Opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who was jailed for more than
eight years on Friday for criticizing Russia’s military intervention in
Ukraine, is the latest in a long line of Kremlin critics slapped with heavy
jail terms.
اضافة اعلان
Others have been
killed, narrowly escaped death or been exiled. Here are Putin’s best-known
critics and where they are now:
Dead
Boris Nemtsov, a Kremlin critic and a former deputy prime minister, was
shot dead in 2015 as he walked home across a Moscow bridge near the Kremlin.
Five Chechen men
were convicted of killing Nemtsov but the mastermind of the murder was never
found.
Nemtsov’s allies
have pointed the finger of blame at the Kremlin and at Chechen leader Ramzan
Kadyrov, who has denied the accusation.
Nemtsov, a
charismatic speaker, had criticized Putin’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine
in 2014 and regularly taken part in opposition protests. He was 55 at the time
of his death.
Nearly a decade
earlier, in 2006, the killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya outside her
Moscow home shocked the world.
Politkovskaya, a
reporter at Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s top independent newspaper, was a fierce
critic of the Kremlin’s tactics in Chechnya.
The newspaper’s
editor, Dmitry Muratov, dedicated his Nobel Peace Prize this year to
Politkovskaya and other Russian journalists killed for their work.
Jailed
Russia’s main opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned with
Novichok, a Soviet-made nerve agent, on a trip to Siberia in 2020.
He underwent
treatment in Germany and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was
arrested on landing at a Moscow airport.
The 46-year-old
is serving a nine-year sentence on embezzlement charges that his supporters
call punishment for challenging the Kremlin.
From prison,
Navalny has denounced Putin’s Ukraine offensive, calling it a “tragedy” and a
“crime against my country”.
Vladimir
Kara-Murza, an opposition politician, was arrested in April for spreading
“fake” information about the Russian army.
He was later
charged with high treason and faces up to 20 years in prison. Kara-Murza, 41,
says he has been poisoned twice.
In August,
Yevgeny Roizman, the former mayor of Yekaterinburg, was detained for his
criticism of Russia’s assault on Ukraine.
After his arrest
sparked protests, the 60-year-old opposition politician was released from
custody to await trial on charges of “discrediting” the Russian army.
Exiled
Some of Putin’s high-profile critics have been abroad for years.
They include
former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison after
challenging the Russian leader early in his rule.
Khodorkovsky
lives in London and has financed media projects critical of the Kremlin.
Many of
Navalny’s prominent allies fled Russia after his organisations were banned as
“extremist” last year.
But the decision
in February to send troops into Ukraine, which ushered in an unprecedented
crackdown at home, proved to be a final nail in the coffin for Russia’s
opposition movement.
Russians opposed
to Moscow’s attack on Ukraine are now scattered around the world. Many have
fled to Europe and Israel.
TV presenter and
entertainer Maxim Galkin, the husband of Russian pop icon Alla Pugacheva, has
become an unlikely leading voice against the Ukraine offensive on social media.
Based in Israel,
the 46-year-old show star regularly uses Instagram to denounce the Russian
army’s offensive.
‘Foreign agents’
Despite a rare intervention by Pugacheva — who is widely considered
untouchable — Galkin has been branded a “foreign agent”.
The epithet,
which has Stalinist-era overtones, has been used by authorities to mount
administrative pressure on critics.
Putin recently
toughened the draconian 2012 “foreign agent” law.
Many journalists
and Russia’s main independent media outlets have been branded “foreign agents”,
making it much harder to operate.
All main independent media organizations in Russia
have been shut down or suspended operations.
Other popular
figures who have spoken out against Moscow’s Ukraine offensive — such as hugely
popular rappers Oxxxymiron and Noize MC, and exiled science fiction writer
Dmitry Glukhovsky — have also been labelled “foreign agents”.
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