The Political Prisoners Support. Memorial project said the scale of politically motivated criminal prosecution in Russia returned to roughly 500 new victims over the second quarter of 2026.
According to the rights group, that amounts to about five new people subjected to prosecution per day.
Memorial stressed that this does not necessarily mean 500 separate criminal cases: a single case can involve several defendants, while the project records cases according to the date when information about the persecution enters its database.
During the second quarter, the number of prosecutions continued to rise against Jehovah’s Witnesses, alleged supporters of Vyacheslav Maltsev’s Artpodgotovka movement, and people accused of financing organizations associated with Alexei Navalny.
During the first half of 2026, Memorial recorded 64 Jehovah’s Witnesses charged under the law on participation in an extremist organization. In all of 2025, the figure was 51.
The number of people accused of financing extremism over donations to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation reached 81 in the first half of 2026, compared with 90 during all of 2025.
The rights group stresses that its figures are based on its own monitoring of politically motivated criminal prosecutions and do not constitute official government statistics.
Original report: https://memopzk.org/analytics/barometr-repressij-ii-kvartal-2026-goda/