From Le Figaro with AFP
Published yesterday at 10:48 p.m., updated yesterday at 10:59 p.m.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. SPUTNIK / Portal
Since the Russian army’s offensive against Ukraine at the end of February 2022, thousands of Russian opponents of the conflict have been sentenced by courts to fines or long prison sentences.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that “new massive repressions” in Russia like those in the Soviet era were “unacceptable” as the Kremlin suppressed any criticism of the attack in Ukraine. “When we talk about the victims of political repression, we are talking about very different people. There are those who were actually opponents of the Soviet system and those who supported it and were behind bars for various domestic political reasons,” he said.
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“Immense damage”
“There were people there completely by chance. All this is important, but for us the most important thing is that all this is not repeated in the history of our country, because it has caused immense and difficult to achieve damage to our people and our state,” he continued, quoted by the Interfax agency. “Such a lack of rights to decide people’s fate is unacceptable if we want our country to have a future,” Vladimir Putin added during a meeting of the Human Rights Council, a Kremlin-affiliated advisory body.
Since the Russian army’s offensive against Ukraine at the end of February 2022, the judiciary has harshly punished citizens who oppose the conflict in word or deed. Thousands of Russians have been sentenced to fines or long prison sentences for this reason. The Kremlin does not deny the Soviet repressions, but minimizes them by portraying them as a tragedy with no real culprit. At the same time, he loudly glorifies the power of the USSR and Stalin, especially since the attack on Ukraine, which he portrays as “denazification” in keeping with the legacy of the Second World War.