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…
Category: Research
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…
“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…
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…
Crimes Committed with Firearms and Explosives During Wartime: Statistical Overview for 2013–2025
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 created conditions that might reasonably be expected to produce a dramatic surge in firearm-related crime. The massive influx of weapons, breakdown of administrative controls in certain territories, displacement of millions of civilians, and general wartime disruption would logically correlate with increased illegal firearms usage. However, Ukrainian…