Russia jails activist as Kremlin widens crackdown on critics

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Russia has sentenced a prominent human rights activist to two-and-a-half years in prison, in the latest sign of President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly brutal crackdown on critics of his regime.

Oleg Orlov, head of the banned rights group Memorial, was charged with “discrediting” the Russian military for an anti-war article he wrote entitled: “They wanted fascism. They got it.”

The 70-year-old was initially fined Rbs150,000 ($16,357) for the article last autumn. However, prosecutors rejected the sentencing, arguing it was not sufficiently severe. A higher court cancelled the ruling and a swift retrial began this month.

In his closing statement before the verdict, Orlov said he had “committed no crime”. He noted that some of his friends had accused him of hyperbole when he had initially published the article more than a year ago, but now his descriptions of a “totalitarian” and “fascist” regime were more apt.

“Now it’s absolutely clear: I wasn’t exaggerating at all. The state controls not only the public, political and economic life. It also seeks total control over culture, over scientific thought and invades private life,” he declared.

Orlov linked the retrial to other efforts by Russian authorities that collectively were forcing the country “deeper and deeper into this darkness”, including the crackdown on Russia’s LGBT movement and the banning of certain books that carried any tenuous link to criticism of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

He called the recent death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony “a murder, whatever the specific circumstances of his death might have been”.

“Even after his death, the authorities are at war with Navalny,” Orlov said. “They fear him even in death — and have all the reasons to be afraid. They are destroying pop-up memorials to him. And…