After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, began posting far more short videos online showing the detention of people facing political prosecution in Russia. The videos are often staged to intimidate government opponents and show off the security service’s effectiveness and power, according to a study by Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. The researchers analyzed 70 criminal cases in which those facing prosecution appeared in such videos.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, mentions of the FSB on the Telegram channels of the Russian state-run propaganda outlets TASS and RIA Novosti increased two- to threefold, Memorial found. The share of posts mentioning the FSB that included videos also nearly doubled over the course of the war.
Memorial said these videos cannot be treated as reliable accounts of events: Detention footage may contradict detainees’ testimony in criminal case files, and recorded confessions are often obtained through torture. The human rights advocates see them primarily as propaganda videos that reveal a great deal about the security service itself.
Memorial identified five recurring elements in the videos: surveillance footage, the arrest, the results of a search or inspection, the detainee’s transfer, and a confession.
Surveillance footage appears in only six of the 70 cases studied. Filming a suspect committing an alleged crime before detaining them is difficult, and the results aren’t dramatic enough, the human rights advocates said. Memorial emphasized that all six cases using such footage were based on FSB entrapment operations.
Security officers try to make the arrests look as violent and dramatic as possible. They throw suspects to the floor, twist their arms behind their backs, and grab them by the hair. Memorial estimates that roughly a quarter of these scenes are staged. Camera operators often arrive before the officers, and detainees behave unnaturally on camera: For example, they ignore approaching armed officers until the last moment or answer their questions without missing a beat right after hitting the ground.
Filming rarely wraps up in a single take, so officers prefer to film detentions in deserted places. In these videos, suspects can be seen walking past garages or across open fields. Confessions are recorded over and over until the officers are satisfied with the tone and wording.
Officers use both torture and deception to get detainees to take part in filming. Crimean artist Bohdan Ziza said FSB officers filmed at least five versions of his confession and apology. He said they beat him when they felt his remorse was not sincere enough, and that the script was revised each time and cleared again with their superiors.
FSB officers told Donetsk resident Georgy Tabuyev he would get just two years in prison if he unpacked a parcel containing explosives on camera. Tabuyev agreed but ended up receiving a 14-year prison sentence. The video was never published.
The human rights advocates believe these staged videos have become a tool of political repression in their own right. The FSB uses them to try to intimidate government opponents, create a sense that the security services control everything, and impose its own version of events.
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