Lawyers and human rights groups reported that dozens of Russians were being subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment because of their political views.

According to the lawyers and human rights groups, this has turned into a trend that has gathered pace since the start of the war in Ukraine.

The practice carried 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.

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 were reported here in detail for the first time, were released after a few weeks but described the experience as a scarring ordeal.

Yekaterina Fatyanova, 37, was interned on April 28 last year at the KKPND, a psychiatric hospital in her home city of Krasnoyarsk, after being accused of discrediting the Russian armed forces by publishing an article in a small opposition newspaper she ran in her spare time.

She was not the author of the piece, which argued the war in Ukraine was driven by imperialist motives.

While in hospital, she was subjected to painful, degrading and unnecessary procedures, including a gynaecological examination, she wrote in letters of complaint to authorities, reviewed by Reuters.

Ms Fatyanova was discharged from the hospital on May 27 after doctors determined, in a document seen by Reuters, that she had no mental disorders or diseases.

“I believe that the real purpose of placing me there was moral suppression and isolation from society, possibly as a punishment for my active civic position,” she said.

Robert van Voren, a Dutch professor and human rights campaigner, has spent decades studying what he describes as the political abuse of psychiatry in Russia.

He said he had documented around 23 such cases a year since 2022, when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, up from an annual average of around five between 2015 and 2021.

Russia’s justice ministry, human rights commissioner and the Kremlin did not reply to requests for comment about the alleged use of psychiatry for political purposes.

The Kremlin said it does not discuss individual cases that pass through the criminal justice system, as these are a matter for the courts.

Hospital KKPND No.1 did not respond to a request for comment.

In the Soviet era, thousands of dissenters were hospitalised for political reasons, based on the premise that only someone mentally ill would oppose the Communist state.

Among the best-known cases were those of dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and Nobel prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky.

(Reuters/NAN)