‘I thought / that I was / a Russian / but this maniac / appears to also / think he is.’ The January issue of the Samara literature journal ‘Volga’ published anti-war poetry by German Lukomnikov.

After a Russian missile hit an apartment block in Dnipro, killing over 45 civilians, including 6 children, Muscovites began bringing flowers and children’s toys to the monument to the Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka

Three Belarusians known as the Svietlahorsk Rail Partisans have received monstrous sentences for courageous actions aimed at hindering Russia’s use of Belarus for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Yury Dmitriev, world-renowned Russian historian, head of the Karelia branch of the Memorial Society and political prisoner, is spending his fourth term in a punishment cell in the space of just two months

After Monday 3 October, as the reality of partial mobilisation and the reaction of the authorities sank in, protests in Russia entered another quiet phase. A great many women who went out on the streets to protest were still being held in police stations across the country and in its detention centres.

Protests have been growing against the drafting of tens of thousands of men. The very term “mobilisation” was reworked to incorporate the Russian word for a grave ‘mogila’ (могила): substituting ‘g’ for ‘b’ transformed the partial ‘draft’ into a mass burial movement (“mogilisation”).

Memorial’s so-called ‘destructive activities’ are precisely those for which it received the Nobel Peace Prize, and include its open opposition to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine

A large letter “Z”, a Zwastika as it’s now called, was painted on a hillside opposite Divnigorsk (Krasnoyarsk Region). Beneath the letter, stones were assembled to spell the town’s name. A protestor clambered up the hillside, took one bar off the Z and rearranged the stones to read “No to the War”.

A Russian artist Alevtina Yelsukova has sewn a quilt resembling the TV signal screen and sold it at auction. The money will be used to buy blankets for Ukrainian refugees. This quilt could cover the largest TV screen and stop anyone watching it again

Russia today is a dictatorial regime with strict censorship. Yet as a protestor from a small village in Central Russia wrote of recent attempts to bribe men into joining the army, “You can’t cure death with money. There’s always a choice”.

It is exactly eight years since Russia’s FSB abducted Valentin Vyhivsky from occupied Crimea and took him to Moscow, where he was held incommunicado for around eight months and savagely tortured

Denis Ivashin played an important role in exposing the Russian fighters who first took part in Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas and were later deployed to prop up the regime of Aleksander Lukashenka

New investigations into acts “discrediting” the Russian army were opened in Elista (Kalmykia, South Russia), in Buinaksk (Dagestan) and Ingushetia in the North Caucasus, and in Petrozavodsk (Karelia), St Petersburg and Krasnodar (South Russia).

St Petersburg priest Father Ioann Kurmoyarov has been held in custody since 9 June. “The blessed peace-makers will end up in Heaven,” he said. “you understand what I’m saying? The peace-makers. Those who unleashed this aggression will not be going there.”

“No to the War”, “Putin is a war criminal!”, or just a placard bearing eight asterisks—with such posters people in Russia hold solitary anti-war protests ending up on the dock.

Since the beginning of March, the police have charged more than 3,000 Russian citizens with “discrediting” the army (Article 20.3.3, Administrative Offences). The Net Freedoms project calculates that courts have issued fines in 92% of cases.

Hardly any anti-war protest takes place in Russia today without harassment or prosecution by the country’s law-enforcement agencies. Protestors are fined under Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Code; they are charged under Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code (up to 15 years imprisonment); or they may be sent, like Maria Ponomarenko of Barnaul (south Siberia), for psychiatric assessment.

One can be arrested for saying “No to the War'' or “Peace will triumph!” in Russia. Even the words “special operation” in inverted commas is a crime.

A major event of the past week was the Moscow trial of Alexei Gorinov. Accused of circulating “fake news” about the Russian military, he was sentenced on 8 July to seven years imprisonment.

During the past week Ilya Yashin, a well-known opposition politician, was arrested in Moscow; Russia’s feminists, the “railroad partisans” and school-leavers showed their opposition to the war in a variety of ways; while Vesna activists in several cities responded to the Russian shelling of the KremenchukShopping Centre [on 27 June] with a ‘Last Purchase’ protest.