Russia’s turn against attorneys

In May 2026, the Russian Justice Ministry won a court ruling stripping lawyers of their licences over a bar association's objection — a first for the legal system. The case involved three prominent Moscow lawyers: Yulia Tai, Dmitry Provodin, and Alexey Basistov. The ministry argued that all three had lived outside Russia for more than a year “without valid reason” and demanded the bar association revoke their status. The Moscow Bar Association refused, but the court sided with the ministry anyway.

The Federal Bar Association called the ruling an “unacceptable precedent” of subordinating the self-governing bar to the will of the executive branch. Under Russian law, it is bar associations, not the state, that decide whether to grant or revoke a lawyer's status. The Moscow Bar Association appealed, but the Moscow City Court upheld the ruling.

Pressure on Russia's legal profession has intensified on several fronts at once in recent years. Some lawyers are stripped of their status; others face criminal charges; and bar associations' ability to protect their own members keeps shrinking. The most visible cases involve lawyers working on politically motivated trials — but the data suggest the problem runs much deeper.

From defenders to defendants

According to Memorial's Support for Political Prisoners project, 13 politically motivated criminal cases were opened against lawyers in 2025, six of them in absentia. The project tracks not only cases brought under explicitly political statutes, but also ordinary criminal charges it believes were driven by a lawyer's professional work. Excluding the in-absentia cases, such prosecutions roughly doubled compared with 2023–2024.

Maria Bontsler, who defended people in anti-war cases, has been charged with treason. Investigators allege she gathered information about Russian security officers and about her clients' criminal cases and passed it to the security services of an unnamed “unfriendly state”. Alexey Navalny's lawyers Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Liptser, and Igor Sergunin were convicted in 2025 after a court ruled that passing letters and messages from the imprisoned Navalny to his associates amounted to participation in an “extremist group”.

A lawyer who spoke to Novaya Europe under the pseudonym Mikhail says the Navalny lawyers' case marked a turning point. “The prosecution was largely built on wiretaps of conversations between the lawyers and their client — and those conversations are attorney-client privilege. They were always the 'sacred cow'; the law explicitly bans intercepting them,” he said. “The bar association should have been outraged and intervened, but it essentially said nothing. And that sent a signal that now anything goes.”

Prosecutions have increasingly reached lawyers with no connection to political cases at all. Over five years, the number of lawyers facing criminal charges rose from 80 to 133 — a 1.7-fold increase.

“Of course, lawyers defending people in political cases are under far more pressure,” Mikhail explains. “But if there's big money involved in a case, or it's a contract hit job, or simply too aggressive a defence, that's already enough. You can't just stay away from politics and feel safe. Everyone is at risk — no illusions about that.”

What lawyers can still do

Russia's acquittal rate is close to zero: in the first half of 2025, just 0.24% of cases heard by courts ended in acquittal. But that doesn't mean 99.8% of cases end in conviction. Many collapse at the investigation stage, and roughly a third of the criminal cases that do reach court never produce a verdict — they're dismissed or sent back for further investigation, often because of a lawyer's work.

A defence lawyer can also secure a reclassification to a lesser charge, the minimum sentence allowed, or a suspended term instead of prison time.

“A lawyer, even with all the restrictions and problems, is still a serious headache for the investigation and the prosecution,” Mikhail said. “I had one case sent back for further investigation five times before the investigator finally decided to close it. Yes, that doesn't look as impressive in the statistics as an acquittal. But in substance, it's a win for the defence — the criminal case no longer exists.”

A representative of one regional bar association told Novaya Gazeta Europe that investigators often try to remove “overly active” lawyers even in cases whose outcome is already a foregone conclusion.

“The investigator's interest [in removing a lawyer] is very simple,” the bar representative explains, “and the most improbable pretexts get invented for it. The investigator understands, of course, that he'll almost certainly get a conviction. But if along the way there are reprimands for sending the case back, delays, this can make the case less smooth than he'd like and hurts his career prospects. He doesn't just need a verdict, he needs to get there fast and without problems. Ideally, with everyone confessing and signing a plea deal too.”

Manufacturing justice

In 2024, Inna Barleva, a lawyer in Kazan, won a rare acquittal for her client Ibragim Zakiev, who had been accused of complicity in one murder and organising another, committed in 2003 and 2004.

On 6 February 2025, as Zakiev's case was under appellate review, officers handed Barleva a summons for questioning as she left the courtroom; six months later, she was charged. Investigators alleged that she obstructed justice by disclosing case materials to a journalist. The same investigative team that had built the case against Zakiev was now pursuing the case against his lawyer.

The bar association took Barleva's side, stating that her prosecution was connected to the legal assistance she had provided her client. Vladislav Lapinsky, the lawyer assigned to defend Barleva by the Federal Bar Association, called the charge “pure revenge for the acquittal”, noting that the witness information she was accused of disclosing was never secret — it had already been read out in open court back in 2017, in separate proceedings. According to Lapinsky, “the actions being imputed to the lawyer as criminal are explicitly among a defence attorney’s powers”.

On July 7, 2026, the court found Barleva guilty on all charges. Lapinsky called the verdict unjust and said the defence would appeal.

The obstruction-of-justice charge against Barleva is just one type of criminal case brought against lawyers. In more than half of the cases examined, defence lawyers are charged with fraud — and even then, not with a completed crime, but merely an attempt.

According to a lawyer identified as Arseny (name changed for safety reasons), “attempted fraud” charges are popular with prosecutors mainly because they're easier to fabricate.

“To charge someone with giving a bribe, or acting as an intermediary, it helps if the lawyer actually handed money to someone who can influence the outcome — an investigator, an expert, or a judge,” he said.

The case narratives we examined frequently followed a pattern: a lawyer receives money from a client or the client's relatives, ostensibly to pass on as a bribe to investigators or court officials. No evidence ever confirms a corrupt arrangement with the alleged recipient. Because of that, investigators conclude the lawyer deceived the client — promising to deliver a bribe while intending all along to keep the money.

The sums involved are sometimes small — 50,000 or 100,000 rubles (€500–€1,000) — often disguised, investigators say, as a lawyer's fee under a formal contract and paid by bank transfer. In most cases, the key evidence that the money was meant as a bribe turns out to be the client's own testimony. Some case files state this outright: the defendant suddenly decides to “confess” fully to investigators about his and his lawyer's supposed criminal plans. In others, the Investigative Committee never explains what its conclusion is actually based on.

“When we're talking about attempted fraud, chances are there's no crime there at all,” the bar association representative says. “Of course, every case needs to be looked at individually — lawyers vary too. But most often an ‘attempted fraud’ charge is simply a way of removing a lawyer the investigation doesn't like. That's all it is.”

Regardless of how a case ends, the mere fact of a criminal prosecution against a lawyer helps investigators pressure the defence attorney — and remove them from the picture, at least temporarily.

Even before a verdict was reached in her own case, Barleva was removed from Zakiev's defence during the appellate review. The prosecutor moved to disqualify her on the grounds that she herself was now a defendant in a case involving obstruction of justice connected to Zakiev's proceedings. The court accepted the argument, citing a possible conflict of interest that might lead the lawyer to act against her client's interests — even though Zakiev himself objected to the disqualification and insisted on Barleva continuing as his defence attorney.

The Federal Bar Association’s commission found no conflict of interest whatsoever and stressed that, with the client's full trust intact, disqualifying a lawyer on such grounds was impermissible. The Association called the disqualification an “extremely dangerous precedent,” since it established that all it takes to remove an “inconvenient” lawyer from a case is to open a criminal investigation against them.

After his case was reviewed again, Ibragim Zakiev was found guilty and sentenced to 19 years in prison.

Lawyers without licences

Beyond criminal prosecution, softer methods of pressuring lawyers also exist. For example, courts and the Justice Ministry can file complaints with bar associations, which can then discipline lawyers — including by stripping them of their status.

For lawyers specialising in criminal cases — practically the only kind who face prosecution in the first place — losing that status effectively means losing their profession. Generally, only licensed lawyers can act as defence attorney in criminal investigations and trials; a disbarred lawyer can only practice in other areas, such as civil cases.

Meanwhile, the authorities are planning to extend lawyers' monopoly to cover most court disputes. Currently, bar status is required only for criminal defence work, but it may soon become mandatory in civil, commercial, and administrative proceedings as well.

The Federal Bar Association does not publish consolidated statistics on disciplinary cases or disbarments, and most regional bar associations do so irregularly or not at all. Novaya Gazeta Europe examined the records of the few associations that publish disciplinary practice reviews at least once a year, including those in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Rostov, and several other regions.

The number of disciplinary cases heard by bar associations in 2024 rose by only 12% compared with 2021. But the associations have grown much more willing to strip lawyers of their status outright: the number of these cases rose by 42%.

According to a 2025 survey, 72% of Russian defence lawyers said they had faced pressure to persuade their clients to plead guilty; 53.5% reported threats of being punished for mounting too active a defence; and around 38% cited systemic obstacles to reviewing case files, restricted access to evidence, and pressure to withdraw motions.

Lawyers now often find themselves weighing their clients' interests against the limits of investigators' patience.

Arseny told Novaya Europe that he recently received a promising case, with a real chance of getting the prosecution dropped. He chose to pass it on to a colleague instead.

“I'd had several cases in a row with that same investigative unit: one was sent back for further investigation, one was dropped, and now here we go again,” he explained. “To be honest, I was wary of provoking them too often. A complaint to the bar association isn't fatal, but it's better to avoid it. And it’s far from the worst that could happen.”