In 2015, Eduard Nikitin shared a joke on social media about Russia’s bleak future. Three years later he is facing trial on extremism charges over this and one other meme.
The case against the 42-year-old is part of a wider trend that has seen Russian authorities bring charges against people for seemingly innocuous, humorous posts in increasing numbers.
Lawyers say the Kremlin is trying to force people to think twice before sharing opinions online — one of the last remaining spaces where the opposition is relatively free to organize.
“It turns out that for a harmless joke, anybody who doesn’t agree with our country’s leadership can be prosecuted,” Nikitin’s lawyer Maxim Kamakin told reporters after a preliminary hearing in St Petersburg on Monday last week. “It seems that in our country only optimists have the right to exist.”
In one of the incriminating posts from Nikitin, who is disabled and unemployed, a father crudely tells his son that nothing will be getting better in Russia any time soon.
The other features a drawing of a “vatnik” — a padded coat popular during the Soviet period that is also slang for uneducated Russians who uncritically follow those in authority.
The “absurd” case has seen Nikitin’s bank account blocked, his computer briefly confiscated and left him unable to participate in any opposition campaigns, his lawyer said.
The charges he faces — inciting hatred or degradation of human dignity — carry a maximum six-year jail term, although most convictions lead to a shorter sentence, a fine or community service.
Such cases are not new, but several high-profile investigations, along with an intervention from the operator of Russia’s largest social networks, has dragged the issue back into the spotlight over the past month.
In the Siberian Altai region, legal proceedings were opened more than a year ago against Daniil Markin, a 19-year-old film student who shared memes including a picture of Jon Snow, a character from the Game of Thrones TV series.
Under the image was written “Jon Snow is risen — truly he is risen!” a play on the Orthodox Easter greeting, which has led to the teenager’s ongoing prosecution on the grounds of religious hatred.
Maria Motuznaya, a 23-year-old who like Markin comes from the Altai city of Barnaul, faces separate extremism charges for images saved on the VKontakte network — Russia’s Facebook equivalent, which rights groups say cooperates with security services.
One of them, featuring apparently African children holding out empty bowls, carries the caption: “Black humor is like food — not everybody gets it.”
Markin and Motuznaya have both said they were pressured by police into signing confessions.
“Too often the actions of law enforcement agencies clearly do not correspond to the potential threat and their reaction to posts or memes are groundlessly harsh,” Mail.ru, which owns VKontakte, said earlier in the month.
The company, itself owned by billionaire Alisher Usmanov, called for a change in the law and an “amnesty” for “those who were unjustly convicted and serving time on such charges.”
The Russian Ministry of Communications has also supported a relaxation of the law.
According to independent rights group Agora, in 2017, 43 people were given prison terms for Internet posts in Russia, up from 32 the previous year.
Sarkis Darbinyan, a Russian digital rights lawyer, welcomed the request by Mail.ru as a step in the right direction, but said he did not expect to see any immediate changes.
“The main idea behind these policies is to create fear amongst Internet users. The aim is to create the impression that authorities are following every network user,” he told reporters. “Many users are already scared of sharing their own thoughts, they’re self-censoring their content, they’re deleting what they shared earlier. That reduces the level of free speech on social networking sites in Russia.”
Dmitry, a 21-year-old from the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, is one Internet user who has changed his behavior because of the steady drip of news of arrests.
“I’ve just been deleting a lot of my photos and posts from my wall that have been building up there for the last couple of years,” he said of his VKontakte profile.
He told reporters he would refrain from posting any thoughts on politics to the network, keeping these instead for other channels.
“Now there’s a definite fear — the state’s going crazy and you can be arrested just for ‘liking’ something. I don’t want to get caught up in all that, I want to be safe,” he said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion