Just days after the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin signed a censorship law that made it illegal to “discredit” the army. The legislation was so far-reaching that even its spokesman acknowledged that it was easy to cross the line into banned speech. In the first 18 months of the war, numerous ordinary Russians – teachers, pensioners, groundskeepers, a car wash owner – were sentenced to punishment.
The law has resulted in more than 6,500 people being arrested or fined, an average of more than 350 per month, according to a New York Times analysis of Russian court records last August. That's a small percentage of Russia's population of 146 million, but the Times analyzed the details of each case and revealed the extraordinary reach and invasiveness of the Kremlin's actions; Anyone who questions the war or expresses sympathy for Ukraine – even in a private conversation – is now liable to prosecution in Russia.
Apparently no gesture is too small. Judges have ruled that simply wearing blue and yellow clothing – the colors of the Ukrainian flag – or painting your fingernails blue and yellow is a crime. And safe havens are few and far between as people become increasingly informed about their fellow citizens. In dozens of cases, people were prosecuted after someone reported them for comments they made on the train, in a coffee shop or in a liquor store.
The censorship law has allowed Mr. Putin to continue a nearly two-year invasion that has killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians, with minimal resistance from opponents at home. While most Russians tell pollsters they support the war, nearly 20 percent say they don't.
In the past, the government made examples of a few people, some of whom were prominent; Widespread censorship is now being practiced. With public anti-war speech largely eliminated this year, records show authorities remained careful to stamp out criticism expressed online and privately. More than 3,000 cases involved popular social media or messaging platforms in Russia.
“A large number of completely unknown, nameless, non-public people who just wrote or said something somewhere are being hit,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
To better understand the extent of this censorship, we spent months analyzing a database of all available public records of prosecutions under the new law, provided by OVD-Info, a Russian human rights and legal aid group.
First-time offenders are typically fined 30,000 rubles – about $300 at current exchange rates, about half the average monthly salary in Russia – while repeat offenders can be punished with prison. The law, known as Article 20.3.3, became the most widely used tool in Russia's wartime crackdown and is the focus of our analysis. Another law punishes spreading “false information” about the Russian army with up to 15 years in prison.
Experts say wartime censorship is transforming Russian society and setting the stage for even more widespread repression in the future as authorities automate their surveillance of the Internet and encourage people to denounce each other online. Mr. Putin set the tone last year when he described opponents of the war as “scum and traitors” who should be eradicated from society.
In response to the crackdown, many Russians began self-censorship. Demyan Bespokoyev, a private school teacher who was prosecuted for writing an anti-war message on his coat, described the trial this way: “The prison forms in your head.”
Silence protest
In the first months of the war, as the documents show, Russia focused on suppressing dissent in public spaces.
Russia's crackdown on free speech previously made headlines around the world. Now they are noticed less and less. One reason for this is the sheer scale: on each of the 530 days of war for which we have almost complete data, an average of 13 cases involving opponents of the war were heard in court – and that is just under the Discrediting Act. The humiliations of the action and the long arm of the Russia law are lost in the numbers.
In villages and remote regions, in schools and hospitals, in chat groups and local news outlets, as well as in a prison and on a military base, people have been accused of speaking out against the war.
The analysis challenges the idea that opposition sentiment in Russia is concentrated among elites in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities. The records show that two-thirds of the cases were heard in courts in cities with fewer than a million residents.
In the small town of Iglino in western Russia, a retired train driver named Zaynulla Gadzhiyev, now 76, predicted on his social media page: “Nothing will save Russia from collapse now.”
Mr. Bespokoyev, 22, a private school tutor, walked through a subway station in St. Petersburg wearing the coat his grandfather wore in World War II, on which Mr. Bespokoyev had written: “I am hurt and afraid. I don’t want war.”
In Novosibirsk, Siberia, Marina Tsurmast, a local journalist, scribbled “Bucha” in red on a piece of paper and pasted it over a trade fair stand celebrating the anniversary of Russia's annexation of Crimea. Police officers immediately arrested her.
Marina Tsurmast in her apartment in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Nanna Heitmann for the New York Times
In dry legal language, the court documents describe the Russian state's arguments against these statements and protests.
The judge in journalist Ms Tsurmast's case ruled that she had “distorted the true aims” of Mr Putin's war. A judge in St. Petersburg ruled that Mr. Bespokoyev, the tutor, had undermined “the authority, image and confidence in the operation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” And Mr. Gadzhiyev, the retired train driver, was accused of “undermining confidence in the decisions of the state authorities of the Russian Federation on the conduct of the special military operation.”
All three were fined 30,000 rubles, about $500 at the time. The data shows that at least 1,662 more Russians were prosecuted for anti-war speech in the first three months of the war.
Other critics, some of them prominent opposition figures, were punished much harsher under other, more punitive laws, such as politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason after criticizing the war. Pacifist artist Aleksandra Y. Skochilenko, 33, was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony in November for posting price tags with small anti-war messages in a supermarket.
But for the thousands convicted of discrediting the army, the fines are just a small part of the problems they face. Interviews with ten of them show that convictions bring social injustices and complications in finding work, leading some people to leave Russia altogether.
The law has penetrated the fabric of Russian society and increased the fear of all opponents of the war. Ms. Tsurmast, the journalist in Novosibirsk, says her anxiety levels increase when she notices car lights outside her apartment window or hears a noise late at night.
“I had these bouts of paranoia,” she said in a telephone interview, adding that she still feels them sometimes. “The elevator at night – is it coming for me?”
Penetrate into private life
The number of cases grew amid outrage over Mr. Putin's draft in September 2022. The crackdown also increasingly affected people's private lives.
On the morning of September 25, 2022, police officers burst into 29-year-old Daria Ivanova's Moscow apartment and, she said, carried her out by her arms and legs before she had time to put on her shoes. Surveillance cameras identified her and a friend, police said, as those who put up prank posters to protest Mr. Putin's mobilization: “To order a coffin, go to the nearest military station.”
Ms Ivanova says she was beaten for 11 hours in detention. While she is still in Moscow, she sees her career prospects as bleak. A friend told her that because of her conviction, she would “never receive approval from the security service of the state-owned company where the friend worked.”
Daria Ivanova in the elevator of her building in Moscow.
Nanna Heitmann for the New York Times
The episode illustrates the Kremlin's reach in trying to catch the war's opponents: It has used police, electronic surveillance and fellow citizens against them.
In smaller towns, residents take over the surveillance themselves. Anton Redikultsev, now 48, was an art teacher in the town of Kalga near the Chinese border – population 2,545. Last June, a deputy district attorney brought charges against him, citing as evidence five social media posts, including links to anti-war songs and an image of a child's drawing with the words: “Bombs are not necessary!” He was fined 30,000 rubles proven. He was released on September 1st, the first day of school.
Mr. Redikultsev, who is also a powerlifter and goes by the nickname “Lifter,” said the conviction made him an outsider. People who would have always greeted him on the street now turned away, he said. “People like to exaggerate, make up details and exaggerate.”
But Mr Redikultsev insists he has no regrets. Silence, he said, “seems to amount to a kind of disgrace – a silent consent.” In court, he said, he asked the prosecutor how he should exercise his right to expression, which the Russian constitution still technically guarantees.
“He didn’t answer,” Mr. Redikultsev recalled.
Internet monitoring
This year, with public protests due to the crackdown all but vanished, the Internet remained the primary vehicle for dissent.
In June, Russia's Constitutional Court upheld the censorship law despite a challenge from legal aid group OVD-Info. People's “negative assessment” of the Russian military could be detrimental to its performance, the court said, and posed a risk to national security. But the court left it to individual judges to decide what exactly constituted unlawful statements was to be classified – a remarkable recognition of the arbitrariness of the law that the Kremlin has adopted.
Dmitry S. Peskov, Putin's spokesman, was asked in a November interview to explain the difference between legitimate criticism of the war and “discrediting,” saying it is difficult to determine. “Where is the line? I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s very thin.”
The cases have become routine in Moscow courtrooms. Last month, a prosecutor in a navy blue uniform quietly read out the sections of the administrative law that 60-year-old defendant Sergei Platonov was accused of. He had written to Russian soldiers on social media: “You will kill other children to feed your own children.”
Mr. Platonov, dressed in white and without a lawyer, said nothing. Within 20 minutes the judge came back with a guilty verdict and ordered him to pay 30,000 rubles. In a subsequent interview, he referred to the officials investigating him as the “Russian Gestapo” and said he would try to avoid paying: “The money will go into the budget, for the war.” And I want that on no way.”
Sergei Platonov will hear his guilty verdict before the Moscow District Court in November.
Nanna Heitmann for the New York Times
Lawyers say the scale of prosecutions at the moment is kept in check by the large amount of paperwork required for each case; As a result, many cases of anti-war speech still go unpunished. But experts fear that prosecutions will become more routine and authorities may focus on monitoring online speech and develop automated methods to initiate investigations and file cases.
“Given the reports that tools for automation are being developed, this fear certainly exists,” said Polina Kurakina, a lawyer at OVD-Info.
Russia's Pacific coastal region of Primorye, for example, launched an anonymous Telegram service last month that allows people to inform about anyone who, among other things, “promotes evil.” And a leak from Russia's internet regulator last year showed it was developing automated systems to scan social media and news websites for politically sensitive content.
However, in many ways, the Kremlin's repressive campaign has already achieved the desired result. Some of the defendants have fled the country, while others have suppressed any impulse to protest the war.
Mr. Kolesnikov, the Moscow-based political scientist, sees the law as an indicator of Russia's descent into an even more controlling, totalitarian system in which anyone who speaks out against the Kremlin anywhere is subject to prosecution.
And yet some people are still protesting. In October, a judge fined 18-year-old Anna Sliva 50,000 rubles – about $500 at the time – for holding a sign at a Moscow monument to the Soviet Gulag labor camps: “Stop killing civilians.” and lock her up.” In an interview, Ms. Sliva said her actions would give her an answer if she had children who asked her, “Mom, what were you doing when the war came?”
Anna Sliva in her apartment in Moscow.
Nanna Heitmann for the New York Times
About the data
The New York Times analyzed 6,771 cases heard under Putin's new censorship law, Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Offenses Code. The cases range from Mr. Putin's signing of the law on March 4, 2022 to the end of August 2023. They are a subset of a larger data set of more than 9,000 cases provided by OVD-Info, a Russian human rights and legal aid group . Cases without a detailed account of what happened were excluded from the analysis, as were cases that we identified as appeals. A small number of cases may have appeared in the database more than once because multiple records were created for them in the court system, often to correct an error in the previous record. The classification of people in the crowds shown is based on the dates on which the hearings took place. Cases highlighted in the figures are placed within one month of the hearing for ease of reading. Their descriptions are based on court documents.
To summarize cases by case category—for example, the number of defendants accused of being under the influence of alcohol—we searched the database for cases with related keywords and manually reviewed the results. The number of cases counted in each category may be too low.
An unsupervised machine learning algorithm classified whether each incident occurred online based on language patterns in court documents. A representative subset of these results was then manually reviewed to confirm the approximate number of online and offline cases.