Silence or Jail: Teens Targeted in Russia’s Wartime Political Crackdown

“Children have the right to choose their own path. Our son chose his and we will walk it with him, no matter what.”

These are the words of the mother of a Russian teenager now serving a prison sentence for opposing the war in Ukraine.

While his family knew about his political views, they never expected him to take public action.

“We always thought we understood each other: if you speak out, you won’t change anything — you’ll only make your own life harder,” the mother said in an interview with The Moscow Times, reflecting on the risks they had discussed long before her son’s protest. She spoke on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

Her son will spend five more years in prison.

His case is one of a growing number of instances in Russia where schoolchildren who express anti-war views face pressure — from teachers reporting them to the authorities to interrogations at police stations.

In some cases, teenagers are sentenced to prison, separated from their families and forced to continue their studies while in detention.

Opposition teens

It is difficult to estimate how many Russian teenagers oppose or support the war. Sharing these views openly, even with friends or classmates, can be dangerous. At least 544 minors had been detained over anti-war protests as of 2023, according to human rights watchdog OVD-Info.

Yet that has not stopped some teenagers from questioning the invasion.

This week, a prosecutor in Kazan sentenced 15-year-old activist Sevastyan Sultanov to one year of restricted freedom and barred him from attending public events. His crime: painting two pieces of anti-war graffiti and expressing support for the late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

In another case, Varvara Galkina, who was just 10 at the time, was reported to police by her school principal for posting an online poll about the war and changing her profile picture in a student chat to an image of Saint Javelin, a pro-Ukrainian meme.

Galkina and her mother were summoned to the police station for questioning, and the family was placed on a watchlist by the juvenile affairs commission.

Denis Bushuev, a promising athlete on the national ski jumping team, staged a solo protest on the first anniversary of the invasion at age 17. Holding a sign that read “No to war. No to madness” on the main street of his hometown, Nizhny Novgorod, he was detained and fined the maximum penalty — 50,000 rubles ($600) — for “discrediting the Armed Forces.”

Silent protest

“I don’t talk to others about my stance and try to avoid controversial topics altogether,” said 16-year-old Darya in an interview with the youth media project Novosti 26.

“It bothers me when people try to force those conversations,” she said.

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Robin Brooks, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, took to X recently to declare that "there needs to be a ban on any academic papers that interpret Russia’s resilient GDP as a sign that sanctions aren’t working." I found it remarkable that he should acknowledge the unexpected resilience of Russia’s economy yet try to disbar analysis which might suggest, therefore, that sanctions had failed.

Brooks produces some interesting analysis, and at the heart of his statement lies an important argument that others have taken up recently: that Western powers didn’t impose tough enough sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine crisis, but could still impose such a catastrophic economic cost on Russia that Putin will, for the first time, be forced to back down.

Let’s take a look at what a maximum pressure policy in 2014 might have involved. (...)