The Moscow Times: Russian authorities have blocked a website that promotes jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s anti-ruling party voting strategy in this month’s parliamentary elections.
The Guardian: Russian opposition politicians are used to finding spoiler candidates with identical surnames running against them in order to confuse voters at the polls. Now it appears that the impersonators are changing their faces as well.
RFE/RL: A court in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has sentenced an aritst who was attending a rally in January for jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny to three years in a colony-settlement.
The Moscow Times: A St. Petersburg court on Monday sentenced a Russian man to three years in a penal colony for hitting a police officer at a rally in support of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
The Moscow Times: Russia has banned Tajik-born opposition activist Saidanvar Sulaimonov from the country for 40 years in what he calls retaliation for his work on Kremlin critic Andrei Pivovarov’s campaign for this fall’s parliamentary election.
RFE/RL: A court in Russian-annexed Crimea ordered Crimean Tatar leader Nariman Dzhelyal to be held in custody for two months on September 6 on suspicion of involvement in an attack on a gas pipeline, a charge dismissed by Ukraine as fabricated.
The Moscow Times: Ukraine has accused Russian security agents of detaining dozens of Crimean Tatars in what it called an ongoing crackdown on individuals who oppose Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.
RFE/RL: Well-known Russian journalist Roman Badanin, who stayed in the United States where he and his family were vacationing when his investigative group Proyekt (The Project) was shut down in Moscow in July, has started a new media outlet aimed at exposing abuses by Russian authorities.
Civil Rights Defenders: On 31 August 2021, the European Court of Human Rights issued a long-awaited judgement in the case of Chechen human rights defender Natalia Estemirova who was murdered in July 2009. The Court ruled that the Russian Federation violated the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to carry out an effective investigation into her murder.
The Guardian: The families of 298 people killed when flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 have demanded justice from Russia as they testified in the Dutch trial of four suspects.
RSF: The Russian embassy in France has reacted to a report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Internet censorship in Russia by accusing RSF of bias but, amazingly, in the course of so doing, it has referred to a Russian foreign ministry report on human rights violations in other countries that quotes RSF extensively (and selectively).
The Moscow Times: Western media news websites are being hijacked by pro-Russian trolls to spread propaganda and disinformation supporting the Kremlin, according to research published by a British university on Monday.
