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.

Ukraine’s demand that special status follow honest elections with international observers caused rage in Moscow. Take away the machine guns at polling booths, elimination of opposition and European neo-Nazi ‘observers’, and the reason for hysteria from the Kremlin and their proxies in Ukraine is clear.

Nariman Dzhelyal has been elected First Deputy Head of the Mejlis, against which the occupation regime in Crimea has been relentlessly waging an offensive since shortly after annexation. Ilmi Umerov was elected Deputy Head just hours after he became the latest member of the Mejlis to receive a formal summons to appear for interrogation

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

In August 2014, Manas Mambetov, a senior lieutenant in the Kyrgyz Army reserves, arrived in eastern Ukraine on a moral quest to fight "fascists.". A week ago, he returned home, accompanying the sealed coffins of two fellow Kyrgyz soldiers and disillusioned by his experience

A recent Russian propaganda channel reduced a 4-minute series of interviews in Sloviansk into 1 minute and then triumphantly reported support for Putin, not Poroshenko, ignoring inconvenient answers calling Putin an arsehole and wanting him dead, for example. Russian media also ignore clear signs that those in liberated cities most fear the return of the militants

Vladimir Putin may consider Ukrainians and Russians to “to be one nation”, as he believed it appropriate to announce on the anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian Crimea, but he could not be more wrong. It is precisely Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine over the last year that has lost him Ukraine forever

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.

It is exactly one year since Russian forces seized control of government buildings and airports in Crimea and organized the events leading swiftly to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. It was a year that saw murder and disappearances, Soviet-style bans and deportation, as well as persecution of all who oppose Russia’s occupation

The near closure of an important Polish initiative countering pro-Russian propaganda this week should serve as a salutary lesson, not least for Facebook, whose complaints system proved unprepared for a well-coordinated attempt to remove a social network resource exposing inconvenient truths

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

Up to 500 Kharkiv residents joined in a civic panakhyda, or requiem service on Tuesday in memory of the four victims, including two young lads, of Sunday’s terrorist attack

Having tried and failed to cower Crimean Tatar leaders into submission, the Crimean puppet government installed after Russian soldiers seized control last February is now attempting to replace elected members of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis and Qurultay with ‘reliable people’.

Whatever the reasons for delays and flaws in investigating and prosecuting crimes related to the disturbances, fire and deaths on May 2, 2014 in Odessa, procrastination serves only the interests of Russian propaganda’s ‘massacre’ claims

Speaking appropriately enough from Budapest, where 22 years ago Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for empty promises, Vladimir Putin called on “pro-Russian separatists to allow Ukrainian troops safe passage”. The last time he pulled that propaganda stunt, several hundred soldiers were ambushed and killed.

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.

A Russian court has upheld the ban imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea on veteran Crimean Tatar leader and Ukrainian MP Mustafa Dzhemiliev. A migration service official said that the 71-year-old had been banned for 5 years “to ensure the state’s defence capacity and security, and to safeguard public order.”