28 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Newsletters, Russia
My predecessor Ruth Anderson used to joke that we weren’t working hard enough because we hadn’t been banned in Russia. Perhaps she was onto something. We’re still not banned there, as far as I know. Amnesty International though appears to have met the mark – or rather crossed a Kremlin red line. This week, Russian authorities labelled Amnesty an “undesirable organisation”, accusing it of being a “centre for the preparation of global Russophobic projects”. Any association with the group is now a criminal offence.
This is no empty label. Just ask Galina Timchenko, co-founder and CEO of the independent Russian-language news outlet Meduza. She’s now facing criminal charges for organising the activities of an “undesirable organisation” – namely, Meduza itself, which earned that designation back in January 2023 for its reporting on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The charges stem from her publishing two videos, one in September 2024 and another in March 2025, which authorities claim were designed to “foment protest sentiment”. If convicted, she could face six years in prison.
But it’s not just human rights organisations and independent journalists in the Kremlin’s crosshairs. This week, a Russian court fined tech giant Apple 10.5 million roubles (approximately $130,900) across four administrative cases. Three related to alleged violations of the country’s anti-LGBTQ+ “propaganda” laws, which were made even more draconian in 2023. The fourth was for allegedly failing to delete content at the request of the Russian authorities.
A journalist from Mediazona, one of Russia’s last remaining independent outlets, covered the court proceedings and offered a glimpse into how such hearings operate. Here’s a telling moment: “Our reporter notes that the judge read the decision at such a rapid pace it was virtually impossible to grasp the precise details of the claims. We then approached the court’s press secretary to request that a summary of the official court record be released for clarity. The response was terse: ‘The hearing is closed.’”
In the past, Apple has received criticism for its compliance with Russian censorship demands, from removing VPNs to restricting certain apps. These are moves it has defended as the price of staying in the country. Now it’s paying a different, more literal price.
As for Index, we remain unbanned – and unbowed. We continue to report on Russia in both our magazine and online, including recently interviewing artist and musician Yaroslav Smolev, and Nadezhda Skochilenko, mother of political prisoner and Index award winner Aleksandra Skochilenko. This isn’t actually about provoking the Kremlin. It’s about doing our job: telling the truth, and shining a light on one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world.
27 Feb 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia
“Dear Alexei, it’s been a year that darkness has fallen upon us – and yet, your ideas and your determination give us strength,” read a letter placed on opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s grave on 16 February 2025, marking the one-year anniversary of his death.
That day, more than 5,300 people attended the Borisovskoye Cemetery in Moscow where he is buried, according to the Beliy Schetchik (White Counter) movement. Despite temperatures reportedly dropping to a frosty -8 degrees Celsius, Navalny supporters waited in line outside the cemetery to pay their respects.
Artist and musician Yaroslav Smolev was one of the attendees. He told Index: “By joining in, not only did we get a chance to feel that we’re among like-minded people, but we also showed the [rest of the] Russian society what matters to us.”
In the days following Navalny’s death last year, Smolev spoke to Index for the first time. He had been arrested for staging a solo protest in support of the opposition leader in the centre of St Petersburg. Around that time, hundreds of mourners were being detained across the country, namely for laying flowers at improvised memorials.
Even so, people have returned to these locations this year to honour Navalny’s memory – and were predictably punished. According to the rights group OVD-Info, on the anniversary of Navalny’s death, at least 26 people were detained. In the city of Volgograd, for example, Alexander Yefimov from the Yabloko opposition party was jailed for 14 days for bringing flowers and a photo of Navalny to a memorial and placing them at a monument dedicated to victims of Soviet-era repression.
Carrying portraits of Putin’s main opponent – and even signs with his name on – became illegal after Navalny and his movement were declared “extremist” in 2021 and 2022.
For Smolev, Navalny is a role model who enabled him to overcome his fears. “He spoke with police officers in a natural and straightforward manner,” Smolev said. “There was not even a hint of fear in his behavior.” Smolev stressed that if it weren’t for Navalny, he would have never joined many peaceful protests, starting in 2017.
He added that if Navalny hadn’t gone as far as sacrificing his life “for his values and his ideals”, “the general public might not have realised that his lifelong battle was, in fact, heartfelt”. He was alluding to Navalny’s return to Russia in 2021 from Germany after recovering from a poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
For Nadezhda Skochilenko – the mother of former Russian political prisoner and Index award winner Aleksandra Skochilenko – Navalny’s death caused “much pain”. Above all, she told Index, she thinks of him as “the son of his mother”, Lyudmila Navalnaya.
When Navalny died, Aleksandra was in jail. She had been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for replacing supermarket pricing labels with anti-war messages. She was ultimately released as part of a prisoner exchange last summer.
Asked if the news of Navalny’s death increased her fear for the safety of political prisoners like her daughter, Nadezhda responded: “I’m too well-informed about what’s going on [in Russian] prisons. I’m frightened for everyone [who’s incarcerated] from the moment they’re arrested.”
She said that people die in jails, in pre-trial detention, and even during arrest. In 2024, eight political prisoners perished; one of them was pianist Pavel Kushnir, who spoke out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Over the past year, the pressure on political prisoners has increased, Nadezhda said. They are placed in solitary confinement “more frequently and for longer periods of time”. In these tiny punishment cells, people are not allowed to lie down during the day, among other restrictions.
To make matters worse, in many cases, proper medical treatment is not provided to political prisoners – a fact that “the authorities no longer try to conceal”, Nadezhda said. She is also concerned that minors accused of “terrorism” in politically-motivated cases are placed in pre-trial detention, instead of on house arrest.
She added that “on a regular basis” dissidents are denied access to letters sent by their supporters. Nevertheless, people keep writing to them – “the most useful and safest act [of resistance] within reach of everyone”, according to Smolev.
Despite the pressure of the authorities, supporters and families of jailed dissidents battle with prison administrations over human rights abuses. They also attend court hearings when they can – while some are still open to the public, many political trials are now closed, especially the ones of dissidents charged with treason, Nadezhda explained.
But acts of resistance “cannot be entirely suppressed”, she said – “hence “[Putin’s] regime responds with even more severe crackdown on dissent”.
29 Nov 2024 | Belarus, News and features, Russia, Ukraine, Volume 53.03 Autumn 2024
Mikhail Viktorovich Feigelman started working at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow in 1980. Eleven years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, funding and decent modern equipment were rare for Russian scientists but there was suddenly intellectual freedom.
“This is why I stayed in Russia at this time, despite the hardships,” the 70-year-old physicist told Index. “This freedom during the 1990s was very important, but it didn’t last long.”
In May 2022, just months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Feigelman fled to western Europe.
“I left exclusively because of the war,” he said. “I could no longer live in Russia anymore, where I see many parallels with Nazi Germany. I will not return home until the death of Putin.”
Initially, Feigelman took up a position at a research laboratory in Grenoble, France, where he stayed for a year and a half. Today, he is employed as a researcher at Nanocenter in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
“I have not experienced any prejudice or discrimination in either France or Slovenia,” he said.
“But in Germany – at least in some institutions – there is a [ban] on Russian scientists, and it is forbidden to invite them for official scientific visits.”
These measures stem from a decision taken by the European Commission in April 2022 to suspend all co-operation with Russian entities in research, science and innovation.
That included the cutting of all funding that was previously supplied to Russian science organisations under the EU’s €95.5 billon research and innovation funding programme, Horizon Europe.
The boycotting had already begun elsewhere. In late February 2022, the Journal of Molecular Structure, a Netherlands-based peer-reviewed journal that specialises in chemistry, decided not to consider any manuscripts authored by scientists working at Russian Federation institutions.
One former employee at the journal, who wished to remain anonymous, said Russian scientists were always welcomed to publish in the journal. “A decision had been taken, for humanitarian reasons, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not to accept any submission authored by scientists (whatever their nationality) working for Russian institutions,” they said.
Last January, Christian Jelsch became the journal’s editor. “This policy to ban Russian manuscripts was implemented by the previous editor,” he said. “But it was terminated when I started as editor.”
Feigelman believes all steps taken “to prevent institutional co-operation between Europe and Russia are completely correct and necessary.”
But he added: “Contact from European scientists with individual scientists must be continued, as long as those scientists in question are not supporters of Putin.”
Alexandra Borissova Saleh does not share that view.
“Boycotts in science don’t work,” she said. “There is a vast literature out there on this topic.”
She was previously head of communication at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and head of the science desk at Tass News Agency in Moscow.
Today, Borissova Saleh lives in Italy, where she works as a freelance science journalist and media marketing consultant. She has not returned to Russia since 2019, mainly because of how scientists are now treated there.
“If you are a top researcher in Russia who has presented your work abroad, you could likely face a long-term prison sentence, which ultimately could cost you your life,” she said.
“But the main reason I have not returned to Russia in five years is because of the country’s ‘undesirable organisations’ law.”
First passed in 2015 – and recently updated with even harsher measures – the law states that any organisations in Russia whose activities “pose a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order, defence or security of the state” are liable to be fined or their members can face up to six years in prison. This past July,
The Moscow Times, an independent English-language and Russian-language online newspaper, was declared undesirable by the authorities in Moscow.
“I’m now classed as a criminal because of science articles I published in Russia and in other media outlets,” Borissova Saleh explained.
Shortly after Putin invaded Ukraine, an estimated 7,000 Russian scientists, mathematicians and academics signed an open letter to the Russian president, voicing their public opposition to the war.
According to analysis carried out by the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, since February 2022 at least 2,500 Russian scientists have left and severed ties with Russia.
Lyubov Borusyak, a professor and leading researcher of the Laboratory of Socio-Cultural Educational Practices at Moscow City University, carried out a detailed study of Russian academics included in that mass exodus.
Most people she interviewed worked in liberal arts, humanities and mathematics. A large bulk of them fled to the USA and others took up academic positions in countries including Germany, France, Israel, the Netherlands and Lithuania. A common obstacle many faced was their Russian passport.
It’s a bureaucratic nightmare for receiving a working and living visa, Borusyak explained.
“Most of these Russian exiles abroad have taken up positions in universities that are at a lower level than they would have had in Russia, and quite a few of them have been denied the right to participate in scientific conferences and publish in international scientific journals.”
She said personal safety for academics, especially those with liberal views, is a definite concern in Russia today, where even moderate, reasonable behaviour can be deemed as extremist and a threat to national security.
“I feel anxious,” she said. “There are risks and I’m afraid they are serious.”
Hannes Jung, a retired German physicist believes it’s imperative scientists do not detach themselves from matters of politics, but that scientists should stay neutral when they are doing science.
Jung is a prominent activist and co-ordinator for Science4Peace – a cohort of scientists working in particle physics at institutions across Europe. He said their aim was “to create a forum that promotes scientific collaboration across the world as a driver for peace”.
He helped form Science4Peace shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, as he felt the West’s decision to completely sever ties with Russian scientists was counterproductive and unnecessary.
“At [German science research centre] Desy, where I previously worked, all communication channels were cut, and we were not allowed to send emails from Desy accounts to Russian colleagues,” said Jung. “Common publications and common conferences with Russian scientists were strictly forbidden, too.”
He cited various examples of scientists working together, even when their respective governments had ongoing political tensions, and, in some instances, military conflicts. Among them is the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (Sesame) in Jordan: an inter-governmental research centre that brings together many countries in the Middle East.
“The Sesame project gets people from Palestine, Israel and Iran working together,” Jung said.
The German physicist learned about the benefits of international co-operation among scientists during the hot years of the Cold War.
In 1983, when still a West German citizen, he started working for Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Based on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, the inter-governmental organisation, which was founded in 1954, operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. At Cern, Jung was introduced to scientists from the German Democratic Republic, Poland and the Soviet Union. “[In] the Soviet Union the method for studying and researching physics was done in a very different way from in the West, so there was much you could learn about by interacting with Soviet scientists,” he said.
In December 2023, the council of Cern, which currently has 22 member states, officially announced that it was ending co-operation with Russia and Belarus as a response to the “continuing illegal military invasion of Ukraine”.
Jung believes Cern’s co-operation with Russian and Belarussian scientists should have continued, saying there was no security risk for Cern members working with scientists from Belarus and Russia.
“There is a very clear statement in Cern’s constitution, explaining how every piece of scientific research carried out at the organisation has no connection for science that can be used for military [purposes],” he said.
In June, the Cern council announced it would, however, keep its ongoing co-operation with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), located in Dubna, near Moscow.
“I hope Cern will continue to keep these channels open to reduce the risk for nuclear war happening,” said Jung.
Can cultural and academic boycotts work to influence social and political change? Sometimes.
They seemed to play a role, for example, in the breakup of apartheid South Africa (1948 to 1994). This topic was addressed in a paper published in science journal Nature in June 2022, by Michael D Gordin.
The American historian of science argued that for science sanctions to work – or to help produce a change of mindset in the regime – the political leadership of the country being sanctioned has to care about scientists and science. “And Russia does not seem to care,” Gordin wrote.
His article pointed to the limited investments in scientific research in Russia over the past decade; the chasing after status and rankings rather than improving fundamentals; the lacklustre response to Covid-19; and the designation of various scientific collaborations and NGOs as “foreign agents”, which have almost all been kicked off Russian soil.
Indeed, Putin’s contempt and suspicion of international scientific standards fits with his strongman theory of politics. But such nationalist propaganda will ultimately weaken Russia’s position in the ranking of world science.
Borissova Saleh said trying to create science in isolation was next to impossible.
“Science that is not international cannot and will not work. Soviet science was international and Soviet scientists were going to international scientific conferences, even if they were accompanied by the KGB,” she said.
Sanctioning Russian scientists will undoubtedly damage Russian science in the long term, but it’s unlikely to alter Russia’s present political reality.
Authoritarian regimes, after all, care about only their own personal survival.
15 Nov 2024 | News and features, Newsletters, Russia, United States, Venezuela
Russia is haunted by the ghost of Joseph Stalin. Dozens of monuments to the Soviet leader dot the country; his angular face beams from billboards, bookshop displays and subway station walls; multi-episode shows depict him on national TV.
It seems a strange twist in Russia’s story to rehabilitate a highly repressive leader from the former USSR but it makes sense too. Under Stalin, Russia emerged from World War II victorious and with many countries under its control, which chimes with Vladimir Putin’s insatiable desire to restore Russia as a global superpower.
It’s not just Stalin’s image that haunts Russia today – it’s his tactics. The political abuse of psychiatry that was developed towards the end of Stalin’s rule, for example, is being used once again against the Kremlin’s critics. You can read a piece about this from Russian journalist Alexandra Domenech here. This week we were made aware of another tactic straight out of the Stalin playbook – using everyday people to denounce each other. A growing number of people are ratting on their friends, family, colleagues, or in the most recent case – their doctor. On Tuesday a Russian court sentenced a 68-year-old paediatrician, Nadezhda Buyanova, to five and a half years in jail for allegedly criticising the war (she denies these claims). The monitoring group OVD-Info (also former Index award winners) has recorded 21 such criminal prosecutions since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and a further 175 people have faced lower-level administrative cases for “discrediting” the Russian army because of people informing on them. The word “chilling” is overused in the human rights world, but this is really chilling.
So too is what’s happening to dissidents in the countries that Putin supports. In Venezuela under Moscow-allied President Nicolás Maduro there has been an intensification of attacks against the leading opposition figure Maria Corina Machado and those who support her since the July elections. Arbitrary detentions, torture, and sexual and gender-based violence by the country’s security forces are rife. One such target was 36-year-old opposition activist Jesus Martinez, who died yesterday in custody from a heart problem associated with complications from type II diabetes. Martinez was a member of the Vente Venezuela party run by Machado; Machado has denounced Maduro’s election to a third term as fraudulent. He was arrested without a search warrant and with no reason given, according to Machado. At yesterday’s Magnitsky Awards, which I was privileged to attend, Machado was given the award for outstanding opposition politician. Speaking from captivity, she dedicated her award to Martinez.
Russia’s other ally, Iran, continues its reign of terror too. This week a Kurdish political activist and women’s rights defender, Varisheh Moradi, was sentenced to death. Iran has not yet carried out the death sentence, so there is still a window of time to make noise and we know from our own campaign to free Toomaj Salehi that noise does work. That is if the noise comes internationally. Within Iran itself the regime has less interest and the enormous emotional strain caused by living under that level of repression was laid bare on Wednesday when former VOA Farsi journalist Kianoosh Sanjari jumped to his death after his demands to release four high-profile political prisoners (one being Toomaj Salehi) were not met.
We’re wrapping up with a final friend of Putin – Donald Trump – whose first term can be remembered by him using the very Soviet phrase “enemy of the people” to describe the press. News has just emerged of Trump sending legal letters to The New York Times and the Penguin Random House over their critical coverage of him. Can a leopard change its spots? It seems not.
His re-election last week made many question, with despair, what had happened to the hope that filled the air following the fall of the Soviet Union. This week’s news has done little to stop that despair. Perhaps then Stalin’s ghost doesn’t just haunt those in Russia – it haunts us all.
