Russian FSB given chilling new weapon of repression against Ukrainian political prisoners

Russia’s State Duma has restored the FSB’s right to have its own SIZO, or remand prisons, with this likely to broaden the Russian Security Service’s already frightening scope for torturing and ill-treating political prisoners, and for concealing information about them.  The new SIZO will be specifically for those accused of so-called ‘crimes against the security of the state’.  This includes the charges of ‘treason’; ‘spying’; ‘terrorism’ or ‘extremism’ regularly used against Ukrainians abducted from occupied terror and other victims of political persecution.

Vasily Piskarev, Duma deputy and one of the authors of the bill, announced that it had passed through its third and final reading on 8 July 2025, in a Telegram post that left no doubt as to the dangers the new SIZO pose.   Piskarev claimed that such FSB-controlled SIZO would “increase the effectiveness of investigations into criminal prosecutions in this category” and would ensure that they were prevented from “unauthorized communication with people accused of other types of crimes. It will furthermore prevent attempts by foreign intelligence services and terrorist organizations from establishing contact with their agents, from obstructing the investigation and from involving them in more subversive behaviour”.

Since 2014, the Russian FSB have, on countless occasions, seized Crimean Tatars and other Ukrainians and subjected them to savage torture, before officially admitting to holding them and getting them placed in detention.  Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been abducted by the Russian military, or by the FSB, and held incommunicado for months, or even years, without any charges being laid, or procedural status.  Up till now, official acknowledgement that a person was in Russian custody afforded them a degree of safety and also the chance of seeing an independent lawyer. 

After the new law comes into force from 1 January 2026, even that, minimal, amount of protection will be removed, with the person held by representatives of the same repressive body responsible for torturing them, and without any chance of communicating with other prisoners.  The FSB has also, on many occasions, used torture, threats or other forms of coercion to prevent a detainee from seeing an independent lawyer.  The greater the level of isolation, the easier this will be.

Nor is the co-author of the draft bill trying to conceal the degree to which this bill will be applied against Ukrainians.  It is, indeed, true, as Piskarev writes, that from 2015 through 2024, there was a huge increase in the number of criminal prosecutions over so-called ‘treason’; ‘spying’ ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ charges.  The massive spike in ‘treason’ cases is partly because Russia has made it impossible to live in occupied parts of Ukraine without taking Russian citizenship, and then charges such Ukrainians with ‘treason’ for sending donations to help Ukraine’s defenders, or charities helping to return children, forcibly taken to Russia by the aggressor state.  Similar reasons, or just any clear opposition to Russia’s war of aggression, have been used to arrest and pass long sentences against Russians as well.

‘Terrorism’ charges have been used since 2014 against Crimean Tatar or other Ukrainian political prisoners targeted  for their active part in the Crimean Solidarity human rights movement, their religious independence or for their opposition to Russia’s invasion and / or war of aggression.  The same politically motivated uses have been made of Russia’s flawed ‘extremism’ charges.

Since 2022, Russia has been using shocking rulings, either from the Russian Supreme Court or from the Southern District Military Court in Rostov, declaring units of Ukraine’s Armed Forces ‘terrorist’ as the pretext for sentencing Ukrainian prisoners of war to 20 years or more for defending their country. 

Most Ukrainian civilians, abducted from newly occupied parts of Ukraine back in 2022, have been held prisoner without any charge for months or years, and then finally sentenced to 10 or 15 years in so-called ‘trials’ held behind closed doors.

None of this is as Piskarev claims “an adequate response by the state to existing threats in the sphere of security”  It is an escalation of terror and repression by an invading power against Ukrainians living in their own country. The claim that FSB-controlled SIZO will “increase the effectiveness of the criminal investigation” is a cynical lie.  It will simply make it easier to maintain full control and pressure on detainees to ensure that they do not retract ‘confessions’ extracted through torture and do not inform independent lawyers and / or other prisoners of the methods of torture applied.

Mediazona first reported that his draft bill had been introduced in February 2025.  This is, it noted, a reinstatement of the old situation, with remand prisoners, or SIZO, having been under the FSB until 2006.  A law was introduced that year, prohibiting the FSB, who are involved in the criminal investigation, from having its own places of detention.  All SIZO were passed to under the jurisdiction of the justice ministry.  As Anna Karetnikova, a former analyst for the penal service, explained to the publication Important stories, the tasks of investigation and of holding a person in detention should not be in the same hands.  The FSB will now be able to continue beating or torturing out ‘confessions’, and it will become much harder to find out anything about such cases.

In fact, several SIZO, have, de facto, long been under FSB control.  These include the notorious Lefortovo SIZO in Moscow, where the FSB were able to hold Ukrainian political prisoner Valentyn Vyhivsky totally incommunicado for eight months and impose an information blockade on the charges against him, his closed ‘trial’ and during the very brief visits his mother and wife were finally able to make.  During one of these, he indicated to his mother that the FSB have “methods of persuasion” and raised his top to show her the scars from some of those ‘methods’.  Both Taganrog SIZO No. 2 and Simferopol SIZO No. 2, one of the prisons in occupied Crimea which Russia opened after its full-scale invasion are believed to be under FSB control.  There are still a very large number of Ukrainian civilians who are held somewhere in Russia, and a mounting number of Crimean Tatar or other Ukrainian political prisoners in occupied Crimea whose whereabouts are officially unknown, but who are, almost certainly held under FSB control and, almost certainly, subjected to horrific forms of torture.