Tens of thousands of Russians protested in the days following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, and thousands were detained. Six months later, only a few brave souls still protest the war, and many of them feel disheartened by their society’s indifference to what they see as barbarism.
In the bedroom of his modest apartment in the southern Russian city of Volgograd, ex-university lecturer Roman Melnichenko has two bags packed: one if he goes to prison, the other if he has to flee.
Across Russia, teachers who have taken an anti-war stance have been fired from their jobs and charged by the authorities. In Volgograd, Roman Melnichenko is considering emigration. Marina Dubrova, from Sakhalin in Russia's Far East, was denounced to the authorities by her own students.
Academic freedoms are being stamped out, with educators forced to spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda and glorify Russia’s ‘special operation in Ukraine.’
The Russian authorities must immediately end their assault on academic freedom and the right to freedom of expression, Amnesty International said today as a campaign to purge schools and universities of dissenting opinions about the aggression against Ukraine escalates. “Russian civil society organizations, which mostly oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are not the only […]