After seizing bags of poppy seeds from their family-run cafe, authorities took the Polukhins to court for alleged trafficking in opium -- a charge the entrepreneurs have vehemently rejected, denouncing what they say is a ruthless racketeering scheme by drug-control officials.

The preliminary hearing is due on July 9 in the trial of Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov and civic activist Oleksandr Kolchenko whom Russia is holding illegally and accusing of ‘terrorism’

Rafis Kashapov is on trial in Russia charged with ‘public calls to violate Russian territorial integrity’ and ‘hate speech’ for posts in VKontakte critical of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in eastern Ukraine.

So what was on the plane from Russia, organized with unprecedented speed on Feb 19, 2014, the day before unarmed protesters were gunned down on Maidan and why was all information about the flights classified as secret in both Ukraine and Russia’?

The vital Crimean Human Rights Field Mission has been placed on a so-called “patriotic stop list” of foreign NGOs likely to be deemed ‘undesirable’ and effectively outlawed in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea.

Investigators in Russia have increased the seriousness of charges against captive Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko, accusing her of direct participation in the killing of two Russian reporters who died last year while covering the conflict in Ukraine.

On Russia’s new museum, bust and all, dedicated to Joseph Stalin, the Russian Culture Minister’s “new approach to history” and the effective blocking for another 30 years of virtually all documents about the Soviet secret police and their crimes

74-year-old head of a Russian Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, Ludmila Bogatenkova was convicted on July 1 of one of the charges laid against her three days after a list she compiled of Russian soldiers believed to have been killed in Ukraine was handed to President Vladimir Putin

The lawyer representing Beslan victims says he is now virtually certain of a European Court of Human Rights judgement finding against Russia over its failure to prevent the tragedy at Beslan and to investigate and punish those responsible

The defence has begun publishing the case material against Nadiya Savchenko, captured by Kremlin-backed militants in eastern Ukraine and now on trial in Russia. Appropriately enough they begin with grotesquely absurd testimony from Igor Plotnytsky, militant leader and identified by Savchenko as one of her abductors

The final of the Russian military-sport game ‘Victory’ has taken place for the first time in Russian-occupied Crimea, with teenagers from 14-16 competing in shooting, as well as dismantling and putting together Kalashnikov rifles. The event is aimed at, among other things, ensuring a “solid basis of patriotic awareness” and an “understanding of Russia’s strength and resilience”.

Interfax reports that Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office is to check whether the Baltic Republics declared independence legally. This comes just days after the same illustrious body informed that the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 had been ‘unconstitutional’ and therefore illegitimate.

As well as seeking a Russian NGO’s prosecution for warning Russian tourists that Crimea is Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation, Russia’s Prosecutor General has asserted that the 1954 decision which formally made Crimea part of Ukraine was illegitimate. This is not the first such attempt to rewrite geopolitical history

Russia’s Foreign Ministry is again aware of ‘pogroms’ that experienced researchers of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Ukraine and human rights groups would seem to have not noticed. Its keeping the details to itself however

With so many renowned film directors calling for the release of their Ukrainian colleague held prisoner in Russia, Nikita Mikhailkov’s shameful silence over the ongoing detention of Oleg Sentsov has gone unnoticed. Mikhailkov had, as reported, appeared to promise almost exactly a year ago to intercede on Sentsov’s behalf. He did nothing.

Russia saw its biggest loss of democracy in a decade last year, while it and other authoritarian states took aggressive action to block efforts to form new democracies elsewhere in Europe and Eurasia, a new report by Freedom House finds.

‘Public Control’, a Russian consumer rights society, has aroused anger in Moscow and could face prosecution over its entirely accurate description of Crimea as ‘occupied territory’ and its warnings of the legal ramifications of any trips undertaken without Ukrainian permission.

Ukrainian historian Stanislav Klykh is in Russian detention charged with fighting against Russia in Chechnya. It can be easily proven that Klykh was never in Chechnya, which may well explain why Russia has concealed his whereabouts over the last 10 months and is refusing to allow lawyers chosen by the family to see him.

3 men in detention since March 2014 for raising a German flag on an FSB building in Kaliningrad as protest at Russia’s annexation of Crimea have been convicted of ‘hooliganism’ but sentenced only to the period already spent in detention. The 92-year-old veteran whom the FSB claimed had been ‘insulted’ turned out to not know that the flag was not that of the Third Reich

It was exactly a year ago, on June 17, 2014, that the Ukrainian pilot was taken prisoner by Kremlin-backed militants who Russia has constantly claimed are Ukrainian separatists fighting a ‘civil war’ in Ukraine. Those militants promptly took her by force to Russia where Russian ’investigators’ took over