‘It’s a reference to the USSR — to its return’: rities' new strategy for preventing protests

On May 13, the St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga published an in-depth investigation into a new method the city's police have devised for suppressing protests: shortly before planned protest rallies, security officials use bomb threat charges to detain large groups of activists and hold them in detention facilities for 48 hours, causing them to miss the protests. On March 5, just one day before a nationwide protest rally against the war, St. Petersburg police used this method to arrest dozens of people; the same technique was used to curtail protests on Victory Day. Read Meduza's summary of the investigation in English below. Original Article: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/05/16/telephone-terrorism