OVD-Info: stop political persecutions in Russia

Dear Friend,

Like many organizations, we ended 2025 by taking stock of the year and planning ahead. This time, both processes were exceptionally difficult.

In November 2025, we were cut off from more than 12,000 people who regularly supported OVD-Info using Russian bank cards. For an organization whose work is focused on supporting people inside Russia, this was a major blow.

Although a significant part of our mission is to share information about political repression with the international community, OVD-Info relies on the support of regular donors to continue its work. Thanks to this support, our lawyers are able to defend people facing political persecution, even under increasing personal risk. Our media team can report from the regions, ensuring that voices that might otherwise go unheard are amplified. When protests occur and people are detained, our defenders are able to provide immediate legal assistance at police stations.

Losing a large share of regular donations threatened the continuity of this work. Yet uncertainty has long been part of our reality. Over 14 years, we have learned one thing with certainty: our constant is your support.

We reached out to our supporters, colleagues in the human rights community, and independent media projects – and the response exceeded all expectations.

Emergency Support and Its Impact

Over the two months since the campaign launched (from November 24 to January 24):

• 4,459 people signed up for regular donations, contributing a total of €69,094.
• In total, we received 9,950 donations made with foreign bank cards, amounting to €185,607.
• An additional 3,336 transfers totaling 4,422,714 RUB (~€48 000) were made to support people facing political persecution through the Zaodno platform.
• A further €11,653 was donated via the GlobalGiving platform* (designated as “undesirable” in the Russian Federation).

Altogether, over the three-month period, we raised €245,287

Thank you for this support. While we were unable to return to the same number of supporters we had before the service disruption, the total amount raised is very close to our previous fundraising levels. These funds are sufficient to cover the costs of our core activities and to ensure continued support for our beneficiaries for some time.

Why Sustainability Matters

Escalating and Transforming Repression

Based on many years of data collection, we can state with confidence: repression in Russia is becoming more targeted, harsher, and less predictable.

Criminal cases often last for years, and the number of lawyers willing to take on political cases continues to shrink due to escalating risks. OVD-Info’s lawyers continue to do this work, ensuring that no one is left alone against the system – but this requires stable financial support.

Read more: Reasons for Political Prosecution in 2025: the charges of ‘public calls for terrorist activities’ and ‘organisation of extremist activity’ replacing those of ‘fakes.’

Declining Funding for NGOs

At the same time, funding for NGOs worldwide continues to decline. This trend, which began several years ago, shows no signs of reversing. Grant funding – once a partial source of stability – can no longer be relied upon.

To keep helping people, we must remain sustainable – and this is possible only with your continued support.

Repression in Russia: Key Findings of 2025

At the end of 2025, we published our annual analytical report. Its conclusion is clear: the human rights situation in Russia has grown even more severe.

Repression in Numbers – and Its Hidden Nature

• Politically motivated criminal cases returned to pre-war levels,
• protest-related arrests dropped by nearly threefold compared to 2024,
• yet the average sentence increased from 6 to 8 years,
• the number of convictions in political cases tripled compared to pre-war figures.

The year 2025 presents a paradox: politically motivated criminal cases returned to pre-war levels, and protest-related arrests fell roughly threefold compared to 2024 — a reduction that might suggest a softening of repression. Yet beneath these statistics lies a far more insidious reality. Repression is increasingly exercised in opaque “gray zones,” particularly in cases involving terrorism, extremism, treason, and espionage, where details are hidden behind secrecy and legal ambiguity.

Laws as Instruments of Control

In 2025:

• searching for “extremist” content and advertising VPNs was criminalized,
• the FSB began operating its own pre-trial detention centers,
• “foreign agents” were barred from educational activities.
  
  

Treason, Terrorism, and Extremism

Severe charges are now applied by default in political cases. Ukrainians in occupied territories face torture under terrorism charges, sentences grow harsher, and minors increasingly appear in court.

Donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation are criminalized, and treason charges are broadly interpreted – sometimes based solely on contact with foreigners.

As lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov notes, such provisions resemble practices found in authoritarian regimes, not democratic states.

Memory, Exile, and Global Resistance

Russian civil society has not disappeared – it has adapted.

One example is the global expansion of Memorial’s Returning the Names initiative. In 2024, events took place in 140 cities across 50 countries. In 2025, exiled activists continued organizing readings worldwide, preserving memory and solidarity despite state efforts to erase it.

As civic space inside Russia shrinks, civil society increasingly operates in exile. Repression is no longer only a domestic issue – its consequences are global.

Why This Work Matters?

The findings of our 2025 report show that repression in Russia is changing in form. It is becoming less visible, more bureaucratic, and more difficult to document and challenge. Mass arrests are increasingly replaced by selective prosecutions; public trials by closed investigations; explicit censorship by legal uncertainty and vague enforcement.

In this context, independent documentation plays a crucial role. Without systematic monitoring, politically motivated prosecutions remain fragmented and invisible. Without legal assistance, defendants face the system alone. Without public attention, unlawful practices risk becoming routine.

We continue to work at the intersection of documentation, legal aid, and public reporting. We collect and analyze data on political persecution, provide legal support to those facing criminal prosecution, assist political prisoners and their families, and preserve evidence of human rights violations.

Our task is not only to respond to individual cases, but also to ensure that repression – when it occurs – is recorded, analyzed, and made visible, even when state institutions attempt to obscure it.

Our Work in 2025: Key Areas and Results

Express help
A call to OVD-Info hotline or a message to our bot are the easiest ways to report persecution and get a free consultation. Specialists will advise you on how your situation may develop, and instruct you about your next steps.

• we received 3,010 calls on our hotline and responded to 51,470 messages in Telegram-bot
• our legal instructions were viewed 170,580 times (site only).
• 171,603 active users were connected to our Telegram bot by the end of 2025. 

Legal Support for Politically Persecuted People
For many, OVD-Info remains first and foremost a legal aid organization. While hopes for fair trials in Russia continue to fade, we persist – and achieve tangible results.

• went to the police departments 148 times, where they helped 243 detainees
• defended 233 people in administrative court cases
• In total, at the end of 2025, lawyers from OVD-Info worked on 94 criminal cases against 134 defendants.

Despite increasing repression, our legal team achieved important outcomes:

• 4 criminal cases against people we support were fully dropped.
• 6 individuals facing political persecution received non-custodial sentences, despite prosecutors requesting imprisonment.
• 10 sentences were reduced by 2 to 5 years compared to the prosecutors’ demands.
• 5 people represented by our lawyers won appeals that resulted in reduced sentences. 

Support for People in Detention
Several initiatives that began as experimental projects have become permanent parts of our work – made possible by thousands of people who refuse to look away.

In 2025:

• 340 care packages were delivered to 203 political prisoners, providing essential food and necessities,
• through the Vestochka letter service, 19,000 letters were sent in just 18 months,
• 972 prisoners received letters that became a vital connection to the outside world.

Through Zaodno, peer-to-peer fundraising platform, Russian donors supported 71 campaigns providing legal assistance. This format enables direct and safer support for people we assist and operates independently from OVD-Info.

Collective Action Against Repression: Dyatel
“Dyatel” means “woodpecker” in Russian. Like a small bird capable of breaking through thick tree bark, this tool helps knock on the doors of Russian institutions that have become impenetrable for civil society.

Over 14 years, we have learned that resisting repression requires collective action. The Dyatel (Woodpecker) platform enables people to file legal complaints and appeals.

• over 45,000 appeals were sent via Dyatel In 2025
• 170,787 appeals have been sent since the platform’s launch.

These efforts led to concrete results:

• Sergey Veselov, a blogger sentenced for his anti-war stance, was kept in isolation — in punishment cells and solitary confinement — for over six months. We collected more than 2,000 appeals to the prison service via Dyatel demanding a medical examination and an end to his isolation. The pressure worked.
• Anya Zhuravlyova, a 16-year-old girl wrongly accused of involvement in a terrorist organization, spent more than a year and a half in pretrial detention. There, she was brutally abused by other inmates — beaten, raped, and driven to a suicide attempt. After more than 7,000 appeals, Anya was transferred to house arrest and is no longer subjected to violence in prison.
• When artist Lyudmila Razumova, under arrest, began a hunger strike due to a lack of medical care, supporters of our campaign helped secure her transfer to a prison hospital. She ended the hunger strike, and the immediate threat to her life subsided.
  We were also in awe of street musicians from the band Stoptime, who continued to sing forbidden songs in the very center of Saint Petersburg. Unfortunately, we were not the only ones watching them. The so-called Stoptime arrest carousel began with repeated detentions at concerts and cultural events, where police would release detainees only to immediately re-arrest them. These practices were later followed by administrative and criminal cases against musicians across different regions of Russia – often for antiwar statements, protest song lyrics, or online publications. Luckily, the musicians from Stoptime were released after over 40 days of consecutive administrative arrests, though they were ultimately forced to leave Russia. Now, these voices of freedom are silenced.

In early 2026, we launched Dyatel in English to enable international solidarity and oversight. You can also participate in campaigns like these, for example by signing a petition against “arrest carousels“.

OVD-Info: A Community of Communities

In 2025:

• 118 defense lawyers collaborated with OVD-Info,
• over 5,000 volunteers supported us worldwide, including 500 new volunteers,
• more than 30,000 donors contributed, over half of them regularly.
  
  

Without this community, our work would not be possible.

We are grateful that you remain a part of it – despite everything happening around us.
Thank you for standing with us.

If you want to be informed about political repressions in Russia you can subscribe to our Digest, follow us on Twitter or visit our website! Everything helps.

Links:

• Repression in Russia in 2025. Overview by OVD-Info
• Dyatel: making changes together
• Vestochka: write to Russian political prisoners