The Kremlin is encouraging everyday Russians to rat out supposed ‘traitors’ including family and friends who criticise the invasion, it has been reported.
The move is eerily similar to tactics employed by Soviet-era dictators like Joseph Stalin and his secret police, the NKVD.
A telephone hotline and website have been set up that allow “good citizens” to report “traitors”.
The Kremlin has reportedly sent Russian citizens in several regions texts with instructions how to report one another, with outspoken voices being tossed into jail.
Any Russian wishing to rat out their fellow citizen can also use a dedicated channel on the social media platform.
This led to a young 22-year-old shop assistant spending 24 hours in a cell this week after they told a stranger in Moscow that she disagreed with the war in Ukraine.
The woman told the Sunday Telegraph: 'It was just a chit chat...he got very upset that we didn't share his opinion and started arguing, saying that Putin and the war were absolutely right.”
The man was thrown out the bar but within an hour police arrived and asked the woman and her friends.
While the man was ejected from the bar, within an hour the police had arrived and asked the woman and her friends to go outside.
She was tossed in a cell overnight and fined for “discrediting Russian armed forces”, she said.
Alongside that, at a school in Penza, central Russia, pupils ratted out their own teacher after they secretly recorded her making anti-war comments..
Other Russians reported on the hotline include a Siberian woman who decorated her tree yellow and blue, the colours of the Ukrainian flag, a man in Moscow who hung a Ukrainian flag from his window, and a police officer who was overheard criticising the invasion.
The accounts have been collected by Russian human rights group OVD-Info.
Head of the group's legal department Alexandra Baeva said: “In Russia now, it is like 1937: people are scared and informing on each other.”
The success of such hotlines come less from the people who are reported to it, than the atmosphere of terror and mistrust it creates among the Russian public
On top of that, the Kremlin remains eager to present the country as behind the invasion, despite 176 people being arrested at 14 separate anti-war protests on Saturday alone.
Currently, it is illegal to speak out or even show disapproval of the invasion of Ukraine.
Even calling it a war is currently outlawed as Putin farcically claimed it was a “special operation”.
On March 16, during one of a number of speeches the Russian President has made, he warned “scum” traitors that loyal Russians would “spit them out like a midge that flew into their mouths”.
He spoke of Russian society in terms of purity, echoing sentiment heard in Nazi Germany.
Putin said: ”I am convinced that this natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to meet any challenge.”
Speaking of Russian traitors, he added: “I do not judge those with villas in Miami or the French Riviera.
£Or who can't get by without oysters or foie gras or so-called 'gender freedoms.'
"The problem is they mentally exist there, and not here, with our people, with Russia.
“The West will try to bet on the so-called fifth column, on traitors...to divide our society...to provoke civil confrontation...to strive to achieve its aim.
"And there is one aim - the destruction of Russia.”
The term ‘fifth column’ was previously used by Stalin to described anyone he decided was against his Communist party.
