“I Don’t Want to Get Used to the War” (opens in new tab)

In Petersburg, Alexander Arseniev, who spray-painted the message "I don't want to get used to the war" on two fences last year, is sentenced to 20 months' time served in pretrial detention and released in the courtroom, underscoring human rights activist and former political prisoner Ivan Astashin's argument, recently made in the Moscow Times, that Russia's wartime repressive apparatus is marked not by its massiveness but by its unpredictability: "[C]ontemporary Russian repression does not ne...