Thousands of exiled Russian dissidents and opposition figures held a multi-city mobilization against Putin's regime in several European capitals Nov. 17. The largest march was in Berlin, where speakers included Yulia Navalnaya, widow of martyred leader Alexei Navalny; Oleg Orlov, former director of the "liquidated" human rights organization Memorial; and Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, recently freed from detention in a prisoner swap with the West. Participants carried the blue-and-white flag of the Russian opposition, as well as Ukrainian flags, while chanting "No to war" and "Putin is a killer" in Russian. (BBC News, RFE/RL)

President Joe Biden is reported to have authorized Ukraine to use US-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) for strikes deep inside Russia. In interviews with both the UK's Times Radio and the BBC news program The World At One on Nov. 18, former Putin advisor and semi-official mouthpiece Sergei Markov responded to the move by warning of an imminent Russian nuclear strike—not just on Ukraine but on the United States and Britain. "In the worst scenario, the nuclear war happens before Christmas of this year," he told the BBC. "Probably you will not be able to say 'Merry Christmas' because you will stay in the hole trying to hide away [your] family from the nuclear catastrophe. It can develop very, very quickly."

South Korea and the EU condemned North Korea's contribution of military arms and personnel to Russia as illegal under international law in a joint statement on Nov. 5. The statement follows recent reports that Russia has deployed North Korean troops in its war against Ukraine. According to a White House press briefing, over 3,000 North Korean soldiers were moved to Vladivostok in October, and underwent training at sites in eastern Russia. This was the first dispatchment of an estimated 12,000 North Korean troops said to be readied for deployment to fight Ukraine. South Korea and the EU maintain that the deployment violates multiple UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions as well as Russian obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded Nov. 5 that Russian authorities have committed torture in Ukraine, constituting a crime against humanity. The commission's report confirmed that torture practices were widespread in all Ukrainian provinces under Russian control, and in Russia's detention facilities. The commission collected testimonies from civilians who had been detained in Russian-occupied Ukraine and prisoners of war who had been held in Russia. These testimonies described a "brutal admission procedure" to promote a climate of fear in the detention facilities. The report documented the use of sexual violence during detention, as well as the practice of torture during interrogation, including severe beatings, electric shocks, and burns to body parts.

Italy's right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, issued a decree Oct. 21 aimed at bypassing judicial obstacles to a controversial deal with Albania to hold and process the claims of asylum-seekers intercepted at sea by Italian forces. The move comes three days after a special immigration court in Rome ruled that the first group of 12 migrants sent to the repurposed military camp at Gjader, Albania, must be returned to Italy. The court found that the migrants' countries of origin—Egypt and Bangladesh—are "unsafe," making their offshore detention illegal. Meloni's decree asserts the executive alone has the power to make such determinations, setting the stage for a showdown between her government and the judiciary. (Politico, DW, BBC News, EuroNews, Jurist, CBC)

Over 40 human rights groups have warned Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk against implementing his plan to temporarily suspend the right to claim asylum. Among the groups are Amnesty International, several asylum law organizations, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. In an open letter on Oct. 14, the organizations stressed that the fundamental right to asylum is binding on Poland under international law, as the country has ratified the Geneva Convention, and under EU law as provided by Article 18 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Additionally, Article 56 of the Polish Constitution enshrines the right to asylum. Acknowledging that "[w]e live in difficult times of war and conflicts breaking out all over the world," the statement nonetheless asserted that fundamental rights, as the core values of Europe, are not subject to discussion or restriction.

The Estonian parliament, the Riigikogu, on Oct. 16 officially recognized the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars by the Soviet Union in 1944 as an act of genocide. The statement passed in the 101-seat body with 83 votes in favor and eight abstentions. The decision comes at a time of renewed focus on Russia's ongoing policies in Crimea, which the Riigikogu linked to Soviet-era atrocities. The statement

The bellicose and authoritarian Russian state's propaganda exploitation of the anarcho-pacifist novelist Leo Tolstoy is an obvious and perverse irony. But a less obvious irony also presents itself. Like all fascist regimes, that of Vladimir Putin is stigmatizing and even criminalizing homosexuality and other sexual "deviance." Following alarming reports of "concentration camps" for gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya, Moscow began to impose an anti-gay agenda nationwide. A 2020 constitutional reform officially enshrined "traditional marriage," while a "gay propaganda law" imposes penalties on any outward expression of gay identity, resulting in police raids on Moscow gay bars. The "LGBT movement" has been designated a "terrorist organization"; media depictions of same-sex love are banned as "deviant content." Yet the venerable littérateur now glorified as a symbol of Russian nationalism may have himself been gay. In Episode 247 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Javier Sethness Castro, author of Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (Routledge 2023).