Saturday sees a spate of arrests and convictions for various anti-war and opposition actions in Russia

On February 4, several people were arrested or sentenced in Russia on various charges related to anti-war or pro-Navalny actions.

In the Oryol region, Alexander Byvshev, a poet and former teacher of French and German languages, was arrested on suspicion of promoting terrorism. The Investigative Committee claims that in February and March 2022, Byvshev made social media posts that included “incitement to terrorist activities.” A local news outlet reports that the posts in question were Byvshev’s poems.

In 2014, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Byvshev shared his poem “To Ukrainian Patriots” on social media. That year, he was subsequently slapped with five different criminal charges and barred for life from teaching.

A Moscow district court sentenced Alla Gutnikova, former editor of the independent Russian student magazine Doxa, to two years in prison. The sentence is harsher than a previous one for the same case, under which Gutnikova was supposed to serve two years of corrective labor. The pretext for the case was a video in which Doxa’s editors explained students’ legal rights ahead of pro-Navalny protests in Russia in January 2021. Gutnikova spent part of 2022 under house arrest, and is now located in Berlin, writes Doxa.

In Rostov-on-Don, two people, 24-year-old Oleg Denisov and 22-year-old Irina Kuznetsova, were sentenced to almost three years each in prison for setting fire to a car with the letter Z on the rear window. According to the local prosecutor’s office, they set the fire in July 2022, completely destroying the car. A local online publication reports that the car was a police officer’s personal vehicle.