In a rare display of dissent in the country, local deputies from the Smolninskoye Municipality in the St. Petersburg area appealed to the Russian State Duma to charge the president with what they called crimes of high treason.
The appeal’s author, Dmitry Palyuga, posted it on Twitter, claiming that Putin was responsible for “(1) the decimation of young, healthy Russian men who would serve the workforce better than the military; (2) Russia’s economic downturn and the brain drain; (3) NATO’s expansion eastward, including the addition of Finland and Sweden to “double” the border with Russia; (4) the opposite effect of the “special military operation” in Ukraine. “
Palyuga and fellow deputy Nikita Yuferev later posted on Twitter a subpoena issued to them by the St. Petersburg police for “discrediting the ruling establishment.”
Palyuga later reported that two of the four deputies summoned have been released by the police and that they will all be fined.
After launching a large-scale invasion in late February, the Russian government acted quickly to shut down the remnants of the Russian free press and introduced a new law imposing severe criminal penalties for spreading “false” information.
According to OVD-Info, an independent group monitoring the arrests in Russia, 16,437 people have been arrested or detained for anti-war activism in Russia since the start of the invasion.