The incident that occurred in the Odesa pre-trial detention centre (SIZO) and that, in a very strange way, came to light and drew the attention of the entire society, is telling and extremely important. Not because it is unique – on the contrary, because it is mundane. It demonstrates the abyss that Ukrainian society has…
Category: Experts
Absolute Prohibition in Relative Application: Institutional Impunity for Torture in Ukraine (2022–2026)
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has fundamentally transformed the country’s social and legal landscape. Yet what proved truly alarming was not only the external aggressor — inside the state itself, mechanisms of violence inherited from previous decades continued to operate. Torture in police stations, abuse in penitentiary facilities, beatings of conscripts within Territorial Recruitment and…
Tetiana Melnychuk: Rule of Law or Rule of Security – Rethinking Legal Responses еo Organised Crime Amid Hybrid Threats
Organised crime in today’s world is evolving into a decentralised and technologically sophisticated phenomenon, more capable than ever before of penetrating strategically important sectors of public administration, the economy and infrastructure, and of adapting to social crises. At the same time, the distinctions between traditional organised crime and more complex hybrid threats, such as political…
The Kyiv Tragedy of 18 April 2026: A Criminological and Human Rights Analysis
Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv. A typical Saturday. A busy supermarket. An armed man opens fire on the crowd, then barricades himself inside the building, taking hostages. The result: six dead, over 15 wounded, including a child. A raid was carried out by KORD special forces, and the attacker was neutralised. The weapon used by the…
“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…