The Russian president did not hesitate to justify the growing repression of those criticizing the offensive in Ukraine, during a press conference on Saturday July 29. “It is 2023 and the Russian Federation is engaged in an armed conflict with a neighbour. And I think we have to have a certain attitude towards people who cause us damage inside the country,” Vladimir Putin told the Russian press.
“We have to keep in mind that to be successful, including in a conflict zone, we have to follow certain rules,” he continued.
Vladimir Putin was responding to a journalist from the Russian daily Kommersant asking him to comment on the recent arrests of a political scientist and a director, Boris Kagarlitsky and Evgenia Berkovitch. “These people were arrested for the words they said or wrote, is that normal? asked the journalist, making the connection with the Stalinist purges of 1937.
A renowned political scientist on the left in Russia, Boris Kagarlitsky was charged this week with “public calls for terrorism” and remanded in custody in Syktyvkar, in Russia’s Far North. He had publicly expressed his opposition to the offensive in Ukraine. Yevgenia Berkovitch was arrested in early May and charged with “apology for terrorism” for a play she directed in 2020, telling the story of Russian women recruited on the internet to marry Islamists in Syria.
Vladimir Putin said he heard their names “for the first time” and “didn’t really understand what they did or what was done to them”, adding that he was just giving his “general opinion on the issue”.
Since the start of the offensive by Russian troops in Ukraine and the adoption of laws prohibiting any critical speech, several Russian independent media have been forced to suspend their activities or leave the country and many opponents have gone into exile or been imprisoned. Thousands of fines and several heavy prison sentences have been targeted pell-mell anonymously, activists and intellectuals.
