In an article titled "High Treason, Stalin-Style." the Center for European Policy Analysis writes: "If there were any doubt at all that the Putin regime is now fighting the most desperate war in its history, it has now been removed."
The authors, Russian investigative journalists Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov (who are also senior fellows at CEPA), observe that "in Russia, high treason has never been a legal concept; it is an ideological and highly emotional notion tracing its roots to the Soviet times."
And President Putin has now ushered in "a deep shift in the Kremlin’s view of the world," argue Borogan and Soldatov. "Loyalty to the state and loyalty to the regime are being merged," they write. This was made possible by a change in law, and then a change in Putin's behavior.
In 2012, after the 2011-12 Moscow protests of questionable election results, which "rattled the Kremlin," Putin had the Russian parliament extend the definition of high treason to include "granting financial, technical, consulting or other help" to those supposedly threatening Russia's security, including its "constitutional system, sovereignty, territorial and state integrity."
Note CEPA's authors: "From then on, anyone — a journalist, or expert, sharing information with foreign organizations, including other journalists, could be charged with treason. But even then, Putin stopped short of using treason charges against his political enemies – activists and politicians."
What changed Putin's approach to prosecutions for treason? The war in Ukraine, of course, which has been responsible for virtually all of Russia's monumental changes — for the worse. With new "high treason" prosecutions of domestic dissidents, write Borogan and Soldatov, "the Putin regime has taken a significant step in returning to the Soviet definition of loyalty as allegiance not to the state itself but to those who run it."
The authors highlight the case of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a long-time Putin critic and "anti-Kremlin lobbyist." The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has poisoned him twice, in 2015 and again in 2017, but the FSB botched the assassination attempts. Meanwhile, Kara-Murza persisted in attacking Putin and his regime — spreading "false information," said the state — for which he was jailed.
Last month, however, the state leveled the fresh charge of high treason against him. Because he had spoken against the war in Ukraine at public events in Finland, Portugal and the United States, and because two of these nations are NATO members, "Kara-Murza is deemed to have cooperated with NATO." The authors further note that "that came as a shock even for trained Russia watchers: Putin was upping the stakes once again against his political opponents."
Other high treason cases are being brought, including one against a 21-year-old student of architecture and civil engineering at Astrakhan State University. The FSB claimed he had attempted to pass secret information to foreign security agencies, which, write the authors, "at first sight looks ridiculous; students do not habitually have access to classified secret material in Russia."
Conclude Borogan and Soldatov: "Russia is once again a state claiming to represent the people, but terrified of their anger." Perhaps the public bomb is ticking.