Arrest, detain, repeat: the Russian war critics caught in jail ‘carousel’

Human Interest

Timofei Rudenko can’t seem to stay out of jail. Reuters exclusively reported that the 30-year-old was arrested and detained five times in the space of two months over the summer for a series of misdemeanours including swearing at passers-by and disobeying police officers, according to Russian court records. On each day he was released, after serving sentences of between 10 and 15 days at a petty crimes jail in Moscow, he was promptly picked up for a new minor offence and returned to custody, a review of the publicly available documents shows. 

Market Impact

Carousel arrests can buy investigators time to dig into a person’s past and online activity to potentially open more serious criminal cases, according to Russian rights group OVD-Info, whose data on detentions of anti-war protesters is widely cited in international media and provides a rare independent barometer of the scale of Russia’s crackdown.