Roman Roslovtsev has been jailed for 20 days for taking a walk in a mask depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, but could face a prison sentence of up to 5 years under new draconian anti-protest legislation. The brave young Russian is in fact challenging the authorities to prosecute to demonstrate the repressive insanity of the new law.

25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia looks set to pass a bill which will effectively lower the Iron Curtain again, and enable the authorities to prevent dissidents from leaving the country

Nadiya Savchenko has spent her 35th birthday alone after her mother arrived only to be refused a visit. This comes amid worrying indications that any exchange or extradition negotiations - for her and other Ukrainian prisoners - may have derailed

The judge in the trial of Mykola Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykh has refused to include material confirming that neither man was in Chechnya 20 years ago when Russia claims they fought against Russian soldiers. The court has demonstrated the same disregard for Memorial Human Rights Centre analyses which show that the entire case against the two Ukrainians is an incompetent fabrication.

Ramazan Dzhalaldinov has not only complained publicly to Russian President Vladimir Putin about corruption among local officials, he lodged a formal complaint with Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika on May 2 requesting that he take legal action against Kadyrov for having publicly insulted him by rejecting his criticisms as lies.

If the truth about the Soviet Union once resulted in imprisonment for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’, just reposting an article entitled ‘Crimea is Ukraine’ can now result in a prison sentence for so-called ‘public calls to separatism’. You’ll also end up on Russia’s ‘List of extremists and terrorists’

It has long been clear that Russia has no intention of releasing Khaiser Dzhemiliev, the 33-year-old son of veteran Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemiliev. What is new, and extremely disturbing is that the Russian authorities now appear to be foisting Russian citizenship on Khaiser against his will

Ukraine has formally requested the extradition of another Ukrainian abducted from Crimea in 2014 and sentenced in Russia to 11 years on mystery ‘spying’ charges. Valentin Vyhivsky was sentenced behind closed doors, with his lawyer preventing from divulging any information, including the almost certain use of torture to extract a ‘confession’ from the 33-year-old.

Please write to Yury Soloshenko, show him that he’s not forgotten on his 74th birthday and help put pressure on Russia to free him (and all the other Ukrainians it’s illegally imprisoning)

There remains no let-up in the pressure against Gennady Afanasyev, the Crimean political prisoner whose courageous retraction of testimony against Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and civic activist Oleksandr Kolchenko made him ‘FSB Enemy No. 1’

While Russian-occupied Crimea is looking set to convict another former Euromaidan activist of invented crimes over which it has no jurisdiction, efforts are continuing to secure the early release of Oleksandr Kostenko, the Ukrainian now serving a politically-motivated sentence in Russia over events in Kyiv before annexation.

Russian nationalists attacked attendees of an awards ceremony for high school history students in Moscow on April 28, spraying them with a green antiseptic liquid and hurling eggs at them for what the activists called a foreign-sponsored attempt to rewrite Russia’s history.

The court in Chechnya trying two Ukrainians on absurd and historically inaccurate facts has suddenly foisted ‘extra lawyers’ on the two men. This is against the will of Mykola Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykh, was not agreed with their lawyers and comes as the trial is coming to an end.

Sergei Magnitsky’s widow and mother have condemned the Green Party in the Euro¬pean Par¬lia¬ment for showing a new false, offen¬sive and defam¬a¬tory film by Russ¬ian film¬maker Andrei Nekrasov about their mur¬dered hus¬band and son

Rafis Kashapov, the Russian Tatar activist serving a 3-year sentence for criticism on social networks of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea is being moved to the worst form of cell-like imprisonment, with no indication of any time limit

The Chief of Russia’s Investigative Committee has proposed criminalizing ‘denial’ of the fake ‘Crimea referendum’, and the country’s new Human Rights Ombudsperson plans to fight attempts by the West to ‘use’ human rights as a weapon “to destabilize Russia”’

A Russian court has convicted Serhiy Lytvynov of a ‘crime’ which was only reported a year after it allegedly took place, and just after Russia’s Investigative Committee had been forced to withdraw war crimes charges which had been proven to be total fiction

Human Rights Watch has condemned the Russian Constitutional Court’s first ruling that a binding European Court of Human Rights Judgment is ‘non-executable’.

46-year-old Yekaterina Vologzheninova was placed on Russia’s notoriously long ‘List of Extremists and Terrorists’ and convicted of ’inciting enmity’ for reposting or ‘liking’ material on social networks critical of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas

Nadiya Savchenko has agreed to end her hunger strike, following a conversation with her mother and President Petro Poroshenko. The news came the day after the sentencing of two Russian military intelligence officers caught fighting in the Luhansk oblast and a telephone conversation between Presidents Poroshenko and Vladimir Putin.