Six Months of Anti-War Actions East of the Urals: Statistics from the Courts

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 24 – Most reporting about anti-war protests and cases brought against participants are either about particular or about the Russian Federation as a whole, but the Sibir.Realii portal has assembled data from courts on these things for Russia east of the Urals during the first six months of Putin’s war in Ukraine.

            The seven key findings of this research (sibreal.org/a/antivoennoe-dvizhenie-v-rossii/32000610.html) are the following:

·       Courts in this region dealt with a minimum of 1043 administrative law cases concerning protesters.

·       The most active regions were Krasnoyarsk Kray, Novosibirks Oblast, and the Sakha Republic.

·       More than 19.3 million rubles (300,000 US dollars) in fines were levied in these cases

·       Most of the cases involved charges that the individuals involved had discredited the military, although different courts defined that term differently and little effort appears to have been made to provide a common standard.

·       The cases against protesters peaked in March but then declined in the summer.

·       Seventy percent of those charged and convicted were men, an intriguing finding given that in Siberia and the Far East women have taken a leading role in organizing anti-war actions.

·       More than 40 people east of the Urals were charged with crimes for anti-war views.