20 February 2025
Dozens of Russians confined to psychiatric hospitals for anti-war views
Source: The Moscow Times
Russia’s war against Ukraine has seen the return in Russia of a method of punishment widely used in the USSR against opposition activists and people opposed to the government: compulsory punitive psychiatry. According to data published by the Memorial Centre for the Protection of Human Rights, at least 48 people accused of politically motivated offences are currently being subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment. Of these, 46 are being treated in psychiatric institutions while another two are undergoing outpatient treatment while in prison.
Of these, 13 were prosecuted for violating censorship laws introduced shortly after the war started. The youngest of these is Maksim Lypkan whose twentieth birthday was on 12 February. In 2023, he was charged with spreading ‘fake news’ about the Russian army after attempting to obtain official approval for an anti-war rally – to be entitled ‘The Year of Hell’ – on Lubyanka Square in central Moscow and giving an interview to Radio Svoboda’ in which he called Vladimir Putin a ‘war criminal’ for invading Ukraine. In February 2024, a court pronounced him ‘mentally unsound’ and ordered him to be treated in a psychiatric hospital.
Reuters spoke with two women sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment but released after a few weeks. The experience they described was a grim one. 37-year-old Ekaterina Fat’yanova was sent to the Krasnoyarsk Regional Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 in April 2024 after being accused of ‘discrediting’ the Russian Army. She had published someone else’s anti-war article in a newspaper she was producing in her spare time. She claims the FSB (Federal Security Service) forced her to sign a form consenting to treatment and that the hospital staff subjected her unnecessarily to painful and humiliating treatment, including a gynaecological examination, giving her mouldy bread to eat and denying her the right to exercise on a daily basis. She was eventually released on 27 May, having established the absence of psychiatric disorders. A court later sentenced her to two years of compulsory work in custody.
This same hospital also ‘treated’ 56-year-old Olga Suvorova – an active member of social and ecological justice campaigns. She also says she was subjected to various medical examinations, although, unlike Fatyanova, she refused to sign a consent form. She had been arrested in Krasnoyarsk airport in December 2023 as she was returning from a meeting in Moscow with the Krasnoyarsk politician Ekaterina Duntsova, who was then planning to oppose Vladimir Putin in the March 2024 presidential elections. Suvorova was accused of falsely alleging having been beaten by a policeman despite a medical examination proving violence against her person to have taken place. When she refused to plead guilty to these charges, she was sent for psychiatric treatment where she was found to be ‘fixated on helping other people’, amounting to a ‘deviation from normal human behaviour’. She was then sent for treatment in the Krasnoyarsk Regional Psychiatric Hospital No. 1, and was released only three weeks later after she had made a formal complaint and had presented a certificate that she was in good mental health.
The Dutch professor and human rights lawyer Robert van Voren, who has spent decades studying the phenomenon of punitive psychiatry in Russia, told The Moscow Times that since the invasion began he has recorded 23 cases of punitive psychiatry a year, whereas there were on average only five such cases a year from 2015-2021. He pointed out that once an individual is put in a psychiatric hospital they can be kept there until they are ‘healthy’ – which means they may be held in perpetuity. In addition to isolation from others and the use of powerful drugs, a person’s condition is also negatively affected by the very fact of having been treated as mentally incompetent. This serves to devalue their opinions and has ‘a strong depressive impact,’ states van Voren.
Translated by Oscar Seecharan
