Authorities arrested an Interior Ministry technician for talking privately on the phone. They also nabbed people holding blank placards implying opposition to the war; a woman wearing a hat in Ukraine’s yellow and blue colors, and a Siberian carpenter in Tomsk named Stanislav Karmakskikh who was holding a poster of an 1871 Vasily Vereshchagin artwork called “The Apotheosis of War.”

A popular food blogger, Nika Belotserkovskaya, was among the first three to face charges under Russia’s law against “fake” war news after her Instagram feed went from truffles and rosé to posts about Ukrainian refugee children. (She is outside Russia.)

The speed of Russia’s transformation to Soviet-style “self-purification” has been astonishing. When Russia invaded Ukraine last month, state TV went to wall-to-wall propaganda blaming Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” and “nationalists.” Now, shadowy pro-Putin figures are daubing the words “traitor to the motherland” on the doors of peace activists and others.