The next hearing is due on April 2 into the trial of Alexander Byvshev, a Russian poet and school teacher whose poem “To Ukrainian Patriots” lost him his job, and could result in a prison sentence

Moscow’s Basmanny Court has agreed to call a further charge in the indictment against Nadiya Savchenko, one that carries a 20-year prison sentence, a “technical mistake”. It found no problem with the investigators’ merging of two other charges against the Ukrainian pilot, one of which was announced the day after PACE demanded her release within 24 hours.

While 3 Russian nationals, facing 7-year-sentences for raising a flag, are charged with having offended veterans of the Second World War, Moscow is taking measures to ensure that elderly veterans who helped win that War will not be allowed near the parade on Red Square marking the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day.

Former employees of Russia’s best-known "troll farm" reveal what the operation looks like from the inside.

Yury Yatsenko, the 25-year-old student first detained in May 2014 after Russian officials realized he was from Lviv has been sentenced to 2 years low security prison colony. The charges were only laid after he and a friend had been in detention for some months and bear no scrutiny, but this did not deter Russian investigators nor the court.

There’s one place in the world where can you see the original, preserved barracks of Stalin’s Gulag – the Perm-36 camp in the Urals. But nowadays it’s something else that strikes you as you flick through the museum’s pamphlet: The words "Stalin," "dissident," or "gulag" are nowhere to be seen.

The trial has begun in Kaliningrad of three men held in detention since last March for placing a German flag on the garage of the FSB building as a form of peaceful protest over Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea. Despite quite bizarre charges, they face up to 7 year sentences

Russia’s anti-extremism squad had issue only with those objecting to the St. Petersburg forum of mainly European and Russian far-right and neo-Nazi parties. Notorious Russian neo-Nazi sadist Alexei Milchakov and his comrade in arms and Nazi views, Jan Petrovsky were there representing the Kremlin-backed militants in Donbas

Europe’s far-right parties are due to take part in an ‘International Russian Conservative Forum’ on Sunday Its organizers hope to find ‘allies in Europe’ among far-right and neo-Nazi politicians who will support Russia’s ‘conflict with Ukraine’ and seek to get sanctions removed.

A day after a Moscow court upheld the justice ministry’s decision to forcibly enter the Movement ‘For Human Rights’ on the Register of ‘Foreign Agents’, another court has fined the Movement 300 thousand roubles for refusing to register itself.

Nadiya Savchenko has written a letter stating that she suspended her hunger strike for 10 days to demonstrate that she valued the concern people showed for her, but that she would lose her self-respect if she did not resume it. "There can be no compromise between honour and dishonour"

Svetlana Davydova, who was still breastfeeding her youngest child when remanded in custody, accused of ‘treason’ for divulging information about Russian soldiers being sent to Ukraine, says that even if she’d known what it would lead to, she would have still made the phone call.

French filmmaker Manon Loizeau explores this sense of schizophrenia in her latest documentary, Chechnya: War Without Trace, which looks at continuing violence and intimidation in peacetime Chechnya under leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

Plans to open a museum dedicated to the murderous dictator Joseph Stalin have been announced just one week after the authorities forced the closure of the Perm-36 Museum on the site of a notorious labour camp for victims of Soviet repression

Mark Feigin, a lawyer for the jailed Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko, claims to have new evidence proving that his client was not involved in the deaths of two Russian journalists

Vladimir Putin has honoured Andrei Lugovoi, the man whom Britain wants to try for the 2006 murder, using radioactive polonium, of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko. If this is a message, it is a scary one. The award is “for courage and daring demonstrated in carrying out work duties in conditions linked with risk to life”.

On Nadiya Savchenko’s letter explaining her change in tactics and partial termination of her hunger strike

If some still doubt that Vladimir Putin himself ordered Boris Nemtsov’s murder, nobody seriously questions that it is he alone who will decide whether Nadiya Savchenko is released. And he who will bear full responsibility if this woman “who doesn’t break, and doesn’t look like a person who could break” dies in Russian detention

In a wonderful show of solidarity, members of the Polish Film Academy have called on Russia to release Crimean film director Oleg Sentsov and have promised not to abandon their Ukrainian colleague. .

When Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin on February 27, the opposition figure joined a grim list of prominent Russians killed in the Vladimir Putin era.