- UN expert says Russia exports a state sponsored rule of fear, carrying repression beyond its borders to intimidate and punish critics abroad.
- Report documents nearly 400 cases, including assassinations, assaults and poisonings, showing systematic transnational repression over the past decade.
- Russia ranks third among ten countries responsible for over 70 percent of documented transnational repression incidents.
- Expert warns foreign states not to comply with extradition requests and urges adoption of a binding international convention against such repression.
A United Nations expert Monday accused Moscow of intimidating and punishing its Russian critics abroad, exporting its “rule of fear” outside the country’s borders.
Presenting a new report, the UN special rapporteur on the rights situation in Russia, Mariana Katzarova, said the country “has become one of the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression”.
Katzarova had described in previous reports how the rights situation inside Russia has dramatically worsened since Moscow expanded its war in Ukraine in 2022.
“Russia is exporting that rule of fear,” she told the UN Human Rights Council, which established her mandate in May 2023.
“Transnational repression is not a series of isolated incidents, but the continuation beyond Russia’s borders of the same structural, state-sponsored system of repression I have documented” in Russia, she said.
Russia did not immediately respond, with its seat remaining empty during the council session.
The independent expert, who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, said her report drew on nearly 400 documented cases, including assassinations, assaults and poisonings.
Katzarova said Russia ranked third in a group of 10 countries responsible for over 70 percent of such documented incidents over the past decade.
She pointed to a dramatic rise in other forms of transnational repression as between 650,000 and 900,000 people have left Russia since February 2022.
“As civil society in exile grows, so does the machinery to pursue it,” she said, pointing out that “sentences in absentia rose from four in 2022 to 157 in 2025”.
Methods have also changed significantly, she said, adding that “repression now travels through arrest warrants, databases, banks, digital systems and proxies“.
Katzarova said Russia used charges such as branding a target a “foreign agent” to seek extradition of exiled dissidents.
She urged other countries not to comply with such requests, warning the suspects risked “forcible return to torture and sometimes death”.
She called on countries to adopt a binding international convention against transnational repression.
