Few Ukrainians have spent as many years of their life fighting authoritarianism as Volodymyr Chemerys.

The sixty-year-old Ukrainian human rights campaigner’s record of activism reads like a history of Ukrainian protest: the 1990 “Revolution on Granite” against Soviet domination of the country, today dubbed the “first Maidan”; the 2000–2001 “Ukraine without Kuchma” protests targeting an independent Ukraine’s later, similarly repressive president; founding human rights bodies that monitored and gave legal aid to the Euromaidan protesters in 2014; and fiercely criticizing Ukraine’s post-Maidan establishment and the growing menace of the far right that came with it.

When the Russian invasion began, things kicked up a notch. In July 2022, officers with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the country’s chief law enforcement and domestic spy agency, entered Chemerys’s home, broke one of his ribs, and seized his electronics. (Chemerys provided Jacobin with medical documents from July 2022 documenting a fractured tenth rib). His crimes, according to the “official warning” he received after the visit, included “his openly pro-Russian position,” “criticism of the activities of the Ukrainian authorities” during the war, and denying Russian aggression against Ukraine by portraying the war since 2014 “as an internal civil conflict.”