On August 12, 2020, women in Minsk and other Belarusian cities formed chains in solidarity with protesters injured during the violent police response to opposition demonstrations against dictator Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka). These solidarity chains, which were often made up of women dressed in white, became one of the main symbols of the peaceful protest movement in Belarus. On May 12, 2021, nine months after the first opposition demonstrations on streets of Minsk, women in white came out in protest once again. 

On Thursday, April 29, Moscow’s Babushkinsky District Court rejected Alexey Navalny’s appeal against the verdict in the “war veteran defamation” case. Navalny took part in the hearing via a video link from prison. This was the first time the opposition politician had been seen by the public since coming off a 24-day hunger strike, which lasted from March 31 to April 23. During a recess, Navalny told his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, that he looks “like a skeleton” and that his weight had dropped to 72 kilograms (159 pounds) — Navalny said this is how much he weighed as a teenager, Meduza’s correspondent reported. 

On the morning of Wednesday, April 28, a graffiti mural of jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny appeared on a transformer vault in St. Petersburg’s Pushkarsky Garden. It showed Navalny holding his hands in the shape of a heart, accompanied by the phrase “A hero of the new times.” The artist behind the mural remains unknown. Artists from the HoodGraff collective, who previously painted a graffiti mural of Russian national soccer team coach Stanislav Cherchesov on the same building, said that they weren’t involved in the Navalny graffiti. Photographer Georgy Markov, who first reported the appearance of the mural, snapped pictures of it around 6:14 a.m. local time. About four hours later, around 10:34 a.m., journalist David Frenkel reported that the mural was being painted over.