Twenty-five years for a subscription, donations and a treason charge: Russia is approaching the threshold of 1937
The Southern District Military Court sentenced Denis Popov, a 46-year-old resident of Novorossiysk, to 25 years’ imprisonment. He is to spend the first five years in prison and the remaining twenty years in a strict-regime penal colony.
Given the defendant’s age, this sentence may prove to be a de facto life sentence.
Popov was convicted under five separate provisions of the Russian Criminal Code: high treason, participation in the activities of an extremist organisation, participation in the activities of a terrorist organisation, financing extremist activities and assisting terrorist activities.
The charges were brought under Article 275, Part 2 of Article 282.2, Part 2 of Article 205.5, Part 1 of Article 282.3 and Part 1.1 of Article 205.1 of the Russian Criminal Code.
According to investigators, Popov became a supporter of the banned Artpodgotovka movement in May 2020 and took out a monthly paid subscription to the account of its leader. In November of the same year, he allegedly completed a questionnaire and joined a so-called “operational information-gathering group”.
The prosecution claims that between December 2020 and September 2021, Popov passed on information concerning the movement of military equipment, ships and submarines in Novorossiysk, exercises conducted by the Black Sea Fleet, military infrastructure and the possible arrival of state-protected individuals in the area of the Grushovaya oil depot.
According to the prosecution, he also transferred money to Artpodgotovka between October 2021 and March 2022.
Russia, in the form in which it exists today, has already come dangerously close to the threshold of 1937. The sentences handed down by Russian courts can no longer be regarded as symbolic. Decades of imprisonment are becoming routine, while convictions increasingly amount to the destruction of the entire remaining life of a human being.
Russia’s repressive judicial system is distinguished neither by objectivity nor by any desire to establish the truth. It has instead learned to attach to real facts things that may never have happened at all, combining subscriptions, money transfers, political views and allegations of espionage into one enormous “terrorism” case.
The paid subscription to the account of Artpodgotovka’s leader and the money transfers probably did take place. Yet these actions in themselves prove neither participation in terrorist activities nor high treason.
What, in substance, was this “crime”? A man supported a political video blogger and a movement that opposed the permanent concentration of power in Russia and Vladimir Putin’s lifelong rule.
The state first designated Artpodgotovka as an extremist organisation, then declared it a terrorist organisation, and now uses those decisions to impose monstrous prison sentences for subscriptions, money transfers and political convictions.
The most serious part of the case concerns the alleged transmission of information about military facilities and troop movements. Yet this aspect of the case also raises numerous questions.
According to investigators, Popov began gathering this information as early as December 2020, more than a year before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The claim that an organised intelligence operation was already taking place at that time appears questionable, to say the least. It was Russia that was preparing its aggression and concentrating troops near Ukraine’s borders, while Ukraine proved insufficiently prepared for the scale of the invasion when it began.
This does not in itself disprove the charges. However, given the closed nature of Russian trials, the absence of an independent judiciary and the systematic use of classified materials, it is impossible to determine what evidence was presented or whether it existed at all in the form described by the prosecution.
Available reports indicate that Popov partially admitted guilt, but they do not specify which acts or charges he acknowledged. Admitting to a subscription or to money transfers cannot automatically be equated with confessing to treason, terrorism and espionage.
Nevertheless, the court combined all of this into a single sentence: a quarter of a century behind bars.
What comes next — an actual life sentence or the restoration of the death penalty?
In the present condition of Russian prisons, however, there is no need to formally restore executions in order to physically destroy a person.
Political and other prisoners are held in conditions that can often be described as torturous. They are denied medical care and subjected to isolation, pressure, abuse and constant transfers between prisons and penal colonies. Some die before completing even a formally limited sentence.
Perhaps no official death sentence or stroke of a pen is required any longer. Sometimes it is enough simply to pick up the telephone and call the right number.
We have repeatedly written about the crimes committed by the system of power created by Putin against Russia’s own population, neighbouring countries and other peoples. Yet the alarming trajectory cannot be ignored: with each passing year, the system sinks deeper into lawlessness.
At first, people were prosecuted for taking part in demonstrations. Then for publications, comments and reposts. Later, for subscriptions, transfers and private messages. Today, a combination of such actions can be used to construct charges of terrorism and high treason and to imprison a person for decades.
The regime, however, does not appear ready to stop. It still has further to go.
The Russian authorities have before them the example of their so-called strategic partner, Iran. There, protests are suppressed not only through mass arrests, torture, lengthy prison sentences and public executions, but also through the direct physical destruction of human beings.
According to some estimates, as many as 30,000 people may have been killed during the suppression of the protests. Establishing the exact number of victims is extremely difficult — and this is no accident.
Modern dictatorships, including through active cooperation with Putin’s Russia, have mastered the technologies of shutting down the internet, disrupting communications, conducting digital surveillance and preventing information from spreading.
When security forces begin shooting people, the country is plunged into informational darkness: the internet is cut off, social media platforms and messaging services are blocked, evidence is destroyed, relatives of the dead are intimidated, and independent journalists and human rights defenders are prevented from establishing the true scale of what is happening.
Russia and Iran cooperate not only in the military and political spheres. Authoritarian regimes exchange experience in censorship, surveillance and the suppression of society. They help one another create a system in which citizens can be destroyed and even the approximate scale of the crime can then be concealed from the world.
The official figures announced by such states therefore often reflect not the real number of victims, but only the number of deaths that the regime is no longer able to conceal completely.
The next stage may bring mass life sentences and death sentences. After that may come the destruction of thousands of people under the cover of a total information blackout.
We know one essential truth: dictatorships never stop by themselves.
When a crime remains unpunished, the next step is always more terrifying than the one before it. A dictatorship can be stopped only by the resistance of its own people — or by external opposition from the countries and peoples against which it directs its aggression.
English: Source: the Telegram channel “Politzek-Info” — https://t.me/politzekinfo/9700