What the data says — and the cases that prove it
Each finding is one defensible claim about how political repression works — a new law, a shifting charge, a crackdown's target, a pattern that crosses borders. The numbers are computed live from our case database, so a published claim can never drift from the evidence. And under every claim: the people. Every case links to its profile and its primary source.
Not a dashboard. Each finding makes a single claim precise enough for a journalist to quote or a lawyer to cite — and narrow enough to be checked.
Every figure is recomputed from the database on the page itself. Nothing is typed in by hand, so the published number and the underlying cases cannot disagree.
Every case behind a claim is listed — name, charge, sentence, source link, and where recorded, a verbatim quote of what the prosecution rested on.
Each finding also ships its own “How to read this honestly” section — coverage limits, unknown-basis rates, and the ways the number could overstate — because a claim you can't stress-test is a claim you can't use.
The price of a donation
Through 2022, almost no one in our database was jailed over money. Then, in one legal system after another, prosecutors converged on the same discovery — a bank transfer is the easiest crime in the world to prove. Belarus prices a donation at a median five years. Russia prices it at twelve, and calls it treason.
The privacy penalty
Cases built on a public act — a post, a protest — end in a median five-year sentence. Cases built on what the state extracted from private space — intercepted chats, informant testimony, the contents of a phone — run seven, eight, ten. The deeper the reach, the longer the sentence.
What the torture is for
Russia and Belarus both torture political detainees — but not in the same place, and not for the same reason. In Belarus the documented violence sits at the point of capture: the protest, the border. In Russia it happens after the door closes, and it clusters in exactly the cases where the file must be produced out of the suspect himself — a phone PIN, a signed confession, an agreement to inform.
A law against posting
In March 2022 Russia created two crimes that did not exist before the invasion. Almost everyone documented under them was prosecuted for online speech.
The treason conveyor
Treason was Russia's rarest political charge — two documented arrests in 2019. Since the invasion it has become an assembly line: dozens of ordinary people a year, drawing the longest sentences in our database for donations, messages and photographs.
The extremism machine
Belarus rewrote how it jails dissenters without writing new laws. In 2020 almost no one was charged as an “extremist.” By 2025, three in four documented arrests were — a wholesale shift from public-order charges to national-security law.
Jailed for words, not the street
Women are a small share of Belarus’s documented political prisoners — but those who are jailed are overwhelmingly prosecuted for journalism and online speech, and almost never for street protest.
A prison population built in two protests
Before 2024, Georgia had almost no documented political prisoners. Nearly everyone in our database was arrested since — and two-thirds of them in just two months, each following a protest the government moved to crush.
Two waves, two generations
Georgia's December 2024 crackdown filled the jails with twenty-somethings from the barricades. The October 2025 wave came for their parents' generation — party leaders, teachers, a 71-year-old opera star. Same state, same crackdown, a different target.
Every finding page carries a copy-ready citation with its as-of date, and every case in its receipts links to the primary source. Cite the finding, or go one level deeper and cite the cases themselves.
Political Prisoner Watch, “[finding title]” (as of [date]). politicalprisonerwatch.org/findings
These findings are built on the documentation of Viasna, Memorial, OVD-Info and regional monitors — structured so their casework can carry an argument. Working on a story, a filing, or a report and need a cut of the data we haven't published?
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