Pressure on politicians, journalists, and activists has intensified in Russia in recent days. In Moscow, former City Duma deputy and Yabloko deputy chairman Maxim Kruglov was placed in pre-trial detention. The case is based on two posts from three years ago about Bucha and Ukrainian civilians killed in the war, which investigators classified as “fake news” about the army.
Two days later, political strategist and former head of Boris Nadezhdin’s campaign штаб Dmitry Kisiev also came under pressure. Security officers came to his home in Khimki and handed him a document ordering him to leave Russia within three days. Earlier, in the summer of 2025, he had been stripped of Russian citizenship at the request of the FSB.
Prosecutors also asked a court to designate a collection of articles by politician Boris Vishnevsky as extremist. Political scientist Margarita Zavadskaya links the growing pressure to preparations for the 2026 State Duma elections and to a broader clearing of the electoral field after Nadezhdin’s campaign, which had gathered more than 200,000 signatures before the Central Election Commission refused to register him for the presidential race.
Persecution of Russians who left the country has not eased either. On October 3, a Moscow court sentenced Novaya-Europe special correspondent Ilya Azar, as well as Sergey Vlasov, Igor Glek, and Elena Rusakova, in absentia to four years in prison in a case on organizing the work of an “undesirable organization.” Dozhd journalist Anna Mongait was sentenced in absentia to five years, and on October 7 Ekaterina Kotrikadze, Valeria Ratnikova, and Tikhon Dzyadko were added to the financial monitoring agency’s list of “terrorists and extremists.”
According to the experts cited, transnational repression has become an extension of domestic repressive policy, aimed at psychological pressure and at sending society a message that the state can still “reach” even less prominent public figures.
The publication’s sources say the crackdown is driven not only by political calculation but also by the bureaucratic logic of the security agencies. As political scientist Timofey Barsukov put it, the guiding principle is that “there is a repressive apparatus, and it must be used.”