Lauren McCarthy and Doug Rice, along with co-author Aleks Lokhmutov from the organization OVD-Info have published a new article on Russia's wartime repression.  

Abstract: Eight days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the State Duma passed several new laws designed to quash anti-war activity. While the law criminalizing the publication of "false information" about the Russian army has received the most public attention, the law making "discrediting the Russian army" a fineable offense has had the broadest impact. In the first year of the war, there were over 5,800 known cases of discrediting the military across the country. In this article, we analyze publicly available court decision documents from the first four months of the war, which provide key insights into how the judicial system learns to use new laws to carry out the work of repression, as well as the ways that those accused of discrediting the military engage with the legal process.

(Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, Volume 31, Number 2, Spring 2023, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, The George Washington University)