A Pskov court sentenced Lev Shlosberg, deputy chairman of Yabloko, to eleven years and one month on 17 August over his anti-war speech and posts. The Associated Press reported the term.
The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the election-observation arm of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said on 6 August that Russia had not invited a mission and gave no substantive answer to its request for a needs assessment. That leaves a third consecutive national vote unobserved.
Nobody outside Russia's own institutions will produce an account of how the 18 to 20 September vote was run. Gerasimov claimed Donetsk captures in July that ISW said it could not corroborate , and the same verification gap now covers the ballot box. A vote nobody observes and a front nobody can verify hand the reader the same problem twice.
