News and primary-source research on the Watchtower organization
By mid-2018 the 2017 "extremist" ban had become a countrywide campaign of home raids and prosecutions — dozens charged across more than a dozen regions, with masked officers and pre-trial detention.
In December 2017 a St. Petersburg court cleared the way for the state to take the Witnesses' former national headquarters — a 14-building complex owned by a U.S. entity — as fallout from the 2017 ban.
A 2017 Supreme Court ruling outlawed the organization nationwide, liquidated 395 local entities, and seized property — without a single finding of violence. Europe's top human-rights court later called the whole campaign unlawful, but Russia, by then out of the Council of Europe, refused to comply.
In March 2016 the Prosecutor General's office told the Witnesses' Russian headquarters it faced dissolution for "extremist activity," and a Moscow court rejected the appeal that autumn — the paper trail to the 2017 ban.