The rights situation inside Russia has substantially worsened since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, a top UN expert said Monday, decrying the “persistent use of torture”, including molestation. “The situation of human rights in the Russian Federation has significantly deteriorated since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022,” the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights situation in the country, Mariana Katzarova, said in her first report. The dramatic degradation came after “the situation had already been on a steady decline over the past two decades, in part a legacy of two wars in Chechnya that ended in 2009”, she said. Katzarova, who last April became the first-ever monitor of the Russian rights situation appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, described how Russian authorities had “severely curtailed the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression, both online and offline.” They had also “fundamentally undermined the independence of the judiciary and the guarantees of a fair trial,” she said, lamenting that a range of administrative sanctions were “being applied arbitrarily against dissenters and force used against peaceful protesters”.