In December 2025, the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council member Eva Merkacheva requested Vladimir Putin to carry out a ‘vacation miracle’. Interesting on behalf of individuals with disabilities and moms within the Russian jail system, Merkacheva instructed pardoning first-time offenders convicted of ‘minor, non-violent’ crimes. ‘The New 12 months and Christmas holidays are developing. Let moms be with their kids,’ she urged. Putin appeared open to the concept, and two weeks later, Merkacheva despatched the Russian president an inventory outlining teams of prisoners who might be launched. However the holidays got here and went, and nobody was pardoned.
A couple of months later, on Worldwide Ladies’s Day (8 March), exiled activists from Political Prisoners Memorial launched a marketing campaign with the same humanitarian enchantment. ‘We acknowledge that it might be unrealistic to anticipate the speedy launch of all political prisoners. There are, nevertheless, no less than 20 people whose freedom calls notably for humanity and compassion,’ the group wrote in a web-based petition. ‘They’re moms who’ve been separated from their underage kids.’
The next week, on 17 March 2026, Putin granted pardons to 23 girls. The Kremlin didn’t disclose their names or the crimes for which that they had been convicted, revealing solely that the pardoned girls both had kids or had family members who ‘participated within the particular navy operation’, the official euphemism for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Not one of the moms named within the petition have been pardoned. As of writing, they continue to be scattered in prisons throughout Russia, alongside tens of hundreds of different girls. What number of precisely is unknown; the federal penitentiary service stopped publishing detailed statistics in 2022. But Russian officers declare that the jail inhabitants has reached a historic low, due partially to the recruitment of inmates to battle in Ukraine. In the meantime, the proportion of ladies within the system is rising, and they’re more and more minimize off from the surface world.
Collateral harm
Political Prisoners Memorial grew to become an unbiased initiative in April 2022, after a Moscow courtroom upheld the dissolution of the Memorial Human Rights Heart, a department of Russia’s oldest and most revered rights group. Later that yr, Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 4 years after that, in April 2026, Russia outlawed Memorial as an ‘extremist’ group. Immediately, Political Prisoners Memorial acknowledges greater than 1,600 political and non secular prisoners in Russia, based mostly on the Council of Europe’s definition of the time period. The group additionally maintains one other database of individuals ‘disadvantaged of liberty’ on politically motivated grounds within the Russian Federation and the occupied territories of Ukraine. It at present incorporates 5,359 names, with the caveat that the actual quantity is probably going no less than twice as many.
The overwhelming majority of those political prisoners are males. For activists, nevertheless, drawing consideration to a smaller demographic is a strategic transfer. ‘Once we talk about political prisoners who’re moms of underage kids, we predict it’s essentially the most morally and emotionally grounded demand,’ says Sergei Davidis, who heads the Political Prisoners Memorial undertaking. ‘They don’t seem to be the one victims of their imprisonment. Their underage kids are victims who’re harmless, even from the state’s viewpoint. They’re collateral harm.’
At one time, moms weighing the dangers of political protest in Putin’s Russia thought-about their kids a mitigating issue. However the Kremlin’s wartime crackdown on home dissent has confirmed indiscriminate.
‘Earlier than 2022, it was much less doubtless for a girl who had a small little one or who was pregnant to be handed a jail sentence,’ says the political sociologist Olga Zeveleva, an assistant professor in battle research at Utrecht College. ‘You’d hear individuals say, “I’ve received a small little one, it’s protected for me to go to this protest. But it surely’s higher for my husband to remain dwelling as a result of they gained’t throw me in jail.” This sort of chatter amongst activists is much much less doubtless now.’
Article 82 of the Russian Felony Code offers for the deferral of jail sentences for ladies who’re pregnant or elevating kids beneath 14, in sure circumstances. Nevertheless, these on trial for talking out in opposition to the battle or the regime are not often granted such postponements.
‘It isn’t an obligation of the courtroom, however it’s a proper. And the courts are much less inclined to be particularly human in circumstances of politically motivated prosecution,’ Davidis says.
Amongst these Political Prisoners Memorial has acknowledged as political prisoners, solely two moms have acquired deferred sentences. Olga Chepeleva, a 35-year-old Belgorod resident, spent greater than six months in pre-trial detention on fees of spreading ‘faux information’ in regards to the Russian navy. Then, in February 2026, she was handed a five-and-a-half-year jail sentence, with a deferment till her little one turns 14. Ilona Nargornova, a 59-year-old mom of six, was discovered responsible in 2024 of belonging to the Revival Christian Church – a Ukrainian spiritual group Russia has banned. Nargornova, who was beneath home arrest whereas awaiting trial, acquired a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence, deferred till 2027.
Of the 20 girls featured within the ‘Free Political Prisoner Moms’ marketing campaign, three are residents of Ukraine serving jail sentences of 12 years or extra for allegedly committing ‘excessive treason’ in opposition to the Russian Federation. Two of them, Oksana Hladkykh and Yuliya Stanika, have been pressured to take Russian passports whereas residing beneath occupation. One other six have been discovered responsible of involvement in organizations and teams Russia has outlawed as ‘extremist’ or ‘terrorist’ – such because the political motion based by the late Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny. The journalist and activist Olga Komleva, for instance, was sentenced to 12 years in jail for volunteering at Navalny’s Ufa headquarters earlier than the motion was designated as ‘extremist’. In a merciless coincidence, she reportedly misplaced her capability to talk whereas in jail.
Ten others have been convicted of speech crimes. The journalist and mom of two Maria Ponomarenko, for instance, was given six years for allegedly spreading ‘faux information’ in regards to the March 2022 bombing of the Mariupol theatre, the place a whole lot of civilians have been sheltering whereas Russia laid siege to the town. Elena Abramova, a translator from St Petersburg, was convicted of ‘discrediting’ the Russian navy for protesting alone, with indicators saying ‘No battle!’ and ‘A world with out battle. Russia with out Putin.’ She acquired a two-year jail sentence.
‘Going out and holding your single picket signal saying “No to battle” is certainly not what the state needs girls to do,’ says Jennifer Mathers, a senior lecturer at Aberystwyth College in Wales, targeted on Russian politics and safety and gender in battle. ‘It doesn’t need anyone to do it, however it particularly doesn’t need girls to do it.’
Historic highs and lows
In opposition to this backdrop of intensifying wartime repressions, the Russian authorities have reported a dramatic decline within the jail inhabitants. In Could, Arkady Gostev, director of the federal penitentiary service, claimed that there are actually 282,000 individuals within the system, together with 85,000 in pre-trial detention centres. On paper, this determine marks a brand new historic low for contemporary Russia. Just some months in the past, in March, the Supreme Court docket’s newly appointed First Deputy Chief Justice, Vladimir Davydov, reported that the jail inhabitants had dropped to a file 308,000, down from about a million in 2001 (when Putin first took workplace). Each officers attributed the latest decline to a ‘humanization’ of prison justice insurance policies, however solely Gostev acknowledged that navy recruitment has had an impression. As Zeveleva put it, ‘Males have a manner out now, and that’s to go to the entrance.’
The Russian defence ministry started enlisting convicts to battle in Ukraine in early 2023, following an preliminary jail recruitment drive by the Wagner mercenary group. Whereas tens of hundreds of prisoners and prison suspects have reportedly joined up, the defence ministry doesn’t publish any such statistics. Exterior estimates additionally range wildly, typically decoding any decline in Russia’s jail inhabitants as indicative of one other recruitment wave. In 2025, Ukraine’s international intelligence service claimed that between 140,000 and 180,000 prisoners had enlisted thus far.
As Russia’s jail demographics proceed to shift, the exact variety of girls at present within the system is unclear. The penitentiary service final printed detailed statistics in early 2022. At the moment, girls made up 8.9 per cent of the jail inhabitants, which stood at 465,896 individuals.
In response to consultants, this share has very doubtless grown. There are ‘increasingly more feminine prisoners usually, and political prisoners specifically,’ says Natalia Arno, the president of the Free Russia Basis, a pro-democracy group headquartered in Washington, DC.
Like the remainder of the Russian military, the overwhelming majority of jail recruits are males. Though there have been intermittent experiences about recruitment from girls’s prisons, this seems to be marginal at most. ‘If there have been a lot of girls being recruited from the prisons, the phrase would get out as a result of it’s so uncommon,’ Mathers factors out. ‘There isn’t a story which might assist recruiting giant numbers of ladies from wherever,’ she provides. ‘The best way they body the recruitment of males – “be a person, be part of the navy” – runs counter to any sense that they might desire a vital variety of girls to affix.’
Along with this outflow of males to the entrance, the variety of convictions handed all the way down to girls has risen steadily for the previous 5 years. In 2025, these accounted for one-fifth (87,000) of all convictions – a file excessive for contemporary Russia, in accordance with information from the judicial division on the Russian supreme courtroom printed by the unbiased media outlet Verstka. Eurozine’s accomplice journal New Jap Europe couldn’t double-check these numbers; in late April, the judicial division eliminated all conviction statistics from its web site.
In response to Zeveleva, this speaks to 2 simultaneous developments in wartime Russia: the feminization of political persecution and of poverty. ‘Although in Russia there are various political prisoners, nonetheless prisons are mainly warehouses for the poor, and jail is a strategy to management poverty,’ she explains. ‘There are a variety of convictions that appear to be they’re poverty associated,’ she continues, itemizing theft and petty crime as examples. ‘These kind of crimes typically go up when the financial scenario turns into more difficult.’
Minimize off
Whereas official statistics on the Russian jail system are both unreliable, incomplete, or restricted, this isn’t the one purpose so little is understood in regards to the girls on the within. ‘A few of that truly has to do with how minimize off we’re from feminine prisoners,’ Zeveleva explains.
Russia’s girls’s prisons have a popularity for being extra strictly managed than these for males, that are generally successfully run by jail gangs or prison networks. With the jail administration totally in cost, girls stay beneath intense surveillance and unbending laws. ‘A whole lot of former prisoners say that a median girls’s jail in Russia is as strict because the strictest regimes of the boys’s prisons,’ Zeveleva says.
Human rights activists, in the meantime, have discovered it more and more tough to entry and monitor Russian prisons, not least as a result of the nation’s principal prisoners’ rights watchdog, the Public Monitoring Fee (recognized by the acronym ONK, in Russian), has been filled with regime loyalists and may now not be thought-about unbiased. Different rights teams have fallen sufferer to wartime repressions, forcing them to close down or relocate overseas.
Two of the political prisoner moms, for instance, Kseniya Garina from Irkutsk Krai and Elvira Saifullina from Norilsk, have been discovered responsible of ‘extremism’ for his or her alleged involvement within the ‘Anti Pytki’ undertaking – an initiative that reported on circumstances of torture within the Russian jail system.
Activists typically present important assist for prisoners, particularly those that can not depend on household or associates. ‘Help mechanisms for males are higher,’ Arno says. ‘Ladies don’t hand over on their males, they don’t hand over on their husbands, sons, and brothers. However as quickly as a girl is behind bars, her accomplice, husband, or boyfriend doesn’t care about her any longer.’
Amnesty Worldwide has documented a spread of techniques Russian authorities use to arbitrarily deprive political prisoners of contact with their family members and even their attorneys, in breach of worldwide human rights requirements. ‘It is a deliberate technique of the Russian authorities to isolate and silence dissenters and inflict additional struggling on them and their households. All types of contact – visits, telephone calls, letters – are being curtailed,’ stated Natalia Prilutskaya, Amnesty Worldwide’s Russia researcher, in a 2024 press launch.
Below Russian regulation, prisoners’ visiting rights might be severely restricted relying on the place and beneath which circumstances they serve their time period. Their correspondence and telephone calls are additionally tightly managed. And people dealing with disciplinary sanctions are sometimes subjected to solitary confinement in a punishment isolation cell (shtrafnoy izolyator, in Russian, or SHIZO for brief). Placement in a SHIZO, which may last as long as 15 days (and doesn’t preclude back-to-back stints), means being prohibited from making telephone calls, having visits, and receiving parcels. ‘This has change into a punishment follow for political prisoners, specifically, they usually’re despatched to SHIZO very often,’ Zeveleva says.
SHIZO circumstances are additionally worse for feminine prisoners; in contrast to males, they’re pressured to put on minimal clothes within the punishment cell. ‘They’re stripped all the way down to the naked minimal of garments, and the SHIZO is infamous for being very, very chilly, particularly within the winter. So that is only a very torturous bodily expertise for ladies,’ Zeveleva explains. Furthermore, even when visits are permitted, not all girls’s prisons are set as much as accommodate moms with younger kids. ‘For girls with younger kids or girls who’re pregnant after which give beginning whereas within the jail system, this isolation from their kids is a extremely huge subject,’ Zeveleva says.
In response to judicial division statistics cited by Verstka, Russian courts convicted 467 pregnant girls and 1,707 moms of kids beneath the age of three within the first half of 2025. One political prisoner, Olga Petrova, even gave beginning in jail in 2025 whereas serving a seven-year sentence for allegedly financing terrorism.
Solidarity is the very best weapon
Sergei Davidis acknowledges that the Kremlin is unlikely to launch the ladies featured within the ‘Free Political Prisoner Moms’ marketing campaign or some other political prisoners for that matter. ‘Each pardons and amnesties occur very not often in Russia beneath Putin,’ he says. Nonetheless, in his view, interesting to official rhetoric about ‘household values’ together with the truth that there are solely 20 moms on the checklist might supply some hope.
‘We can not make sure that this demand will probably be heard, however it has the best chance to be heard,’ Davidis says. ‘Even when we fail in our try to launch them, we are going to present them with a excessive degree of assist,’ he provides.
In response to Arno, a participant within the PACE Platform for Dialogue with Russian Democratic Forces, advocating on behalf of much less well-known political prisoners is harder. A number of distinguished figures have been freed in August 2024 as a part of the biggest prisoner trade between Russia and western nations because the Chilly Battle. Negotiated beneath the Biden administration, the swap secured the discharge of 16 high-profile prisoners, together with the Wall Avenue Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, Free Russia Basis Vice President Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Memorial co-founder Oleg Orlov.
Putin signed presidential pardons for 13 of the launched, together with 4 girls: the Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva (a mom of two), former Navalny activists Lilia Chanysheva and Ksenia Fadeyeva, and the anti-war artist Sasha Skochilenko. ‘It was a historic swap,’ Arno recollects. ‘For the primary time in 38 years, it wasn’t solely US residents who have been launched but additionally Russian dissidents. Proper now, there isn’t any political will for that.’
After coming into workplace in January 2025, US President Donald Trump appeared intent on negotiating an finish to Russia’s battle in opposition to Ukraine. Greater than a yr on, peace talks have successfully stalled. In the meantime, the Trump administration has succeeded in putting offers with Alyksandr Lukashenka of Belarus, securing the discharge of a whole lot of political prisoners in trade for relieving some sanctions.
‘It’s a special scenario with Putin as a result of he doesn’t want something. Lukashenka wants issues, Putin doesn’t. He doesn’t care,’ Arno explains. On the similar time, she warns in opposition to taking the same strategy in negotiations with the Kremlin. ‘Proceed strain; don’t raise sanctions for motivational causes. All sanctions ought to be tied to elementary adjustments,’ Arno advises. ‘And if they don’t seem to be now, that doesn’t imply that the scenario gained’t change tomorrow.’
Arno is adamant that each peace talks and coverage in direction of Russia ‘ought to be about individuals’. She expressed fears alongside Davidis {that a} potential ceasefire settlement would fail to incorporate the discharge of Russian political prisoners. Whereas Ukrainian prisoners of battle and civilian hostages have officers in Kyiv to advocate for them, Russians behind bars should depend on activists and the worldwide group, Davidis says.
Requested what recommendation she would give to Western leaders, Arno was fast to reply. ‘First, assist Ukraine; it’s essential that Putin fails there. Second, don’t make the regime stronger,’ she says, including that conserving political prisoners on the agenda ought to be a key part of this technique.
‘The associated fee for such repression ought to be very excessive for the regime,’ Arno says. ‘Solidarity is the very best weapon in opposition to dictators.’
