Human rights in Russia: What follows Oleg Orlov’s sentence?

On Tuesday, a court in Moscow sentenced Oleg Orlov, co-founder and co-chair of the human rights organization Memorial, to two and a half years in prison. The 70-year-old had been charged with “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian military after writing an article criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and labeling President Vladimir Putin’s regime as “fascist.”

Orlov’s wife, Tatiana Kasatkina, was present at the verdict’s announcement. The two had jointly built up the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization in the 1980s. Russian authorities have been clamping down on the entity’s work for years, and in 2021, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the outright liquidation of International Memorial and the Memorial Human Rights Center, the two branches of the organization.

Despite this, the activists and campaigners involved have carried on their fight, and on Tuesday, Kasatkina confirmed that they would continue to do so. “We will live, and we hope that what is happening right now will be over soon, and that Oleg and many others are released ahead of time,” she told reporters in front of the courthouse.

She also said that she believed the court had rushed the case in order to announce the verdict before the upcoming presidential elections in March.

‘Fascist totalitarianism’

Members of the movement Veterans of Russia had initiated the case in response to an article by Orlov titled “They wanted fascism. They got it,” first published in the French online newspaper Mediapart. In his opinion piece, Orlov argued that, following the “bloody war unleashed by the Putin regime in Ukraine,” Russia had “slipped back into totalitarianism, only now of the fascist variety.”

A Moscow court had already sentenced Orlov to a fine of 150,000 rubles ($1,650, €1,522) in October 2023. Two months later, however, a higher court canceled the decision and sent the case back to prosecutors. In court, Orlov demonstratively read Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial,” and at times even refused to participate in proceedings.