More than six years after Pavel Sulyandziga, an Indigenous activist from Russia, left the country to seek political asylum in the US, he continues to face harassment by the Russian government.
A court in the Siberian republic of Buryatia on Friday sentenced the head of the anti-war advocacy group Free Buryatia Foundation to seven years of prison in absentia for spreading “war fakes.” Russian authorities accused activist Alexandra Garmazhapova of spreading “knowingly false information” about the Russian Armed Forces in a video about Russian servicemen who were detained in eastern Ukraine's Luhansk region last year after refusing to continue fighting in the war. “I don’t consider this [ruling] a legal document that can be taken seriously that’s my principled position,” Garmazhapova, who currently resides outside Russia, told The Moscow Times. “We were dealing with a fake legislation and a fake court, so the result is a fake verdict,” she added.
Russia's ethnic minorities are paying a heavy price in Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine. Now they are seeking to revive their national identities suppressed under Russian rule and are calling for "decolonisation" of Russia.
Russia on Friday branded the non-governmental organization Free Buryatia as "undesirable," a label that criminalizes the group and puts its staff at risk of prosecution.