EXPLAINING THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN RUSSIA |
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Hello and welcome back to the Digest. |
Apologies for a pause in the newsletters, I got sick and then I was on vacation but I am now back. I also had an op-ed come out at the New York Times with a former OVD-Info colleague, check it out here. Today in the Digest we focus on an intrepid lawyer and rights defender in Kaliningrad, Maria Bontsler, who was recently arrested. |
In solidarity, Dan Storyev |
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Trigger warning:
This is a newsletter about Russian repressions. Sometimes it will be hard to read. |
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I am often asked — how does OVD-Info still work in Russia? The answer to this question is manifold, but one of the key elements of our ability to work on the ground is lawyers. These are lawyers who are still willing to stay in Russia despite the enormous risk to their well being. One of these affiliate lawyers was recently arrested for her work. This is her story. |
Maria Bontsler was born in July 1960. In 1995, shortly after the start of the First Chechen War, Maria created a Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers branch in the Kaliningrad Region, which she led into the 2000s. |
Maria had three small sons. “I will not let my children serve in the military,” she would later say in an interview.
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“She did everything so convincingly that a public council on the problems of violations of conscripts’ rights was created. Maria brought gross violations of conscription to the attention of the authorities, the military commissar was chewed out, and had to explain why the law was being violated,” human rights activist Sergei Krivenko says.
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In Russia, whose huge military still subsists on hundreds of thousands of conscripts each year, the young men brought in, often against their will, are subject to routine rights violations. All Russian men between the ages of 18-30 are required to do a year of mandatory military service even in peacetime. An entire system of brutal hazing from older soldiers called dedovshina has been present since Soviet times. Bontsler has been defending the rights of conscripts for over 20 years and investigating murders and suicides.
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“They threatened to drown a sailor conscript, locked him in the hold and the next morning the ship was leaving for sea. Around 5 am before the ship sailed, [Maria] arrived there with the prosecutor’s office and simply took the guy from the hold,” one of her colleagues gives a typical example of Bontsler’s work. |
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In 2010, Bontsler published “Pieta. A Mother’s Grief Over the Body of Her Murdered Son” — a collection of stories about soldiers who were killed by the military system, and their parents’ quest to find justice. She processed about three hundred stories that were collected and documented by human rights activists. |
“The military is not a mold, but a ‘death mask’ of society, the ghost of its extinction and complete degradation,” Maria wrote in the preface. |
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Maria Bontsler during her chairmanship of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers in Kaliningrad, 2011 / Screenshot: ‘The Real Army’ YouTube channel |
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“Maria took on all these terrible stories of the deaths of children,” says Sergei Krivenko. “She was engaged in legal cases, fought in court, fought with the authorities, got tired. She came home and began to write these stories. She got even more tired, but in a different way. And this helped her find the strength for daytime work.” |
“I would see Bontsler in the city — running somewhere, worried and sad, with such a shock of blond hair, probably in a hurry to protect someone, what else can she do... It was obvious that she was afraid of barely anyone, probably no one at all” says a Kaliningrad resident who worked as a journalist in the 2010s. |
In 2007 Maria began working in the courts as a lawyer. She took cases related to military service, and later — political ones, including under the “extremism” articles. These are a series of articles in the Criminal Code often used by the Kremlin to come after their political opponents who are not actually engaged in any form of extremism at all. |
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Wedding of Antonina Zimina and Konstantin Antonets / Source: Novaya Gazeta |
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One of her most famous clients is Antonina Zimina, convicted of treason. The case received wide publicity due to the Kafkaesque episode with an FSB officer at Antonina’s wedding: the state prosecutors alleged that, having photographed the agent among the guests, she and her husband revealed the identity of the special service officer to Latvian intelligence. |
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“I said very harsh, but fair things there [at the trial]. For those speeches, today I would probably be shot right away,” Maria said later. |
By the end of the 2010s, every activist in Kaliningrad knew Bontsler. Bontsler defended Mikhail Feldman, Oleg Savvin, and Dmitry Fonarev in court. The prosecution accused them of hanging a German flag on an FSB garage — “as a symbol of the need for the Kaliningrad region to leave the Russian Federation and join the European Union.” Maria’s clients were found guilty of hooliganism and sentenced to one year and two months in prison. They were released immediately after the ruling as they already served their sentence in pre-trial detention.
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“Some of these terms have already started to crop up in America. Words like “oligarchy” and “gulag” have been pressed into use as people try to make sense of President Trump’s administration. But there are lots more. We decided to write a handy phrase book — a sort of short glossary of authoritarianism — to help Americans name their new reality. Because when we can describe what is happening, it becomes a bit easier to fight it.”
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“She has always been our guardian angel,” says a former Kaliningrad activist, who Maria has repeatedly defended in administrative cases, and who asked to remain anonymous. |
An OVD-Info employee who also asked to remain anonymous says that Bontsler never called her clients “defendants” or “clients”: “I always heard from her that ‘they are our own, we will not abandon them, we will fight to the end.’ She perceived her clients’ problems as her own.”
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“My investigator... was a complete bastard, but Maria knew how to speak to her so delicately that after that [Veretnova-the investigator] made it much more difficult to terrorize me. Bontsler dealt with evil, but even in such conditions she managed to protect my interests,” says Kaliningrad writer and blogger Nikolai Gorelov who Maria defended several times. |
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Photo: Maria Bontsler’s social media |
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On March 1, 2018, Dima, Maria’s youngest son, died. He was 19 years old. After the tragedy, Maria turned to Krishnaism and writing heartfelt poems dedicated to Dima. |
Two days before the war began, on February 22, 2022, Bontsler was hospitalized with a heart attack.“Her phone was taken away from her so as not to cause another one, and she heard about the [war] only from other patients,” journalist Leonid Nikitinsky wrote in Novaya Gazeta. |
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Maria was discharged from the hospital on March 5. The next day, an anti-war rally was held on Victory Square in Kaliningrad. Security forces detained 58 people. Bontsler immediately took up the defense of some of them.
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In total, she worked about 35 hearings for people charged with “discrediting the military”, a new administrative offense passed just days before her hospital release. And then Maria herself came under fire for “discrediting the military” — because of two speeches in court, during which she uttered the word “war”. |
Speaking at a hearing of her case, Bontsler said: “Today we are approaching a terrible line beyond which there is complete dehumanization. And the only thing left for us to avoid crossing it is justice. Let’s preserve it together, as much as possible now.” The court fined her 60,000 rubles, roughly 780 USD. |
This was the only known case when a lawyer was brought to administrative responsibility for a speech in court. |
At that time, Maria was already an affiliate of OVD-Info, working with the seriously ill activist Igor Baryshnikov. Igor, accused of spreading fake news about the military online, would become one of the most famous Russian political prisoners. The court sentenced him to 7.5 years in prison. |
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Vladimir, Maria’s husband, died of cancer in the fall of 2023. Just like with her son, she scattered his ashes over the Baltic Sea. An OVD-Info employee adds: “I was struck by the situation when, in the hustle and bustle, I asked her about a trial, and she told me, casually: “I’ll send you the materials tomorrow, I have to say goodbye to my husband today, he died.” |
In one interview, Bontsler said that she was very disappointed by the reaction of “many people, including loved ones” to the war in Ukraine. |
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Igor Baryshnikov and Maria Bontsler in court / Photo: Natalia Kholmanova, SOTAvision |
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“She is a much greater humanist than I am. She believes much more in the nobility of people, I am a much greater cynic,” says Nikolai Gorelov. Despite his cynicism, Gorelov said he cried when he learned of Maria Bontsler’s arrest: “I still haven’t written anything about her arrest. I’m thinking about what to write. I’m still in shock about what’s happening.” |
Bontsler was arrested after a search of her home on May 28. The court sent her to pretrial detention until July 26, despite the fact that Maria has a severe form of chronic hypertension and was recently hospitalized for a hypertensive crisis. |
According to state investigators, in 2024 Bontsler passed information about Kaliningrad security officials to the security services of an “unfriendly” state, “whom she became aware of due to her advocacy.” Other details of the case are unclear. |
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Arrested Maria Bontsler in court, 29 May 2025 / Photo: SOTAvision |
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Many tried to talk Bontsler into leaving Russia. She refused to leave. “Who will defend us here? They keep telling me: ‘Maria Vladimirovna, what are we going to do? We know now that if they come on a raid and detain us, we have someone to call.’ [Soviet singer] Vladimir Vysotsky has these lines: ‘Don’t worry — I haven’t left. And don’t hope — I won’t leave!’ And I’m staying here,” she said in an interview in 2022. |
A former Kaliningrad journalist who wished to remain anonymous said: “She helped people all her life and now she has paid for it with her freedom. It is extremely sad that hundreds of people whose rights she defended today cannot or do not want to speak out in her defense, and local journalists, to whom she gave tons of stories for publication, are afraid to print anything about her case other than rewrites of the investigation’s press releases. This is very unfair, and all these people should be at least ashamed.”
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We still have roughly 300 affiliate lawyers in the country. With every passing day they’re less safe. You can support their and our work via donation links in this digest. |
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Sources cited in the reading list are not necessarily aligned or in a formal partnership with us. It is just what the editor finds interesting. |
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The Digest is created by OVD-Info, written by Dan Storyev, edited by Dr Lauren McCarthy |
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