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.

It should have been Boris Nemtsov’s 56th birthday on Oct 9. Instead it is the first birthday since Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic was gunned down outside the Kremlin, and two days after the ninth anniversary of the killing of another bitter critic of Putin and his regime – Anna Politkovskaya. Novaya Gazeta marked these anniversaries by “comparing the fingerprints”.

In the latest of a number of ‘spying’ cases brought by Russia in the months following its annexation of Crimea, Viktor Shur, about whom virtually nothing is known, has been convicted of ‘spying for Ukraine’ and sentenced to 12 years maximum security imprisonment.

As well as an FSB officer (or not) in make-up and a wig, a witness was heard whose account is alleged by the defence to be a lie from beginning to end but who was protected by the court and allowed to conceal information that would have immediately confirmed that his story was false

The division between us versus the enemies has only grown in Russia to give birth to overwhelming tones of propaganda. Anna’s country lives under what PEN has called “a tsunami of anti-free expression laws emerging in Russia, which include treating international NGO’s as foreign agents; anti-gay laws; a law permitting the blocking of websites without a court order; laws against discussing Russian history; a Religious Defamation law.”

Journalist Oleg Kashin’s letter is an indictment of what he portrays as Putin’s corruption-ridden 15-year reign that has been "a monumental moral catastrophe for our generation" and "left the nation demoralized and disoriented."

On October 3, state-run television channel Rossiya-24 aired an exhaustive weather bulletin describing the current climatic conditions in Syria as "very favorable" for a bombing campaign.

Oleg Shevkun lost his post as Chief Editor of the Russian Blind Society’s Internet radio service after honestly criticizing Russia’s forced annexation of Crimea. He is one of an ever-increasing number of Crimeans and Russians who have faced dismissal or prosecution for stating the undeniable truth that Russia is in breach of international law

Agreement, as now suggested, to ‘extradition’ if Ukraine accepted the Russian court’s verdict could have serious implications for applications to the European Court of Human Rights whose findings in this gross case are otherwise entirely foreseeable

Mystery Ukrainian Alexander Malofeyev has been sentenced to 24.5 years maximum security prison, after ‘confessing’ and claiming that he fought in Chechnya together with Russia’s Ukrainian prisoners Mykola Karpyuk and Stanislav Klykh, as well as Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and other prominent Ukrainians.

The hearing on Sept 29 in the trial of Nadiya Savchenko confirmed the degree to which prosecution and the court are working in unison  and indicated the courage shown by Nadiya Savchenko in captivity which has probably resulted in this universally condemned judicial travesty

The explanation provided by Russia’s Ambassador to Venezuela for why the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept 17 was not an invasion is disturbingly similar to the arguments presented by Vladimir Putin as justification for Russia’s annexation of Crimea 

Lev Shlosberg, a lawmaker in Russia’s north-western Pskov region known for his relentless criticism of the Kremlin has been expelled from the local legislature, a move denounced by the opposition as politically motivated.