On Friday, a court in Siberia sentenced a former head of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's local headquarters to nine years in a penal colony. And on Thursday, two Russian poets who publicly staged antiwar poetry readings in a central Moscow square, were sentenced to seven years and five-and-a-half years in prison respectively.
The latest developments indicate that Russia's repressive machine shows no signs of slowing down, and form part of a broadening political crackdown, where Russians are handed sentences on increasingly absurd and conflated charges, often under wartime censorship laws such as spreading 'fake news' or 'discrediting' Russia's armed forces, as well as 'inciting terrorism.'
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