Russia has ‘thousands’ of prisoners persecuted for political motives: NGO

WARSAW: Russian human rights group Memorial has told AFP that Moscow´s crackdown on dissent since invading Ukraine is vastly underestimated, with thousands of Russian and Ukrainians jailed for political reasons.

Russia already had a poor human rights record before the Kremlin launched its 2022 attack on Ukraine, but has since unleashed political repression unseen since Soviet times. Nobel-Prize winning Memorial, now banned in Russia, believes there are far more political prisoners than human rights organisations are aware of.

Sergei Davidis, the head of Memorial´s department for supporting political prisoners, said there were around 7,000 Ukrainian civilians detained by Russian authorities, repeating a count by the Ukrainian NGO Centre for Civil Liberties.

Davidis said Memorial also discovered several hundred Russians being held for “high treason” or “sabotage” cases since the Ukraine invasion, and “thousands” of criminal cases for refusing to fight in Ukraine. There are also dozens of Ukrainian soldiers held in Russia who are facing prosecution instead of being treated as prisoners of war.

The Memorial activist added that 1,300 prisoners were held in cases deemed political by the OVD-Info group, which monitors political repression in Russia. “We can talk about a political motive or violation of these people´s rights in practically all these cases,” Davidis said.

Memorial´s current list of political prisoners counts 778 names but it does not include people who are being tried in secret, a practise that has become extremely common in Russia. Davidis said the 778 names were just “the tip of the iceberg” because Memorial could not “with certainty” establish the status of a prisoner whose trial is being behind closed doors -- or even, in some cases, know of their existence.

“We understand that our information is not complete and we are trying to create, along the list of political prisoners, other more comprehensive lists of people prosecuted for political and illegal reasons,” Davidis said.

Memorial´s co-chair Oleg Orlov, who served time in prison for speaking out against the Ukraine invasion before being released in a prisoner swap with the West, told AFP last month that while incarcerated he found many people imprisoned for political motives whom Memorial did not know about.