After the 25-year prison sentence of the long-time opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza Monday, a look back at the repression that has hit Russian President Vladimir Putin’s major critics since he took office in 2000.
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murdered
Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister who for a time acted as President Boris Yeltsin’s successor against Vladimir Putin, had become a major critic of the Russian president by the 2000s.
In 2014 he spoke out against the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s military support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Less than a year later, in February 2015, Nemtsov was shot four times in the back on a bridge a few tens of meters from the Kremlin. He was 55 years old.
Photo Drew Angerer/AFP
A photo of Boris Nemtsov was posted near a street in Washington bearing his name in February 2018.
His supporters have accused Chechen satrap Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering it, which he denies. Despite this, five Chechens were convicted for this murder without the sponsor ever being officially identified.
Ten years earlier, in October 2006, Anna Politkovskayaanother well-known critic of MM. Putin and Kadyrov were shot dead in the lobby of their Moscow apartment building.
This journalist from Novaya Gazeta, the country’s main independent medium, had for years documented and denounced the crimes of the Russian army in Chechnya.
locked
Other critics narrowly escaped death and ended up in prison.
Alexei NavalnyThe 46-year-old anti-corruption activist was the victim of severe poisoning in Siberia in 2020, which he blames on the Kremlin, which the Kremlin denies.
When he returned to Russia in January 2021 after recovering in Germany, he was immediately arrested. He has been serving a nine-year sentence since March on what he believes to be fabricated fraud allegations.
Photo Vasily MAXIMOV / AFP
Alexei Navalny at a demonstration to commemorate Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, February 2018.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, 41, says he has recovered from two poisonings in the past. On Monday he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for “treason”, “misinformation” about the army and illegal work for an “undesirable” organization.
Another well-known critic Evgeny Roizman, 60, former mayor of the city of Yekaterinburg, has been arrested and released several times. He is accused of “discrediting” the army and faces a multi-year prison sentence at a trial beginning in late April.
In December, another well-known opponent, Ilia JachineThe 39-year-old was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing “the murder of civilians” in the Ukrainian town of Boutcha, near Kiev, where the Russian army has been accused of ill-treatment, which Moscow denies.
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exiles
The vast majority of opposition figures remaining in Russia are imprisoned. The others fled.
Mikhail Khodorkovskya former oil tycoon, spent 10 years in prison after opposing Putin in the early 2000s. Since his release in 2013, the ex-oligarch has found sanctuary in London, from where he funds opposition platforms.
Many supporters of Mr. Khodorkovsky, but also of Alexei Navalny, have left Russia since 2021, a year that marked a sharp acceleration in repression.
This repression has intensified since the offensive in Ukraine, which also exiled thousands of opposition supporters, not just its leaders.
Photo Odd ANDERSEN / AFP
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in Munich last February.
“Foreign Agents”
Those who escaped death or prison risk another punishment: the designation “foreign agents.”
In recent years, this infamous label, reminiscent of the lexicon of Stalinist terror, has been attached to dozens of media outlets, NGOs, journalists, activists or artists.
This status obliges them to submit to Kafkaesque constraints. In particular, they must indicate their quality“foreign agents” in all publications under threat of sanctions.
Last winter, the NGO Memorial, a co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and a pillar of the defense of human rights, was dismantled by order of the Russian judiciary for violating the law on “agents from abroad”.