Russia Policy Monitor No. 2710

YET ANOTHER RUSSIAN GENERAL ASSASSINATED
On December 22nd, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov was killed by a bomb planted under his car outside his residence in southern Moscow. Sarvarov, a veteran of Russia's military campaign in Syria, was the head of operational training for the Russian General Staff – a job that made him responsible for, among other things, the training of forces for the Kremlin's ongoing war on Ukraine. According to Russian officials, authorities are probing the killing for the possible involvement of Ukraine's intelligence services. (The Moscow Times, December 22, 2025)

RUSSIA'S ANTI-UKRAINIAN LAWFARE
As part of its ongoing pressure on Ukraine, the Kremlin isn't just deploying conventional military tactics. It's also harnessing increasingly draconian "counterterrorism frameworks" to target Ukrainian soldiers and civilians alike, a new study from the Free Russia Foundation details. "Since at least 2014 with the invasion and occupation of Crimea, Russian authorities have increasingly employed counterterrorism frameworks to justify arrests, coercive interrogations, incommunicado detention, and long-term imprisonment of Ukrainians in and from occupied territories," the study, entitled Russia's Escalating Use of Terrorism Charges Against Ukrainians, notes. "These prosecutions show a strategic shift of reclassifying individuals protected under international law as 'terrorists,' serving both political and punitive aims."

"Rather than isolated irregularities," the report makes clear, "this state-sanctioned practice forms part of a broader political agenda aimed at delegitimizing Ukraine's resistance and national identity, while also deterring civil society from exercising core international rights such as freedom of expression and association." In response, it counsels, the international community should ramp up pressure on the Kremlin, including through "targeted sanctions on officials responsible for arbitrary detention and torture," as well as by providing asylum to Ukrainians "fleeing politically motivated prosecutions." (Free Russia Foundation, December 19, 2025)

PUTIN CALLS UP RESERVISTS TO PROTECT INFRASTRUCTURE
In recent months, Ukrainian drone strikes have targeted infrastructure targets such as fuel depots deep inside Russia, to devastating effect. Belatedly, the Kremlin is moving to better protect these and similar installations. On December 30th, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order summoning citizens with contracts with the Russian Armed Forces Reserve to training centers to prepare for the protection of critical infrastructure. While the exact list of facilities to be guarded is not finalized, the Russian General Staff includes energy and transportation hubs in this category. The law allowing for reservists to serve in these positions passed back in November. At the time, Vladimir Tsimlyansky, the Deputy Chief of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the Russian General Staff, claimed that the law would not amount to a mobilization, but rather sought to attract the "most prepared and patriotic citizens," who maintain their rights as reservists, to military training. (TASS, December 30, 2025)

RUSSIA'S MILITARY CONTINUES TO ABUSE ITS OWN SOLDIERS
Recently, the office of Russian human rights ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova accidentally published confidential complaints submitted by Russian soldiers and their loved ones between April and September 2025. Those documents detail severe abuses by Russian military leadership, describing how the country's military command sends soldiers with severe medical conditions and released prisoners of war to frontline positions and active combat, how commanders extort and steal from their units and threaten to kill their own soldiers, and how units torture soldiers who refuse to participate in suicide missions with beatings or abandonment.

Many of the cases describe men who were denied proper medical treatment or sent back to the front while awaiting treatment for combat injuries, with one documented case showing soldiers sent into combat on crutches. Some conscripted soldiers describe being pressured to sign military contracts under threat of being transferred to dangerous assault units, or being pressured to pay bribes to avoid assaults. Russian commanders have further been documented either directly killing soldiers or intentionally sending them on suicide missions – sometimes without weapons or protection – in order to punish specific people, a practice so common it has its own name: "zeroing out." (New York Times, December 31, 2025)