Kirill Serebrennikov
Playwright and theater director Serebrennikov was placed on house arrest in 2017 for embezzlement and was convicted on June 26, 2020. The court handed him a three-year suspended sentence… More
Nizametdin Akhmetov
Poet and the first PEN Freedom to Write honoree, Akhmetov was arrested in 1966 on fabricated charges of theft for association with a movement advocating for the return of… More
Oleg Sentsov
After being arrested in Crimea, Ukrainian filmmaker was Sentsov given a 20-year sentence on terrorism charges in August 2015. Following 5 years in a Russian jail--including a hunger strike… More
Natalya Sharina
Sharina, head of the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow, was detained and put under house arrest in 2015 after authorities raided the library and found several Ukrainian nationalist works… More
Stanislav Dmitrievsky
In December 2012, a petition was filed against writer Dmitrievsky alleging his study on Chechnya was “extremist” in nature. In 2013, after expert evaluation of the study, the petition… More
Natalia Estemirova
In July 2009, journalist and human rights defender Estemirova was abducted by four gunmen on her way to work in Grozny, Chechnya. She was found dead in woodlands near… More
Alexey Kungurov
Siberian blogger Kungurov, who spent two years in prison for “justification of terrorism” from 2016-18, was arrested again in November 2019 for 15 days. He was accused of arousing… More
Grigory Pasko
Since 1997, Pasko has faced repeated charges of treason for his reporting. In 2016 while traveling to Barnaul train local journalists, Pasko was met with an aggressive pattern of… More
Roman Sushchenko
A Ukrainian journalist and artist who reported on Russian propaganda, Sushchenko was arrested in Moscow in September 2016 and sentenced to 12 years in prison for “spying.” He was… More
Russia Moves to Track Residents Under Cover of Coronavirus
For weeks, the Russian government has failed to undertake serious measures in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and tackling it efficiently. More
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PEN America On 
The Philippines will reimpose a stricter coronavirus lockdown in and around the capital for two weeks from Tuesday, President Rodrigo Duterte announced, as the country struggles to contain infections that have jumped to more than 100,000 cases. https://bit.ly/2Xq8apQ
Join PEN America & @usc_uschina on 8/5 for a discussion of PEN America's upcoming report on how Chinese censors have spread their influence across filmmaking in the U.S. — incl. recommendations for how Hollywood can chart a better path forward: https://bit.ly/30tYkFH.