It is too late for Alexei Navalny; but perhaps it is not too late for the others.

The terror continues, with two more prominent pro-freedom activists added to the growing list of those imprisoned in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for speaking the truth: Oleg Orlov and Boris Kagarlitsky. Not household names like the late Aleksei Navalny, but each vitally important to the cause of freeing Russia from the ever-strengthening grip of Putin-style totalitarian rule . . . each now being muzzled for having offended the dictator in the Kremlin.

Oleg Orlov, age 70, Chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization “Memorial,” was charged in October 2023 with “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian armed forces. Found guilty at trial, he was fined 150,000 rubles (US $1,630) and walked free. But — as has become commonplace in Russia recently — the prosecutors appealed the sentence as being too soft. A higher court ordered a retrial.

Some four months later, the guilty verdict was confirmed, but the sentence was far different: he would be sent to prison for 2-1/2 years . . . simply for having written an article presenting his assessment of the war in Ukraine. In his closing statement in court, he spoke of a Russia that is “sinking ever more deeply into darkness” and of “the suffocation of freedom.”

“We know the real reason why we’re being detained, tried, arrested, sentenced and killed. We are being punished for daring to criticise [sic] the authorities. In present-day Russia this is absolutely prohibited.”

He addressed the judge and the prosecutor: “Doesn’t the obvious occur to you? That sooner or later, the machine of repression may roll over those who launched it and drove it forward? That’s what happened many times throughout history.” [Steve Rosenberg, BBC News, Feb. 27, 2024.]

And then he was handcuffed and led out of the courtroom.

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Boris Kagarlitsky, age 65, is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist, editor-in-chief of the Left Politics publication in Moscow, and host of the YouTube channel Rabkor. In May of 2022, he was declared a “foreign agent.” And in December of 2023, he was found guilty of “public justification of terrorism” for a video published on Rabkor commenting on the Crimean Bridge bombing in October of 2022. Like Oleg Orlov, he was issued a fine, though in the higher sum of 609,000 rubles (US $6,700).

Also as in Orlov’s case, the prosecution appealed the sentence, and on February 13, 2024, the Russian Military Court of Appeal sentenced him to five years in a penal colony, and banned him from administering websites for an additional two years after his release.

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More and more, Mr. Orlov’s words ring true: Russia is indeed “sinking ever more deeply into darkness.” And the people who dare to speak out against the causes of its decline are paying with years spent in the hell of the Russian prison system . . . and sometimes with their very lives.

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So I urge you yet again: Do not forget or forsake those men and women being held HOSTAGE by the Russian government, who have done no more than speak out against the dictatorial, fascist regime of Vladimir Putin. While they have been forced into silence, we have not.

We must continue to use our voices for them.

Please . . . bring them home!

Brendochka
3/4/24