The ranks of Russia’s so-called “enemies” have grown once again. And who has been awarded this honorary title this time? Human rights defenders, of course — people who help those who genuinely need protection and who often have nowhere else to turn.

This time, a Russian court designated the human rights group SK SOS an “extremist organization.” The project helps LGBTQ+ people and women subjected to violence in the North Caucasus. Its human rights defenders advise victims, organize evacuations from dangerous regions, and help them obtain medical and psychological support.

In other words, the Russian state has declared people who save victims of violence to be “extremists”: people who help those threatened by relatives, local security forces, or representatives of the so-called traditional community, and evacuate them from places where they may face beatings, abduction, or murder.

The manner in which this decision was made is particularly revealing. Representatives of SK SOS said that they learned the organization had been designated “extremist” only almost a month later, from a letter sent to the project’s director, David Isteev.

The organization intends to appeal the decision. At the same time, its human rights defenders acknowledge that they had expected such a development and began restructuring their work after the Russian authorities declared the so-called “international LGBT movement” an “extremist organization.”

For people’s safety, SK SOS disabled donations from Russian bank cards and reduced its activities inside the country. According to the project’s representatives, the organization currently has neither employees nor volunteers in Russia.

Nevertheless, it is not ending its assistance.

“For the people who turn to us for help, nothing changes. We remain ready to advise them, assist with evacuation, and provide medical and psychological support,” SK SOS said.

All of this is happening while Russia is establishing official relations with regimes such as the Taliban, ceremonially receiving their representatives and negotiating with them as though they were ordinary and entirely respectable state partners.

The result is a remarkable, though by now familiar, logic: people who save women from violence are “extremists,” while representatives of a semi-feudal regime are official guests and partners.

Representatives of a regime that deprives women of fundamental rights and builds its state system on fear, religious violence, and repression become respected interlocutors. Meanwhile, those who try to save people from violence and evacuate them from dangerous regions are turned into “enemies of the state.”

There is almost no reason left to be surprised. Russia itself is increasingly coming to resemble such regimes: persecuting human rights defenders and independent civil society organizations, destroying freedom of speech, labeling dissenters “foreign agents,” “extremists,” and “terrorists,” and waging a savage war that violates every conceivable rule of warfare — from the torture of prisoners and prisoners of war to the mass killing of civilians.

Russia has practically drawn level with these states. Only three differences, perhaps, remain.

First, the Russian authorities have not yet finally decided to restore the death penalty. But I fear that this is merely a matter of time. When a state steadily expands its list of “enemies,” “traitors,” “extremists,” and “terrorists,” the next stage of this evolution is not difficult to predict.

Second, representatives of the authorities themselves enthusiastically enjoy all the fruits of Western civilization. At the same time, they are systematically and almost successfully taking these opportunities away from ordinary Russians, while carefully preserving for themselves every comfort, technology, property, education for their children, and other privilege.

And third, the Russian elite has grown far too fond of the clothing, lifestyle, and luxury goods created by the very same “decaying West” against which it supposedly wages an irreconcilable struggle.

Vladimir Putin’s proclaimed struggle against the “corrupting influence of everything Western” sits uneasily even with his own public image.

For many years, the Russian president has appeared in Italian Brioni and Kiton suits costing several thousand euros, as well as wearing luxury Swiss and German watches by Blancpain, Patek Philippe, Breguet, F. P. Journe, and A. Lange & Söhne.

The value of individual models attributed to Putin by journalists and researchers has been estimated at anywhere from ten thousand to half a million dollars. The Kremlin, however, has never published complete and verifiable information about the origin of these watches, their formal ownership, or whether such a collection is compatible with the president’s officially declared income.

This is the same Russian struggle against the “corrupting influence of everything Western”: the population is offered restrictions, prohibitions, domestic substitutes, and stories about a hostile West, while the authorities continue to enjoy its finest and most expensive achievements.

Even after sanctions, international isolation, and years of state propaganda, members of the Russian elite show no desire to give up Western brands, technology, property, medical care, or education for their children.

In this respect, they still genuinely differ from the Taliban leadership. The latter at least lives, to some extent, in accordance with its own ideology. Russia’s rulers, by contrast, demand austerity, sacrifice, and rejection of the West exclusively from everyone else.

They themselves are clearly in no hurry to give up Brioni, Kiton, Swiss watches, or the other fruits of Western civilization.

At this point, the differences largely come to an end.

The ideological roots of the Taliban may lie in its supporters’ genuine internal conviction that Western culture, secular society, and modern achievements are evil. For Russia’s rulers, talk of the “decaying West,” traditional values, and a special path is merely convenient camouflage, successfully borrowed from the world’s most closed and repressive regimes.

They are not fighting the Western way of life. They are fighting ordinary people’s ability to choose for themselves how they wish to live.

They are not banning Western goods. They are banning freedom.

They do not persecute violence, but those who protect its victims.

They designate as extremists not those who threaten, abduct, and kill, but those who help people escape from them.

That is why the decision against SK SOS is not an isolated incident or simply another ban. It is part of the systematic destruction of all independent assistance in Russia.

The state appears determined to leave people alone with violence — without human rights defenders, independent journalists, lawyers, or any safe way to ask for help.

All that remains is to hope that this does not descend into complete absurdity — to the point where access to Western technology, social media, gaming platforms, and the outside world in general remains available to only one representative of the state.

Such absurdity has already been almost fully realized in North Korea. At one point, a single activity marker appearing in North Korean territory on a Steam activity map attracted users’ attention.

Naturally, the Steam map did not reveal the identity of the mysterious user in Pyongyang and did not make it possible to determine who owned the account.

However, in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population is isolated from the global internet and full access is available only to an extremely narrow circle within the ruling elite, an ironic theory arises almost by itself: could North Korea’s sole Steam account belong personally to Kim Jong Un — or to someone in his immediate circle?

There is, of course, no evidence of this. But the North Korean regime has done everything possible to ensure that the number of potential owners of such an account remains extremely limited.

And when the Russian authorities systematically block foreign websites, platforms, social networks, independent media, and access to the outside world for their citizens, the joke about the state’s sole Steam user no longer seems entirely fantastical.

Perhaps one day the struggle against the “corrupting influence of everything Western” will finally be completed: the population will be left with prohibitions, domestic substitutes, and stories about the hostile West, while the real internet, Western products, expensive suits, Swiss watches, and gaming platforms remain available only to selected representatives of the authorities.

And we seem to know already who among them will be first…

Source: the Telegram channel “Politzek-Info” — https://t.me/politzekinfo/9682