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.

Russia’s Investigative Committee and pro-Kremlin media have again collaborated over the detention of a Ukrainian MP and attempt to use Odessa 2 May ‘massacre propaganda’ to distract attention from the political murder of Putin’s main opponent Boris Nemtsov

The words below were first posted under a different title, prompted by the proven futility of appealing to humanity from Russia’s leaders. It should nonetheless be recorded that Vladimir Putin is ignoring his own Human Rights Council in risking Nadiya Savchenko’s life

Boris Nemtsov was murdered 2 weeks after he told a Russian newspaper that, like his mother, he was afraid that Vladimir Putin would have him killed. His was one of the few public voices of sanity in Russia, unafraid to speak out and even make a film about the war Putin has launched against Ukraine.

Another former Soviet political prisoner, Viktor Fainberg, has joined Mustafa Dzhemiliev in addressing Nadiya Savchenko as a Russian ‘court’ yet again refuses to release her from custody despite the real danger that she will die in detention. Meanwhile Russian writer Vladimir Voinovych, searingly truthful as ever, has addressed his letter to Vladimir Putin telling him not to appear in any western capital if he lets Savchenko die.

Nadiya Savchenko’s latest letter from Russian imprisonment coincides with a poignant appeal from Mustafa Dzhemiliev calling on her to stop her hunger strike using the same argument with which, when he was equally resolute in 1975, Andrei Sakharov saved his life

After 73 days on hunger strike, Nadiya Savchenko is reported to be experiencing kidney and gall bladder problems, Germany, while admitting that two German doctors examined Savchenko on Feb 15, is still saying nothing about what they found.

While Ukrainian doctors are refused permission to examine Nadiya Savchenko, on hunger strike for 69 days, Russia’s Penitentiary Service continues quoting anonymous ‘German doctors’ whose anonymity would seem to be part of a secret agreement between Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Pavel Shekhtman, the Russian political activist who fled to Ukraine in recent days, has been added to Russia’s ‘register of terrorists and extremists’. The list includes Oleg Sentsov, but not Russian fascist ideologue Alexander Dugin whose call to “kill all Ukrainians” was more public and no less extreme than the Facebook comment made by Shekhtman.

Russia claims that some anonymous German doctors have examined Nadiya Savchenko and found her condition “satisfactory”. There is no serious statement from the West regarding Moscow’s flagrant non-compliance with the Minsk II agreements in not releasing Savchenko, nor the Kremlin’s proxies’ breach of the entire agreement

A day after the Minsk II agreement was announced, Russia has claimed that Nadiya Savchenko is not unlawfully held, nor a hostage, and will not be released. This breaches the commitments made on Wednesday night, as well as flying in the face of numerous European and international resolutions demanding Savchenko’s release in accordance with the first Minsk agreement.