket.

Russia is holding Sasha Kolchenko, Oleg Sentsov and many other Ukrainian political prisoners thousands of kilometres away from their families. Helping Larisa Kolchenko visit Sasha is just one of the tasks of a wonderful initiative by Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan on his Zhadan and Dogs rock tour

Paris-based Ukrainian journalist Roman Sushchenko has now been in Russian custody for a month. He is accused of ‘spying’, with Russia avoiding accountability for the surreal implausibility of such charges by making all information secret.

The trial has begun in Moscow of Natalya Sharina, Director of the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow. She is charged with ‘incitement to enmity’ over supposed ‘extremist’ material allegedly found in the library and could face a 5-year prison sentence. Much later the prosecutors also came up with other charges on which she could be jailed for 10 years

Ildar Dadin, the first Russian to be serving a 3-year prison sentence for totally peaceful protests has managed to get a letter to his wife describing the torture he was subjected to soon after being moved to a new prison and almost immediately after being placed in a punishment isolation cell

If the Russian FSB really had grounds for charging Valentin Vyhivsky with spying, why did they first abduct him and hold him incommunicado for 8 months, and why does he still bear the scars of the methods of ‘persuasion’ they used to get him to ‘confess’?

A group that has received financing from the Kremlin is under fire over a report that it has been secretly assessing the "protest potential" of students and staff at Russian universities and making its findings available to the authorities

In modern Russia, like in Stalin’s time, ‘confessions’ can override anything, including unbreakable alibis and undeniable historical fact. Russia’s Supreme Court on Oct 26 rejected the appeal against manifestly unjust sentences passed on Ukrainian political prisoners Mykola Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykh

Ildar Dadin, the first Russian to be serving a 3-year prison sentence for totally peaceful protests has been placed in a punishment isolation cell and will from now on be held in harsher conditions

Warning Russians that they can face legal consequences for visiting Russian-occupied Crimea has had consequences for Mikhail Anshakov. He has just learned that he has again been placed on Russia’s wanted list over absurd charges lodged two weeks after he and his organization used the dirty words ‘Russian occupation’.

Russia has removed almost all independent rights activists from the Civic Monitoring Committees [ONK] which are allowed to visit remand and convicted prisoners. The move is disastrous, not least for Ukrainian political prisoners, whose very whereabouts have often been revealed by rights activists with access to prisons

The Russian prison authorities in Yakutia have placed Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov in a punishment cell for 15 days. This follows the news that Russia has refused to return Sentsov and civic activist Oleksandr Kolchenko to Ukraine, claiming falsely that the two men are Russian citizens

Moscow’s continued denial of direct military aggression in Ukraine convinces nobody, it seems, with the latest confirmation coming from an unexpected, if sadly typical, source

Russia’s Ukrainian political prisoner Stanislav Klykh’s rejection of his lawyer on Oct 17 and request for a singer to replace her is almost certainly linked with his psychologically disturbed state after 10 months of torture and psychotropic drugs, yet Russia is continuing to deny him a proper psychiatric assessment

2 and a half years after Russia’s FSB first seized Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and 3 other opponents of Russia’s annexation, and charged them with a non-existent ‘terrorist plot’, the same scenario is being followed with (at least) two other Ukrainians. Yevhen Panov and Andriy Zakhtei have been illegally taken to Moscow with the move immediately following confirmation that Panov had been tortured

Alexei Moroshkin has been declared a danger to society after he refused to reject the Memorial Human Rights Centre’s recognition of him as a political prisoner. A psychiatrist was recently taken off his case for saying he shouldn’t be in hospital and there is every reason to see Moroshkin is a victim of punitive psychiatry because of his support for Ukraine.

The Moscow Prosecutor has proven undaunted by previous failures and is once again seeking the imprisonment of Natalya Sharina, Director of the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow for so-called ‘incitement to enmity’.

Viktor Kapitonov was violently detained on Oct 7, when he tried to hold a legal solitary picket in memory of Anna Politkovskaya. The 20-year-old, who is disabled, was so badly injured that he is now in hospital with a broken arm, and may need an operation

Anna Politkovskaya’s voice would certainly have been heard, as was Boris Nemtsov’s, over Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. It is sorely needed now also in occupied Crimea, with Russia increasingly using the same methods that it has applied for so long in Chechnya and Ingushetia