If world fails to stop Putin, Ukrainian journalists and activists risk ending up in Russia’s Gulags

May 14, 2025 - 16:02
If world fails to stop Putin, Ukrainian journalists and activists risk ending up in Russia’s Gulags

Russia mobilization Ukraine war

The Kremlin may be planning a staged tribunal against Ukrainian leaders, modeled after the Nuremberg Trials, historian Alexander Korb told Ukrinform. 

In 2024, Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, said Russia planned execution lists, mobile crematoriums, and mass graves before launching its all-out war on Ukraine as Moscow prepared genocide against the Ukrainian people. Execution lists were to include Ukrainian language, literature, and history teachers, veterans of the Donbas war, journalists, scholars, writers, and clergy of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. 

However, a Russian tribunal could be aimed at branding Ukrainians as “Nazis” to retroactively justify Russia’s war.

According to Korb, such a show trial could lead to the imprisonment of Ukrainian politicians, journalists, and activists in Russia’s Gulags, much like the mass repressions already seen in occupied Crimea and Donbas.

Korb argues that Moscow’s repeated accusations of “Ukrainian Nazism” reveal a deeper strategy: to impose a “victor’s justice” by conquering all of Ukraine and silencing its prominent public figures. If Russia succeeds, mass arrests and repressions would likely follow in newly occupied territories.

He warns that Western leaders often underestimate the gravity of this threat, dismissing Kremlin rhetoric as routine disinformation.

“This isn’t just propaganda — it’s an existential threat. If Russia captures more Ukrainian land, these people will be in real danger,” he says. 

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