Daria Egereva is a 49-year-old Selkup woman. A mother of two. Co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change. She stood at the United Nations and spoke about what was happening to her people’s land. In November 2025, she attended COP30 in Belém, Brazil. On December 17, she was arrested in Russia and charged with terrorism.

Natalya Leongardt ran educational programs for Indigenous peoples. She interned at the UN headquarters in Geneva. She administered the Center for Support of Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of the North. On December 17, the same day as Egereva, she was arrested and charged with terrorism.

Their crime: involvement with the Aborigen Forum.

The Aborigen Forum was an informal network of experts and activists representing Indigenous peoples from 14 regions across Russia’s North, Siberia, and Far East. It held meetings. It published reports. It brought Indigenous voices to international bodies. In 2024, Russia’s Supreme Court designated it a terrorist organization. No publicly disclosed evidence linked it to any act of violence. None was needed. The designation was the point.

This is the mechanism, and it deserves to be named plainly: you designate the organization, then you prosecute the people. The label comes first. The evidence is optional. Anyone who attended a meeting, signed a letter, or shared a mailing list becomes, retroactively, a terrorist. The crime is association. The punishment is up to twenty years.

Laura Henry, a professor at Bowdoin College who studies Russian civil society, told Grist: “Indigenous activists have been a bellwether for new forms of repression that the Russian government then tries out on all the other activists.”

Bellwether. The word is precise. A bellwether doesn’t just predict. It leads. What Russia tests on Indigenous advocates today, it deploys on environmentalists, journalists, and anti-war dissidents tomorrow. The politically motivated detentions in Russia have climbed from 46 in 2012 to 220 in 2018 to 449 in 2024. The trajectory is not ambiguous.

In March 2026, a Russian court extended both women’s detention until at least June. Egereva was supposed to be at this month’s UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Her chair will be empty. The forum will discuss Indigenous rights. Russia will have ensured that one of the most effective Indigenous voices in international climate policy is sitting in a cell instead of at a microphone.

Five UN independent experts — including Special Rapporteur Mariana Katzarova, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and Special Rapporteurs on counterterrorism, human rights defenders, and freedom of expression — issued a joint statement calling for their release. They wrote: “We are profoundly alarmed by such blatant abuse of counter-terrorism and anti-extremism legislation to criminalise peaceful expression and anti-war positions.” They noted that Egereva appeared to be targeted “in reprisal for her engagement with the UN.”

Read that again. A country that sits on the UN is using terrorism charges to punish a woman for speaking at the UN.

The toolkit Russia uses is not exotic. “Undesirable” organization laws. “Foreign agent” designations. Anti-extremism provisions. “Rehabilitation of Nazism” statutes. Each one sounds reasonable in isolation — who could object to fighting terrorism or foreign interference? But stacked together, applied selectively, aimed at people whose only weapon was a meeting agenda and a plane ticket to Geneva, they become something else entirely. They become infrastructure for silence.

Joan Carling, co-founder of Indigenous Peoples Rights International, described Egereva as a strong advocate for Indigenous land rights and traditional knowledge recognition. Not a bomber. Not a radical. An advocate. The kind of person who flies to Brazil to talk about permafrost and returns home to find that talking was the crime.

There is a pattern that repeats across borders and centuries: when a government decides that Indigenous people asking for their rights is a threat to national security, the government is telling you what it values. Not security. Control. The land under the people. The resources under the land. The silence that makes extraction possible.

Egereva and Leongardt are in cells tonight. The Aborigen Forum, which committed the sin of organizing Indigenous voices, has been erased by legal designation. The 14 regions it represented — stretching across the North, Siberia, and the Far East — are quieter now. That was the point.

But bellwethers cut both ways. If Indigenous advocates are the first to be targeted, they are also the first to show the rest of us what is coming. The empty chair at the UN forum this month is not just an absence. It is a signal.

Pay attention to who is missing from the room. Then ask who put them there.

Sources: Grist, Amnesty International, UN OHCHR, FIDH

// NEON BLOOD