Yulia Navalnaya, Oleg Orlov, the newspaper “The Moscow Times”… all symbols of the repression that is raging in the country

Alexei Navalny’s widow was placed on the list of terrorists and extremists this week, while the newspaper “The Moscow Times” was classified as an “undesirable organization.”

It’s been a violent week for dissident voices in Russia. Newspapers have been prosecuted, opponents have been sentenced, and on Thursday, July 10, even Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, was put on the list of terrorists and extremists. Yulia Navalnaya is not afraid. Since her husband died in his Arctic prison last February, the wife of Vladimir Putin’s main opponent has been urging her supporters every day not to give up.

Since Alexei Navalny’s organizations were already classified as terrorist organizations during his lifetime and banned, it is now his widow’s turn to be included in the same list, two days after an arrest warrant was issued for her participation in a terrorist group. If she returned to Russian soil, Yulia Navalnaya would be immediately placed in pretrial detention…

Oleg Orlov, 71, one of the greatest figures of Russian dissidence, a veteran of the Memorial association, Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. The Russian justice system refused his appeal, he remains in prison, sentenced to two and a half years of detention for having simply criticized the invasion of Ukraine. The association perpetuates the memory of the repression of the Soviet era and documents attacks on freedoms today. One of the bêtes noires, again of the regime of Vladimir Putin, who dissolved it and is prosecuting its members.

If the repressive message was not clear enough, Wednesday July 9, here is the newspaper The Moscow Times, which was ranked among the “undesirable organizations”. This newspaper was already in the crosshairs, classified in the category “foreign agents”. But its reclassification as an undesirable organisation now places all journalists working there under direct threat of prison sentences. Threats that also affect anyone who collaborates with the newspaper or even shares its content online.

Dissidents within the country crushed by the repressive machine, dissidents in exile dissuaded from returning to the territory, Russia is therefore seeking to send strong messages in a context exacerbated these days by the NATO summit.