Russian authorities have arrested thousands of their country’s citizens protesting the war in Ukraine in the six months since the invasion launched by President Vladimir Putin, The Moscow Times reports.
According to the website “OVD-Info”, which belongs to a non-governmental organization that advocates for the observance of human rights, since the beginning of the “special operation” on February 24, almost 16,500 people have been arrested throughout Russia.
The vast majority of arrests took place in the first month of fighting, before Moscow’s parliament passed laws criminalizing virtually any form of speech or action critical of the war.
OVD-Info notes that after the adoption of these legislative acts, the number of arrests decreased from 800 in the period from March 24 to June 24 to only 89 in the following months.
Most of the arrests took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia’s largest cities. More than 3,800 of those detained have been charged with offences, but at least 224 face criminal charges for things like calling a “special military operation” a “war” or an “invasion”.
Russia has banned any “false” statements about the war in Ukraine
On March 22, the Russian parliament passed a bill that provides for criminal liability for spreading information that the authorities consider “false” about all the country’s institutions that also work abroad.
If “dissemination of false information caused grave consequences, the term of imprisonment shall be from 10 to 15 years,” the law provides, but also provides for lesser penalties for circumstances deemed less severe.
The bill was essentially a continuation of another law passed by the Moscow parliament earlier in March, which criminalizes only the dissemination of “false information” about the country’s armed forces.
The laws came amid an unprecedented crackdown on dissent and the media in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when all non-Kremlin media outlets were virtually shut down.
Blocking of foreign social networks not controlled by the Kremlin is added to these measures.
Recently, the Russian authorities announced that they are working on Oculus, a system to automatically detect prohibited information on the Internet, which will analyze photos, video images, texts on websites, social networks and messaging services.
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Source: Hot News RU
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