Russian court sentences opposition leader Shlosberg to 11 years for war criticism

In a courtroom in Pskov, Russia, a man who called a war a catastrophe was sentenced to more than eleven years in a penal colony for saying so. Lev Shlosberg, a senior figure in Yabloko — the only registered party openly opposing the invasion of Ukraine — was convicted of discrediting the armed forces, while the party itself was simultaneously banned from parliamentary elections. The case is not merely one man's fate: it is a state's deliberate architecture of silence, in which law, judiciary, and legislature are aligned to ensure that dissent has no voice, no institution, and no future.