A vital defamation hearing is finally taking place on Nov 2, brought by Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov against Russia’s FSB & media. While it has little or no chance of success, it is important in highlighting the way in which the FSB presented four Crimeans as ‘terrorists’, with this obediently parroted by most Russian media

On Oct 29, while some Muscovites gathered on Lubyanka Square to remember by name victims of the 1937 Terror, a 58-year-old librarian was spending her second day in custody, without food or water, and facing interrogation, including at night, over books allegedly held in the library

Natalya Sharina, Director of the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow, has been detained for 48 hours, and the Investigative Committee is seeking to have her remanded in custody on new charges of ‘inciting hatred’ over books found during Wednesday’s armed search of the library (see end for updated information)

A Moscow court has rejected Mikhail Anshakov’s appeal against an absurd criminal investigation lodged against him less some 3 months after his civic organization warned Russian tourists of the legal consequences of visiting Crimea under Russian occupation.

Nadia Savchenko and Svetlana Alexievich have voiced deep admiration for each other and share a strong distaste for Russian President Vladimir Putin, including for the macho stunts he regularly pulls on Russian television

(Updated) The respected Memorial Human Rights Centre has analysed the prosecution’s case against two Ukrainians accused of fighting against federal forces in Chechnya and found it lacking in everything but lurid ‘confessions’

The members of two pro-Kremlin organizations, NOD and SERB, who attacked an elderly pensioner holding a single-person picket outside the History Museum in Moscow on Oct 24 threatened to do the same to “all those who insult Putin, insult Russia”.

Each hearing in the trial of Nadiya Savchenko is filled with absurdly implausible details and raises inconvenient questions, such as why some witnesses for the prosecution should be top secret and why the court should have rejected, as ‘premature’, the defence’s application to interview the most crucial witness, namely Nadiya Savchenko’s sister, Vera.

To mark Back to the Future day on October 21, RFE/RL takes a look at seven aspects of the Soviet era that have reappeared since Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.

Oleg Navalny, brother of the prominent Kremlin critic and politician Alexei Navalny, has been put in a punishment cell for 15 days and is to be transferred to maximum security conditions after writing a first blog article for the Russian journal Novoye Vremya [New Times]

Please write to Gennady Afanasyev - even a line or two will be moral support for him and a clear message to the Russian authorities that any act of reprisal for his courage in retracting testimony against Oleg Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko will be seen

The trial has begun in Yekaterinburg of Yekaterina Vologzheninova who is accused of ‘inciting inter-ethnic enmity’, otherwise known as reposting material on the social network VKontakte critical of Russia’s policy with respect to Ukraine.

On their front pages and Internet sites, Russian media moved headlines that seemed aimed at absolving Moscow of any of the blame for the downing of Malasyia Airlines flight MH17, which crashed on July 17, 2014, on territory held by Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine

Ukraine cannot and should not recognize sentences in falsified prosecutions of Ukrainian hostages held in Russia, a former judge of the International Criminal Court on Former Yugoslavia stresses

In a closed trial held after Yury Soloshenko was denied access to the lawyers of his choice and to the Ukrainian consul, a Russian court has sentenced the 73-year-old pensioner with no access to state secrets or Russian weapons to 6 years maximum security imprisonment.

Five Russian contract soldiers have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment over their unwillingness to end up fighting in Ukraine, with the soldier most active in communicating with the media receiving the longest sentence.

It is 5 weeks since Crimean political prisoner Hennadiy Afanasiev was moved from Rostov, apparently to a prison colony, and all efforts by his mother to find out his whereabouts have been unsuccessful.

Russia has demonstrated the nature of the ‘trial’ of Nadiya Savchenko by banning her sister who is a vital witness from entering Russia for the next five years, probably as a ’threat to national security’’.

If Moscow’s foreign hostages are currently all Ukrainian, the recent abduction, detention and long sentence of Estonian Eston Kohver and the Russian media’s increasing anti-western hysteria demonstrated that no foreign national should feel totally immune

The preliminary court hearing took place on Oct 5 in the Kafkaesque trial of 73-year-old Yury Soloshenko, a pensioner from Poltava in Ukraine. He is facing charges of ‘spying on behalf of Ukraine’, but this is effectively all that is known.