By Riley Waggaman, Substack, 2/7/24
Russia’s upper house of parliament on Wednesday (February 7th) unanimously approved a law that allows for confiscation of property and deprivation of military ranks and honorary titles for activities directed against the state, as well as for discrediting the country’s armed forces. Since the start of its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian government has granted itself a range of new powers to combat information deemed nonfactual and damaging to national security.
Under the new legislation, money, valuables and property acquired as a result of discrediting the military, as well as property used to carry out such activities, is subject to confiscation by court order.
A lawyer who spoke with Fontanka.ru explained how the law works by providing an example of “a person who committed a crime by publishing a message on the Internet from a mobile phone.” In this case, “the smartphone can be confiscated as an instrument of the crime, and if the convicted person received money for this crime, then that can also be confiscated.”
The legislation also permits the stripping of military ranks, as well as honorary and state titles, from those convicted of discrediting the army or advocating for activities that threaten the state.
Speaking at a plenary meeting in January, State Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin said the bill was designed to punish “scoundrels and traitors who spit on the backs of our soldiers, betrayed our Motherland, and transfer money to the armed forces of the country that is at war with us.”
But what constitutes collusion with Russia’s enemies is open to interpretation.
Russia was the main exporter of uranium to the United States in November, and Russian gas continues to flow across Ukraine. On February 3, Gazprom disclosed that 42.4 million cubic meters of gas was being delivered daily to Europe via Ukraine’s Yelets–Kremenchuk–Kryvyi Rih pipeline. The gas transit deal with Kiev is expected to last until the end of 2024.
The new law expands on preexisting legislation that Russian authorities have used to crack down on speech deemed dangerous to national security. Just hours after President Vladimir Putin announced the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor, the federal government’s media watchdog and regulator, warned media outlets that they were required to use information only from official sources when preparing materials about the military intervention.
Less than two weeks later, on March 4, 2022, the Russian government criminalized “the public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in order to protect the interests of Russia and its citizens”, with a maximum punishment of 1.5 million rubles and fifteen years in prison.
Courts have not shied away from punishing the enemies of Russia.
In March, a 63-year-old man was sentenced to seven years behind bars for “posting two comments under other people’s posts on the VKontakte social network, which contained an aggressive attitude towards the authorities of the Russian Federation and hostility towards the course of the SMO in Ukraine.”
In December, a 28-year-old woman from St. Petersburg was sentenced to six months of “compulsory treatment” at a psychiatric hospital after she was convicted of posting fakes about the military on social media.
At the end of January, a 72-year-old pensioner received five years in prison for posting “information about the number of dead Russian military personnel” and an “emotional video.” The elderly woman admitted guilt but said she had acted emotionally after her brother, who lived in Ukraine, was buried under the rubble of a building that collapsed as a result of shelling. A Rostov region court ruled that she had been motivated by political hatred.
Fines are given for less serious offenses. In March 2022, a St. Petersburg court fined a resident 35,000 rubles for holding a sign in public that read “No to war”. The defendant was found guilty of “expressing his opinion and forming the opinion of those around him about the participation of the Russian Armed Forces (AF) in a war, and not in a special operation.”
In November 2023, a resident of Kamchatka was fined 30,000 rubles after a “linguistic study” determined that she had “denigrated” the Russian military in a social media post. Russian media has reported dozens of similar cases over the past two years.
Punishment is not reserved for those deemed “anti-war”. In September, A former member of a volunteer detachment in Donbass was fined 20,000 rubles for hanging a banner with the inscription: “Freedom for Strelkov”, and scattering leaflets demanding the release of the ex-Donetsk commander from a pre-trial detention center in Moscow. The defendant was found guilty of discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
In December, retired GRU colonel Vladimir Kvachkov was fined 50,000 rubles for discrediting the Russian army. Like Strelkov, Kvachkov supports military intervention in Ukraine but has been highly critical of the SMO’s execution.
A month later, Strelkov himself was sentenced to four years in prison, purportedly in connection to several Telegram posts he wrote. The evidence against Strelkov was deemed a “state secret” and his trial was closed to the public.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained in a November interview that “certain censorship” is required during “wartime”. He acknowledged, however, that the rules against dangerous speech are somewhat ambiguous.
“Where is the line? I can’t answer this question. [The line] is very thin. And therefore, I would advise all those who speculate indiscriminately and throw words of criticism towards our army without understanding the essence of the matter … to think ten times,” Peskov advised.
The line is constantly moving. On February 15, 2022—a week before Russia launched its special military operation—Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned reports about Moscow’s impending military intervention as “information terrorism”.
Russia has since the beginning of time been an irresistible– and dangerous — target for the West.
Whether we’re talking about an actual crime and whether the severity of the punishment is justified or not really comes down to your perspective and the laws of a nation. (I would not criminalize casual criticism myself, but I would come down hard on actual treason, ie. aiding the enemy. Where do you cross the line? Like Peskov, I don’t know.)
In any case, this is nothing new in wartime. There are plenty of precedents. I’d point to the United States during and immediately following World War I, when critics of the war and/or the government were prosecuted under the Sedition Act and faced prison terms of between five and 20 years. The famous socialist and anti-war agitator Eugene Debs was handed a 10-year sentence, although he was later pardoned.
And while the Sedition Act was rescinded in 1920, the accompanying Espionage Act (which extends beyond wartime) remains in force to this day. The list of Americans charged under that act include everyone from Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to Daniel Ellsberg to William Snowden. The penalties you pay if caught and convicted exceed anything in this proposed Russian legislation.
So, make of the Duma’s action what you will. But don’t act as if this is a Russian aberration. It isn’t.
I really appreciate the previous comments. If this article, submitted the Natalie is true, and to me that’s a pretty large IF, it means only one thing to me. That the CIA and MI6 are involved up to their ears in attempts at subversion in Russia, just as they were in the overthrow of the government in Ukraine in 2014, because Ukraine wouldn’t capitulate to Europe and the USA, through the IMF. The hands of those mentioned, run in blood. JFK wanted to destroy the covert operations branch of the CIA. That information is in the book, JFK and the unspeakable. Ray McGovern has written and spoken about it often. And, he has been beaten and arrested for exposing the lies of the US government, and likes of Hiliary Clinton.
I believe that they, MI6 and the CIA, had convinced Navahny to work for them. He found out the hard way and should have listened to what Kissenger said. “To be an enemy of the USA is dangerous, and to be a friend is fatal”. It was fatal for him. Those organizations have been responsible for the destruction of more than 50 countires since WW2 and the dealths of over 20 million people. You can find that in numberous places, one being Consortium News. Look up article submitted by John Pilger. The fisrt such operation was in Iran in 1953, following the countries nationalization of their oil.
The west, owes a great deal of their profitable existance to the colonization of South and Central America, Africa, India, Iraq, Iran, the far east. Its a long list. Both Russia and China are gradually helping to end those countries subserviance to the West. And, the deals are simply business, allowing them to grow out of that captivity, which no doubt has set alarm bells ringing for the collective west.
I could go on at length, but in my opinion Mr. Putin, repectfully, is the best thing that has happened to Russia in over 100 years. 70 years of communism, followed by the country being raped by the west for 10 years, when Yeltsin was in office. I have family there whos lives were in ruins because of those years, and many Russians wanted Stalin back, because they were better off in that era. Larry Johnson said it well, when he stated that the west first cheered Mr. Putin, but when they found out he wasn’t going to be the ‘prison bitch’, they turned against him, and began to villanize him. THe war in Ukraine has been a disaster for the west, except for the fact that the western arms industry is making billions in profits from the war. But, the Urkainian people have suffered for it. They are now the victions of colonization. Hopefully the day will come when they wake up and take control of their destiny.
The author referenced (with embedded visuals) within the article mainstream Russian media sources. These legal penalties for criticizing the war are not made up. The author also lives in Russia and used to be an editor at RT. He’s not anti-Russia. He does however think that those who people in the west who take a knee jerk position that because the US-led west is nefarious everything that goes on in Russia is totally ducky and beyond reproach and that Putin can do no wrong are just as wrong-headed. I tend to agree. Not everything that is negative that goes on in Russia is false and Putin and some of his entourage still continue to go along with a lot of stupid and/or dangerous things that western institutions decree. I long ago got sick of people on both sides who push un-nuanced and caricatured views.
Yes, I’m a bit disappointed too. After reading your book I’d be surprised if these sorts of actions were not taken, it’s too much in character. I hoped that Russian Bureaucracy, being very historically aware, would go more softly, rather than have history repeat itself. Some of the early work on controlling foreign NGO interference was handled well enough that I though it was a model worth exporting, but this is quite ham fisted, and detrimental to building a robust, learning society that can keep moving forward post Putin Administration.