Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine marked its second anniversary on 24 February. What was intended as a quick offensive has become a drawn-out war in which two armies battle inch by inch for territory. It’s brought disastrous consequences for civilians, with over 10,000 killed, 10 per cent of Ukraine’s housing destroyed or damaged and widespread human rights violations committed. As in Gaza, journalists and media workers are paying a heavy price too: at least 69 have been killed so far.

A key difference on either side of the frontline is the role civil society can play. While Ukrainian civil society is able to offer an immense and essential voluntary effort, Russian activists have faced intense constraints. The recent suspicious death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony is part of a great wave of repression.

Ukraine’s civil society steps up

In Ukraine over the last two years, civil society has worked to evacuate civilians from occupied areas, rehabilitate wounded people, restore damaged buildings and raise funds domestically and internationally to enable a sustained response. New initiatives formed and existing civil society organisations (CSOs) quickly refocused when the full-scale war began.

Civil society is also documenting and collecting evidence of Russia’s many crimes, with a view to one day holding Vladimir Putin and his circle to international justice. The Tribunal for Putin (T4P), an initiative set up by three Ukrainian CSOs, among them Nobel Peace Prize winner the Center for Civil Liberties, gathers and logs details of human rights crimes, developing an evidence base that could be used by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other bodies to pursue justice. It has recorded tens of thousands of incidents that could constitute war crimes. Last August it presented evidence to the ICC of acts of genocide by Russian forces in the city of Mariupol. The ICC opened a field office in Kyiv in September 2023.

The Center for Civil Liberties is also working with the Euromaidan SOS initiative to provide a map of enforced disappearances, including of activists and journalists, along with a guide for relatives of hostages.

In the last year, Ukrainian civil society has increasingly focused on challenging corruption, reflecting increased public interest in how state agencies are spending money, including international aid, amid concern that support could dry up if donors think funds aren’t used well. Some organisations, such as the Money for the AFU group, are demanding that money spent on municipal projects be put towards the war effort instead, a sentiment anti-corruption protests also voice.

Others are trying to ensure reconstruction is corruption-free, including by using online tools to track public spending. Among other initiatives, the Better Regulation Delivery Office, an independent civil society think tank, is working to investigate and prevent corruption in the reconstruction and restoration of damaged buildings.

At the same time, the extended conflict has taken an inevitable toll on people’s ability to respond. Volunteering dropped from incredibly high levels of 80 per cent of people in the early months of the war to half that in the second year of the invasion. Sustained international support is needed to ensure the long-term sustainability of Ukraine’s vital civil society response.

Dissent crushed in Russia

Meanwhile Russia continues to pay a backhanded compliment to the importance of civil society by suppressing it through every possible means. The most shocking recent event is the death of Navalny, with state authorities currently refusing to release his body for burial. Navalny, who presented a credible challenge to Putin’s continuing power and exposed elite corruption, survived an assassination attempt in 2020 before being jailed on his return to Russia. He’s the latest in a long list of people who’ve come to a sudden end after falling out with Putin. Navalny’s death sends a further chilling message to Russian activists.

State-directed murder is the most extreme form of repression, but Putin has many more tricks up his sleeve. One is criminalisation of protests, seen when people showed up at improvised vigils to mourn Navalny, commemorate his activism and share their anger. People came out to lay flowers at informal memorials, knowing what would happen. Police arrested hundreds, among them solo protesters carrying signs with factual statements that replicated the state media headline: ‘Alexei Navalny died today’. The flowers were soon cleared away.

Human rights organisation OVD-Info reports that since the start of the full-scale invasion, the authorities have detained 19,855 people at anti-war protests, brought 894 criminal cases against anti-war activists and introduced 51 new repressive laws. A similar story of repression has unfolded in Russia’s staunchest ally Belarus.

Among many other Russians jailed for symbolic acts of protest, Crimean artist Bohdan Zizu was handed a 15-year sentence last June for spray-painting a building in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. In November, artist Alexandra Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years for placing information about the war on supermarket price tags. In April, opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza received a 25-year sentence. Now people helping Ukrainian refugees living in Russia are being criminalised.

The state is targeting organisations too. In January 2023, the authorities declared Meduza, one of Russia’s few remaining independent media outlets, an ‘undesirable organisation’, in effect banning it from operating in Russia and criminalising anyone who shares its content. In June it was independent TV channel Dozhd’s turn. The state slapped the same label on others as the year went on. In a sign of how little space civil society has, even conservation-focused organisations – the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Wild Salmon Center – are among those declared ‘undesirable’.

In January 2023, a court ordered the shutdown of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia’s oldest human rights organisation, on a registration technicality. In August, courts ordered the closure of another human rights organisation, the Sakharov Center. Through similar means the authorities have forced several other CSOs out of existence or into exile.

The state has designated numerous people and organisations as ‘foreign agents’, a classification intended to stigmatise them as associated with espionage. In November, it added the Moscow Times to the list. Though new laws the government is further intensifying its repression. This month Putin approved a law that allows the government to confiscate money and other assets from people who criticise the war.

The state is criminalising journalists as well. In March, it detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on spying charges, sending a signal that international journalists aren’t safe. The authorities are also holding Russian-US journalist Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe, detained while paying a family visit to Russia. Putin is likely planning to use them as leverage for a prisoner swap. State authorities have put other journalists based outside Russia on wanted lists or charged them in absentia.

Meanwhile, Putin has pardoned real criminals for joining the fight. They include one of the people jailed for organising the 2006 assassination of pioneering investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Crackdown on LGBTQI+ rights

The Russian government has also doubled down on its attacks on LGBTQI+ people. The tightening of the state’s policing of gender and sexuality might seem odd in a time of fixation on war. But Putin’s repression of LGBTQI+ people mobilises the narrow nationalist and identitarian sentiments he needs to inflame so he can pretend his war is a defensive reaction to western aggression. The government characterises demands for LGBTQI+ rights, along with those for gender equality, as western imports.

In December the government expanded its 10-year-old law against the sharing of what it calls ‘gay propaganda’, making it illegal to praise LGBTQI+ relationships, publicly express diverse sexual orientations or suggest they’re normal.

In late November, following a request from the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court outlawed what it called ‘the international LGBT movement’, characterising it as a danger to the moral fabric. Since there’s no entity identifiable as ‘the international LGBT movement’, the ruling was broadly seen as a blanket ban on all LGBTQI+ activism and enabled further violence against LGBTQI+ people. Within days, security forces raided gay clubs and bars across Moscow.

Through another law, the government prohibited surrogacy arrangements between Russian men and foreigners, making fatherhood inaccessible to gay men. In July, it banned almost all medical help for trans people, including gender-affirming healthcare, along with gender changes on official documents. People who’ve gone through gender-affirmation processes were prohibited from adopting children and their marriages declared void. Many trans people feel they’ve have no choice but leave Russia. The government is also targeting LGBTQI+ organisations with its ‘foreign agents’ law.

It’s hard to hope for any let-up in the crackdown on dissent for at least as long as the war lasts. A non-competitive election will approve another term for Vladimir Putin in March. No credible candidates are allowed to oppose him, and recently an anti-war politician who’d unexpectedly emerged to provide a focus for dissent was banned from standing. Last year the government amended laws to further restrict media coverage of the election, making it very hard to report on electoral fraud.

Weak or strong?

For a time last year Putin seemed weakened when his former ally Yevgeny Prigozhin rebelled over the progress of the war and tried to assert his power by marching his Wagner Group mercenaries on Moscow. The two sides agreed a deal to end the dispute, and two months later, Prigozhin died in a suspicious plane crash.

Putin has reasserted his authority. Wagner forces have been brought under state control, and its mercenaries continue to play a key role in several military-controlled Central and West African countries, rebranded as the African Corps and channelling resources to the Kremlin.

Currently Russia has the upper hand in the war, aided by its greater firepower. Ukraine’s 2023 counter-offensive failed to produce a breakthrough, and in December, Russia launched a renewed large-scale assault, bringing a fresh wave of civilian deaths. Recently Russia captured the city of Avdiivka, although it was rumoured to have sustained heavy losses.

Russia is largely surviving attempts by western states to isolate it financially, with repressive regimes such as China, India and Turkey picking up the slack in demand for its fossil fuels. It’s turned itself into a Soviet-style war economy, with state spending strongly focused on the military effort, although that can’t be sustainable in the long term. Some of the world’s most authoritarian governments – Iran and North Korea – are also happy to supply weapons.

The conflict may be turning in Russia’s favour because Ukrainian forces are running out of ammunition. Support for Ukraine’s effort has come under greater strain due to political shifts in Europe and the breaking of political consensus in the USA, with Trump-affiliated Republicans working to block further military support. Putin is ideologically buttressed by Trump supporters and European far-right nationalists who’ve started to echo his imperial rhetoric, seeking the restoration of centuries-vanished empires by laying their own claims to various parts of Ukraine.

Putin may be riding high, but such is the level of state control it’s hard to get an accurate picture of how popular he is, and the election will offer no evidence. Given the extent of repression, protest levels may not tell the full story either – but some have still broken out, including those in response to Navalny’s death.

A vital current of dissent has formed around unhappiness with war losses. Last September, an independent poll suggested that support for the war was at a record low, with only 38 per cent of respondents definitely supporting the military’s actions. Morale among Russian troops is reportedly poor and deserters have called on others to quit. Families of men serving in the military have staged protests demanding the fighting ends. In February, police detained 20 journalists for reporting on one such protest at Moscow’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Protesters have offered other recent moments of opposition. In November, people held a demonstration in Siberia against a local initiative to further restrict protests. In January, in Baymak in southern Russia, hundreds protested at the jailing of an activist. There’s also domestic unhappiness at high inflation.

Moments don’t make a movement, but they can offer inspiration that turns into one, and that often happens unexpectedly. Putin’s story is far from over. As with other tyrants before him, he’ll likely look invincible until just before he falls.