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RIGA, Latvia — Jailed Russian opposition figures are incommunicado, missing in the country’s opaque and secretive prison system and unreachable by their lawyers or even the court system.
A popular, exiled detective novelist has been branded as a terrorist and charged by Russian authorities.
Monuments to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin are popping up, the latest a museum dedicated to him in the Siberian city of Barnaul.
And President Vladimir Putin is ramping up his inflammatory anti-Western military rhetoric, as his defense minister claimed that Russian weapons and military equipment had proved superior to NATO’s in the war on Ukraine — a boast that omitted the fact that the United States and Europe have restricted military supplies to Kyiv to limit attacks on Russian soil.
Just days into Putin’s reelection campaign — a highly stage-managed process in which there is no doubt he will win — there are signs that the Kremlin is sharpening its already severe repression of opponents and critics, with no regard for international criticism or the potential for deeper damage to relations with the West.
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Lawyers for Alexei Navalny, an imprisoned Putin political rival, said Tuesday that they had not been able to contact him for 14 days after he was removed from the prison colony where he was being held in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow. His location was unknown.
Lawyers for another prominent opposition figure, Alexei Gorinov, 62, a local legislator in Moscow, said they had been denied access to him since Dec. 8.
Both Navalny and Gorinov have been in poor health, according to their lawyers, with Gorinov deprived of medication and so ill with bronchitis that he did not have the strength to sit on his chair or speak when he was last seen this month.
Leaders of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, who live in exile because of threats of arrest and prosecution, posted pictures on social media Tuesday of supporters holding up signs asking: “#Where is Navalny?”
His team posted that Navalny was “alone with the people who tried to kill him,” a reference to his 2020 poisoning with a banned chemical nerve agent, an attack that was carried out by the Russian government, according to the State Department.
Navalny, 47, could be in transit to another prison, but Russian authorities have confirmed nothing, raising fears for his safety, given the unusually long time he has been out of contact. In Russia, transit between penitentiary facilities is seen by rights groups as a highly vulnerable moment for political prisoners.
Russia will win war in Ukraine, Putin tells news conference and call-in show
As supporters worry about Navalny and Gorinov, Putin’s powerful propaganda machine is operating at full blast in the run-up to an election designed to boost the legitimacy of his war on Ukraine. The Kremlin is carrying out public events featuring the Russian leader that seem designed to build a cult of personality around him.
Last week, Russians tuned into Putin’s annual news conference and call-in show for citizens, in which he exuded confidence and said the goals in Ukraine were unchanged.
On Tuesday, he addressed an expanded board of the Russian Ministry of Defense, attended by the militaristic leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, and other religious, political and military officials, and boasted that the West’s attempts to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia had failed.
Thanks to Russia, he said, “the myth of the invulnerability of Western military equipment also collapsed.” Putin said that Russia would never compromise its interests in any negotiations over Ukraine, and he proclaimed a need to further ramp up military production.
As Russia’s weapons factories churn out arms 24 hours a day, the nation’s security apparatus is equally industrious, jailing activists and trying to intimidate leading exiled cultural figures critical of the war. These include a beloved detective novelist, Grigory Chkhartishvili, who is famous for a series of historical whodunnits written under the pen name Boris Akunin.
One of Russia’s most popular novelists, he wrote a series of books about a fictional Russian detective in imperial times, the handsome, brave and incorruptible Erast Petrovich Fandorin, whose only flaw is a misfortune in gambling.
Chkhartishvili, 67, who left Russia in 2014 after Putin illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea and is based in London, is a strong critic of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and continues to call for aid for Ukraine.
“Terrorists declared me a terrorist,” he wrote Monday after Russian authorities designated him a terrorist. He added that Russia had “fallen under the power of criminals” and warned that even darker times lie ahead.
“A seemingly minor event, the banning of books, the declaration of some writer as a terrorist, is in fact an important milestone,” Chkhartishvili wrote. “Books have not been banned in Russia since Soviet times. Writers have not been accused of terrorism since the Great Terror.” He was referring to Stalin’s brutal 1930s purges in which millions of people were shot or sent to the gulag prison camp system.
“This is not a bad dream, this is happening to Russia for real, for real,” he wrote.
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Putin’s increasingly harsh rule, however, has seen a renewed public embrace of Stalin, with numerous monuments erected since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, airbrushing away that dictator’s bloody history.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday that Russian weapons factories had not developed, tested and produced weapons so quickly at any time since World War II. Russia’s military force will reach 1.5 million next year, almost half of them contract soldiers, Shoigu said.
Putin claimed that Russia had tripled its production of armored vehicles, “but more are needed, modern tanks, modern armored vehicles.” He called for increased manufacturing of drones and high-precision missiles.
As Western arms production lags, analysts have warned that NATO risks losing its military advantage.
“If we allow Russia to rearm without properly rearming ourselves, we are in deep trouble,” Janis Kluge, the deputy head of the Eastern Europe and Eurasia Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, posted Tuesday on social media.