In Bangkok this week, members of an antiwar Russian-language rock group were fighting deportation to Russia, detained in what supporters described as a cramped, hot, 80-person immigration holding cell.
On Wednesday in Moscow, the lower house of Parliament passed a law that will allow the Russian government to seize the property of Russians living abroad who, in the words of the legislature’s chairman, “besmirch our country.”
The two developments, though thousands of miles apart, reflected the same grim calculus by the Kremlin: Using new legislation and apparent diplomatic pressure on other countries, it is turning the screws on Russia’s sprawling antiwar diaspora.
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