ON MARCH 5TH, a solitary picketer stood in a public plaza in Ivanovo, a small city northeast of Moscow, with a homemade sign stating: “*** *****”. The eight asterisks stood in for the Russian words for “no war,” alluding to a new wave of censorship that has rendered it a punishable offense to refer to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a war, and has forced the last vestiges of Russia’s independent media off the air. The previous day, a new law that bans “discrediting the Russian army,” carrying a maximum sentence of three years, had been rushed through the Duma—and when police arrested the protester, it was on those grounds. In the days since, the same law has been used to arrest other demonstrators holding up signs bearing only asterisks, or carrying blank pieces of paper. Since the beginning of the war three weeks ago, the Russian human rights media group OVD-Info reports that at least 14,906 people have been arrested for protesting the invasion.
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