A year after the ban, Russia was raiding Jehovah's Witnesses nationwide

A little over a year after Russia outlawed Jehovah's Witnesses as "extremist," the ban had become a nationwide manhunt. On June 28, 2018, Human Rights Watch reported that Russian authorities were carrying out a sweeping wave of home raids and criminal prosecutions of Witnesses across the country.^[1]

Between April and June 2018 alone, Human Rights Watch documented raids on Witness communities in at least 11 regions, from Saratov in the southwest to Primorsky Krai in the far east. The raids typically brought together regular police, masked FSB officers, armed National Guard personnel, and investigators. As of the report, 18 men were being held in pre-trial detention on extremism charges, and roughly 160 Witnesses had fled Russia altogether.^[1] The religious-freedom monitor Forum 18 offered a broader tally days later: more than 30 Witnesses facing criminal cases across 14 regions, with 21 in pre-trial detention, following armed raids in the first half of the year.^[2] The figures differed because the numbers were climbing week by week.

The prosecutions rested on Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code, which makes it a crime to organize or take part in the activities of an organization banned as extremist; some Witnesses also faced charges of "financing" extremism, carrying up to eight years. The maximum sentence under the organizing charge was ten years — for, in practice, continuing to hold worship meetings.^[1][2]

It was the machinery of the April 2017 Supreme Court ban grinding into motion. That ruling had liquidated the Witnesses' Administrative Center and some 395 local organizations and stripped roughly 175,000 believers of any lawful structure for their faith; the 2018 raids were what enforcement of it looked like on the ground.^[1] "The Jehovah's Witnesses," said Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch, "are simply peacefully exercising their right to freedom of religion."^[1] Even Russia's own presidential human-rights council asked prosecutors to review the legality of the campaign.^[1] The raids continued regardless.

The exodus told its own story: by mid-2018, scores of families had already left the country rather than risk prosecution, and those who stayed learned to expect the pre-dawn knock. Nor was 2018 the peak. Within a year the number of Witnesses charged would climb past one hundred, and in the years that followed hundreds would be prosecuted and dozens imprisoned, some for terms of six years or more — the enforcement of a ban that had made the ordinary practice of a faith a criminal act.^[1]