Tatyana Kuznetsova is 52 and disabled, and she gets by on a modest pension. On May 23, 2022, a court in her corner of northwest Russia fined her 30,000 rubles ($450) for something she typed into a local VKontakte chatroom.
The offence was a pair of comments. The first came on February 25, one day into the invasion, and it criticised the war. On March 12 she wrote that, had she a son or a husband, she would never have let him go to Ukraine. A court called that discrediting the Russian armed forces.
How the law works
The mechanics are simple, and the catch is how little they require. Eight days after Putin announced the invasion, two laws dated March 4 banned “false information” about the military, as the state defines it. They also criminalised protesting the war or backing Western sanctions. At the top end, a conviction can mean 15 years inside.
Kuznetsova said she had barely registered the law’s existence. “I had no idea what ‘discrediting the Russian Army’ was,” she told North Realities. Her lawyer, Maria Zyryanova, argued that the comments were opinion, with “no calls” to act and “no discrediting”. She planned to appeal. Kuznetsova herself said the fine would be crushing, and that from now on she would speak her mind only among close friends.
That last remark is the point of the exercise. A fine is a small bill. What it buys the state is a quieter chatroom.
The count climbs
Volume came fast. OVD-Info, a group that tracks protests, police action and prosecutions, had logged at least 1,938 “discrediting the armed forces” cases by mid-May 2022. In Karelia, the region bordering Finland where Kuznetsova lives, a police official said about two dozen cases had been investigated, with some defendants fined and others still waiting. One of them, the Petrozavodsk activist Vladimir Malegin, who is known for standing alone in the city centre with protest signs, was awaiting trial.
By August 2024, Mediazona reported that the total had passed 10,000. The 10,000th case landed in court during the opening days of August. Most came early, with 5,614 filed through the end of 2022, then at least 1,410 in the first part of 2024. The pace slowed, but thousands of people had been detained.
Fines first, prison on repeat
The penalty ladder matters. A first offence is fined, at most, 50,000 rubles ($566). Do it again within twelve months and the case turns criminal: up to five years in prison, rising to seven where injuries, deaths or mass public order offences followed.
According to OVD-Info, 200 people had been indicted for a repeat offence, although some of them had since left the country. The best-known case is Oleg Orlov, a Memorial rights activist, found guilty in February 2024 as a repeat offender and given two and a half years. In July, aged 71, he was released in a prisoner swap between countries and flew to Germany.
Sources
- Russia Opens 10K Cases for 'Discrediting' Army Since Invasion – Mediazona – The Moscow Times
- 'Discrediting' The Armed Forces: The Russians Caught Up In A Draconian Law
