Mikhail Savva spent a decade defending civil society in southern Russia before the state turned on him. As vice-chair of the Krasnodar Krai public oversight commission, he inspected prisons and detention centers and documented how the authorities treated the activists and vulnerable people held inside them. The FSB arrested him in April 2013 on fabricated fraud charges. He spent eight months in pre-trial detention and four more under house arrest. Memorial named him a political prisoner; Human Rights Watch called the prosecution unfounded and politically motivated. When a court converted his suspended sentence to prison time in 2015, he fled to Ukraine, where he holds refugee status.
Savva is a professor with a doctorate in political science and a candidate's degree in sociology, and he serves on the Expert Council of the Center for Civil Liberties, the Ukrainian organization awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. His work now centers on Ukrainians abducted, tortured, and imprisoned by Russia: he helped author the strategy for securing their release and prepares expert opinions for international courts. Russia designated him a "foreign agent" in 2023 and, in January 2026, sentenced him in absentia to three and a half years in a penal colony.
