Together with aggressive indoctrination and propaganda, Russia is seeking to impose a full information blockade both at home and on all illegally occupied Ukrainian territory

Russia would almost certainly use any 'peace deal' as opportunity to prepare for further aggression, while Crimean Tatars and other Ukrainians under Russian occupation would continue to endure mounting terror and repression

While systematically bombing Ukrainian electrical infrastructure, Russia is claiming, almost certainly without evidence that 56-year-old Natalia Shulha was part of a ‘plot’ to damage an electricity pylon

As well as specific incriminating details about this ‘trial’, it is worth remembering Russia’s track record in abducting and torturing Crimeans, and threatening to kill them or hurt their families in order to extract ‘confessions’

The charges laid by the aggressor state against Iryna Kulish were very obviously fabricated, as well as extraordinarily cynical and lawless given that Russia is illegally occupying her Ukrainian home

The number of killings this year alone, as well as intercepted calls ordering such executions, point to such flagrant war crimes being part of Kremlin policy

Russia’s ‘spying’ charges are as cynical as the initial claim that Iryna Horobtsova was being held for opposing Russia’s invasion, but the charges do reach new depths of lawlessness

Russian legislators have dangerously broadened the definition of charges standardly used against Ukrainian political prisoners and civilian hostages, while also extending the range of targets

The manipulative methods used to try to prove that men defending their country were ‘taking part in a terrorist organization’ are pitiful, and terrifyingly lawless

Russia’s invasion and occupation of Mariupol have brought repression, torture and a chilling resurrection of the worst Soviet practices, including denunciation by collaborators

Russia’s militarization of childhood on occupied territory, and militaristic formations like ‘Yunarmia’ are war crimes, with Russia now using this so-called 'Youth Army' to get new ‘cannon fodder’ for its army

Russia almost certainly tortured the ten Ukrainian prisoners of war before staging these latest fake ‘trials’ and sentences of up to life imprisonment

Yan Petrovsky is on trial, under the name Voislav Torden, assumed to try to avoid international sanctions, accused of five grave war crimes in occupied Luhansk oblast

37-year-old Vladyslav Bily disappeared without trace in March 2022, with Russia only admitting to holding him and coming up with 'spying' charges in September 2024

In February 2022 Yevhen Matveyev led unarmed residents of Dniprorudne in telling Russian invaders to keep their tanks out of his Ukrainian city. He was seized two weeks later and had not been seen since

The Russians almost tortured and starved Leonid Popov to death in 2023, and have now brought immensely cynical ‘spying charges’ against an immensely vulnerable young man in desperate need of medication and care

The three were arrested in occupied Melitopol almost a year ago and Russia’s behaviour to date gives no grounds for hoping that their age would protect them from being tortured for ‘confessions’

While cultivating far-right and neo-Nazi movements worldwide, Russia and its propaganda bodies present efforts to destroy Ukrainian identity as ‘countering neo-Nazism’

Ihor Protokovilo is one of many Ukrainian elected deputies, mayors, journalists, civic activists and other civilians whom Russia has been holding prisoner, usually incommunicado since 2022

Serhiy Kuris was subjected to electric shocks, horrific beatings and other torture, but it was the threat to torture his wife and baby son that forced him to sign ‘confessions’ which he later retracted, graphically describing the methods applied