‘Putin’s critics have a choice: flee Russia or rot in jail’

Ilya Yashin had always known that his time as a free man was rapidly running out. The Russian opposition politician was determined to use whatever weeks or months were left to tell his fellow citizens the truth about the war in Ukraine. But the truth is a dangerous thing in President Putin’s Russia.

In early March, eight days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin approved a new law that made it a crime to promote “fake” news about the actions of the Russian army. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in a prison camp. Scores of people have been charged under the law in the six months since it was adopted.

Thousands of opposition activists and journalists have fled Russia, but Yashin, 39, refused to give the Kremlin the satisfaction of forcing him out. In online videos recorded in Moscow, he detailed the atrocities committed by Russia’s army, and urged people to speak out against the invasion.

An ally of Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader, Yashin has been fighting against Putin’s rule for two decades. He also worked closely with Boris Nemtsov, the Kremlin critic who was shot dead near Red Square in 2015.

In June Yashin was arrested while walking in a park in Moscow and locked up for 15 days on charges of disobeying police orders. Just before he was due to be released he was charged under the fake news law over a video about Bucha, the Ukrainian town where Putin’s soldiers killed and tortured hundreds of civilians in a month-long orgy of violence. He now faces up to ten years in prison.

 “Could I have avoided arrest? Yes. The authorities have given Putin’s critics a simple choice – prison or emigration,” he said in a letter to The Times that he wrote in his cell at the notorious Butyrka prison in Moscow. “The KGB once erected an iron curtain around my country and would not let anyone out. Today’s Kremlin, however, prefers to force opposition figures to flee the country. This makes it easier to declare them foreign agents or traitors to the motherland. But if you choose to stay in Russia, you have to pay for this with your own freedom.”

About 30 other people have also been locked up on fake news charges, while a similar number have avoided arrest by escaping to Europe or former Soviet states such as Armenia and Georgia, as well as the Baltic states. More than 16,000 people have been detained at protests across Russia since the war began.

The heaviest sentence handed down so far was to Alexei Gorinov, a city councillor in Moscow. He was jailed for seven years in July after telling a council meeting that it would be inappropriate to hold a children’s arts and dance festival while “children are dying in Ukraine”. He said in a message smuggled out from his prison cell that he been refused medical care for breathing problems.

A decade ago, as protesters furious at vote fraud filled the streets in central Moscow, the Russian opposition briefly appeared to have the upper hand in its fight against Putin’s regime. “They ruined my big day, now I’m going to ruin their lives,” Putin is said to have vowed after massive protests against his inauguration for a third presidential term in 2012.

He has kept his word. Even before the war, Navalny and his nationwide network of opposition activists were targeted mercilessly by Putin’s security forces. Navalny, who in 2020 survived an attempt to kill him using the novichok nerve agent, was arrested last year when he returned to Russia from a German clinic. He is now serving nine years in prison on fraud charges that were widely seen as Putin’s revenge.

Since the war, the Kremlin has escalated its crackdown on dissent. “If you do not support the authorities, then you need to get used to living in fear, to being woken up at night by the sound of footsteps outside the door,” Yashin wrote.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, another opposition politician, was arrested in April after flying into Russia to try to encourage anti-war protests. He has likewise been charged with spreading fake news and could be sent to prison for more than a decade. The charges relate to a speech that Kara-Murza, 41, made about Bucha and Mariupol at the Arizona House of Representatives. Russian investigators said his comments were motivated by “political hatred”, a term that critics would say is far better suited to Putin’s attempt to destroy Ukraine as an independent state.

Others to be charged include Yevgeny Roizman, the former mayor of Yekaterinburg, one of Russia’s biggest cities. Marina Ovsyannikova, a former state television journalist, was placed under house arrest last month after she held up a sign near the Kremlin that described Putin as a fascist and his soldiers as murderers. Ovsyannikova, 44, made international headlines in March when she burst into a television studio with a sign that read “Stop the War.”

Putin said yesterday that opposition journalists who have fled Russia since the start of the invasion had “always worked against our country” and has previously described critics of the war as “traitors” and “scum”.

Sergey Parkhomenko, an independent journalist, told Dozhd TV, an online opposition channel that has been forced to close its offices in Moscow: “The Kremlin has successfully eradicated all civil rights and freedoms in the past six months. Russia is now a full-fledged totalitarian state.”

Ilya Yashin’s letter from Butyrka prison (translated from the original Russian)

For six months, the whole world has been watching closely the war that the Kremlin has unleashed in Ukraine, a conflict that will in large part determine the future of Europe. Yet at the same time, another far less noticeable war is going on in Russia itself — Putin’s cruel and vile aggression against his own people.

In speeches by western politicians, I often hear about the “collective responsibility” of my fellow citizens for the actions of their leadership. But few appear to understand that my people are being held hostage by the Kremlin junta. With one hand, Putin strikes at Ukraine, but with the other he squeezes the throat of Russian society.

Russians are poisoned every day by toxic propaganda. If you watch television for long enough, your brain could melt. The concentration of hatred and the torrent of lies is crippling people’s minds and making them easier to control. All independent media in Russia has been banned.

Some people have simply been intimidated into staying silent. Those who make it clear that they think differently from the Kremlin risk arrest, huge fines, being sacked from work or expelled from higher education. The genetic memory of Soviet political repression also remains strong. If you do not support the authorities, then you need to get used to living in fear, to being woken up at night by the sound of footsteps outside the door.

In March, Putin signed a law on “military censorship”. Dozens of Russians who have condemned the bloodletting in Ukraine have been jailed. In Moscow, Alexei Gorinov, a city councillor, was imprisoned for seven years simply because he proposed holding a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of the Kremlin’s aggression. Alexandra Skochilenko, an artist in St Petersburg, has already been in prison for several months for sticking anti-war messages on supermarket shelves. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist, and Dmitry Talantov, a lawyer, have also been imprisoned for calling the Kremlin’s “special military operation” a war.

As for myself, I have been locked up in the notorious Butyrka prison in Moscow for two months. Many political prisoners have passed through these walls, from the leaders of the peasant uprisings during tsarist times to Soviet dissidents. The allegation against me reads like it was ripped from the pages of an Orwellian dystopia. I am “guilty” of showing an extract of a BBC report about Bucha, where Ukrainian civilians were killed, during an online broadcast. For this, I face a prison sentence of up to ten years.

Could I have avoided arrest? Yes. The authorities have given Putin’s critics a simple choice – prison or emigration. The KGB once erected an iron curtain around my country and would not let anyone out. Today’s Kremlin, however, prefers to force opposition figures to flee the country. This makes it easier to declare them foreign agents or traitors to the motherland. But if you choose to stay in Russia, you have to pay for this with your own freedom.

I realise that many countries went through this stage on the path to democracy. However, there are many who believe that democracy is fundamentally impossible in Russia. Yet I remain optimistic. Putin personifies a bygone era. He thinks and acts like a Soviet Cold War dinosaur, looking to the past for values, slogans and symbols. He is using our country’s resources to try and revive a long-dead empire. Some older people who are nostalgic for their youth approve of this. But a reanimated corpse cannot be an attractive model for the future.

Unlike Putin, we talk to society about the future. We talk about what kind of country Russia should become in the 21st century. A country that is open to the world. A country that does not threaten its neighbours and builds mutually beneficial economic ties. Where the life of a human being is of the highest value and we can change our rulers on a regular basis through elections.

I can see that these simple ideas attract young Russians. And this gives me grounds for optimism. Russia will change – if only as a result of the passing of the generations. However young Putin might try to look, he does not have the power to turn back the clock.