LONDON, Feb 20 (Reuters) – Dozens of Russians are being subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment because of their political views, according to lawyers and human rights groups – a trend they say has gathered pace since the start of the war in Ukraine.
The practice carries echoes of a method of control used widely in the Soviet Union and known as “punitive psychiatry”, even if the current scale falls far short of that seen from the late 1960s until the early 1980s.
For this story, Reuters analysed data from an international expert and two Russian human rights groups, interviewed three lawyers and reviewed case materials of two female activists sent by court order to undergo psychiatric assessments at a Siberian hospital.
The women, whose accounts are reported here in detail for the first time, were released after a few weeks but described the experience as a scarring ordeal.