Author: yagunov
The Algorithm as Witness: Errors in the Criminal Justice System Through the Lens of Technological Determinism
On 29 March 2026, CNN published a report on a case that might have been dismissed as yet another instance of bureaucratic negligence, were it not for one crucial detail: the basis for the arrest of a Tennessee resident was facial recognition carried out by Clearview AI — a company with a database containing billions…
“Motherland” Protects Its Fraudsters: Russia Is Building a Telephone Iron Wall
Russia has taken another step toward ensuring the safety of its citizens — and, as one might guess, toward achieving its own telecommunications self-sufficiency. According to the second package of “anti-fraud measures,” which the State Duma passed in its first reading in February, the government plans to block incoming international calls to landlines for Russians…
“We’ll Be Closing the Windows”: The Self-Isolation of Russian Society as a Performance of a Carceral State
— How many open windows do we have in total? — They’re all open. — We don’t know when to stop. Well then, we’ll close the open windows. Yevgeny Schwartz. “To Slay the Dragon” (1944) There is a particular kind of academic ‘stagnation’: when a phenomenon is so vast and so obvious that the scientific…
Anesthesia of Consumption and Surgery of Control: A Two-Phase Model of Authoritarian Governance of the Digital Space in Russia
Social science has long sought to explain why citizens of authoritarian states do not mount mass resistance against systems that openly restrict their rights. Traditional answers reduce to either fear of repression or ideological indoctrination. Neither, however, fully accounts for the phenomenon observed in post-Soviet Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century: the relatively…
Dmytro Yagunov: Crime and Social Control in Ukraine 2013-2025: Analysis of Transformation Under War Conditions
This study examines crime trends in Ukraine from 2013 to 2025, with particular focus on the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion beginning February 2022. The analysis reveals that Ukraine represents the first testing ground for studying modern warfare’s impact on a contemporary democratic state operating under European legal frameworks. Pre-war (2013-2021), Ukraine demonstrated consistent crime…
War, Total Surveillance, and The Collapse of Social Control (Criminological Reflections on the Paradox of the Panopticon in Armed Conflict)
Contemporary criminology has long theorised surveillance as the cornerstone of social control. From Bentham’s Panopticon to Foucault’s disciplinary society, and from Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of the “synopticon” to other surveillance studies, the prevailing assumption holds that the totalising gaze of the state and its apparatuses produces order, compliance, and the internalisation of norms. Yet armed…
New Detention Centre with 4,000 places in the Moscow Region: Relieving Pressure on the System or Preparing for a New Wave of Repression?
In early February 2026, the Main State Expert Review Board of the Russian Federation issued a positive opinion on the project to build a 4,000-capacity pre-trial detention centre in the Solnechnogorsk urban district of the Moscow region. The customer for the construction is the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) of Russia, and funding will be provided…