“Power in Russia is law and violence at the same time”

Without publicly providing any evidence, the prosecution in charge of his case accuses the journalist of having collected secret information on behalf of the CIA, the American intelligence service. He risks up to 20 years in prison for espionage, at the end of a trial that opened this Wednesday behind closed doors. The White House, which denounces a “mock trial“, states loud and clear that Evan Gershkovich is not “not a spy” et “should never have been arrested“.

The Evan Gershkovich case is not an isolated one. More and more journalists, Russian or foreign, are being detained and tried on spurious grounds: espionage, terrorism, false information, discrediting the Russian armed forces, etc. The list is long.

Justice also served

More broadly, an unprecedented wave of repression has swept across Russia since the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, more than 20,000 Russians were imprisoned for having displayed an anti-war position between February 24, 2022 and May 20, 2024. Extrajudicial pressure, such as cases of harassment, intimidation or threats, are also regularly observed.

Justice is no longer content with enforcing the law; in Russia, it is even very clearly pursuing another objective in the service of power: purging the political opposition, by putting all dissent out of harm’s way, that is, in prison. This aggressive and offensive use of the law in order to keep the elites at the head of the State gives rise to a “dictatorship of the law”, to use the words of Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, Director of Research at the CNRS. According to him, the mechanism is clear: everyone potentially has something to reproach themselves for. And if this is not the case, it is enough to invent cases.

“What is new since 2022 is that lawyers are also targeted. They are much more constrained in their activityanalyzes the researcher who has just published “The vertical of fear” (Ed. La Découverte). Before the war in Ukraine, even though they were sure to lose, lawyers used trials as a platform to denounce the injustice of the treatment of the people they defended. They still had a certain freedom of expression. I have the impression that this is now over in Russia.“

How Vladimir Putin Uses Fear to Keep Elites in Line

Extrajudicial violence assumed

In addition to targeting new professions, the runaway repressive machine is illustrated by the fact that the police forces are resorting to violence in an increasingly assumed manner, in parallel with judicial proceedings. The most striking example this year is the state of the four defendants in the attack on the Crocus City Hall concert hall, which occurred on March 22 and killed 144 people, upon their arrival in court. All showed visible signs of torture on their faces and bodies.

“It is a demonstration of omnipotence.worries Gilles Favarel-Garrigues. Everyone knows that there is torture in places of detention in Russia. But for it to be shown so explicitly in a court of law is completely new. A milestone has been reached in the communication of the Russian public authorities. It is no longer just a speech, it is images which demonstrate that power in Russia is law and violence at the same time.“