As a fifth term for Vladimir Putin looms, Russia is stepping up its war on its own people

On February 26, one of Russia’s longest-serving human rights activists stood up at the end of his trial in a Moscow court and offered his uncensored verdict on Russian democracy.

“The state in our country is once again controlling not only social, political and economic life, but is now claiming full control over culture, scientific thought, and is inserting itself in private life. It’s becoming all-pervasive,” said Oleg Orlov, a 70-year-old who was on trial for “discrediting the army.”

Powerful voices like Orlov’s are becoming a rarity in Russia, where high-profile opponents to President Vladimir Putin and his ruling elite are now mostly either in exile, in prison, or dead.

Orlov, co-founder and co-chair of Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights organization set up in the Soviet Union’s twilight years, knew he had nothing to lose.

The day after his speech in court, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Discrediting the army is just one of several new offenses added to Russia’s penal code since the invasion of Ukraine.

Orlov’s so-called crime was committed just over a year earlier, when he  published an article in a French online newspaper titled “They Wanted Fascism, They Got It.” After his sentencing, Amnesty International called him a “prisoner of conscience” and called for his immediate release.

Russian human rights group OVD-Info says more than 260 people are currently serving jail terms in the country for crimes related to taking an anti-war stance. The group has recorded almost 20,000 detentions, and while most of those were at the beginning of the war, there is still a steady stream. They’re not large numbers in a country of 140 million people, said OVD-Info lawyer and analyst Darya Korolenko, but just enough to make for an effective deterrent.

And it’s not just known opposition figures or activists who are being targeted.

“They will imprison old people, they will imprison people who have disabilities. They will imprison people with children, women with children,” Korolenko told CNN. “They just want everyone to be silent.”

The wartime censorship laws — discrediting the army, or the more serious offense of knowingly spreading “false” information about the army — have turned social media into a minefield.