In a post last January, I took note of a Russian college student named Olesya Krivtsova. She was facing ten years in prison. Her crime: to have criticized the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.

On Wednesday, this report appeared. It begins,

Olesya Krivtsova thinks it’s because she was neither the first, nor the last, to criticize the war in Ukraine that she scared Russian authorities as much as she did.

Her social media posts were neither particularly strident nor unusual, she told CNN, reflecting those of so many other university students across the country. And that, she believes, is where her troubles started: when her fellow students denounced her to authorities in need of an example.

Now in Lithuania and on Moscow’s list of most wanted criminals, the softly spoken, slight 20-year-old from Russia’s northwestern Arkhangelsk region makes for an unlikely villain. But from the start, Russian authorities seemed to have singled her out for harsh punishment with particular zeal.

I am glad that there are free countries for Russians to flee to. Olesya made it to Lithuania. I hope that Russia will someday be a free country, so that Russians can stay in Russia and pursue their destinies as free men and free women.

By the way, did you notice this line in the report? “. . . when her fellow students denounced her . . .” Very Soviet. In the past 20-plus years, Vladimir Putin has re-Sovietized Russian society.

• This report is terrible and moving, in equal measure:

A Russian court on Tuesday convicted a single father over social media posts critical of the war in Ukraine and sentenced him to two years in prison — a case brought against him after his daughter’s drawing at school opposed the invasion, according to his lawyer and activists.

But Alexei Moskalyov fled house arrest before his verdict was delivered in his Russian hometown of Yefremov and is at large, court officials said. His 13-year-old daughter Maria, who has been taken from him by the authorities, wrote him a supportive letter for his trial from the orphanage where she is living, according to his lawyer, telling him, “Daddy, you’re my hero.”

Very Soviet, what Russian authorities have done. And what is so beautifully human is: “Daddy, you’re my hero.”

• A journalist to know: Mikhail Afanasyev. This report is from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. I will quote:

The editor in chief of the Novy fokus (New Focus) online newspaper in the Siberian region of Khakasia, Mikhail Afanasyev, went on trial on March 29 charged with discrediting Russia’s armed forces. Afanasyev was arrested in April 2022 after his newspaper reported about the refusal of local riot police officers to participate in Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Russians are some of the bravest people in the world. It was true in Soviet days, and it is true now. In Soviet days, the Kremlin had the support of many, many in the West. The same is true now. Authoritarians and oppressors will always have their supporters, sympathizers, and apologists in free countries — a sad, but also outrageous, fact of life.

• On Thursday, I had a note about Evan Gershkovich, the new American hostage in Russia. He is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. I compared this case to that of Nicholas Daniloff, from 1986. Daniloff was working for U.S. News & World Report when he was taken hostage by the Kremlin. I heard George Shultz give a speech in which he spoke of Daniloff. (This was during the reporter’s imprisonment.) Hard to forget.

Today, I would like to link to a piece by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw: “Evan Gershkovich Loved Russia, the Country That Turned on Him.”

One paragraph:

Mr. Gershkovich, 31 years old, is the American son of Soviet-born Jewish exiles who had settled in New Jersey. He fell in love with Russia — its language, the people he chatted with for hours in regional capitals, the punk bands he hung out with at Moscow dive bars. Now, espionage charges leave him facing a possible prison sentence of up to 20 years.

I imagine we’ll trade for him as we did for Daniloff. What I would most like is for Americans to be clear about what the Putin dictatorship is.