TODAY: Three Greenpeace activists granted bail, others may have detentions extended; court cages and Putin’s textbooks under fire; Navalny’s party will not be registered; Mutko says Kremlin should have waited to implement ‘gay propaganda’ law; Merkel warns Russia against further Ukraine pressure.

A St. Petersburg court granted bail to three of the 30 Greenpeace crew members detained since September (all of them Russians). Colin Russell, the Australian activist who remains in detention, says his human rights have been ‘violated very, very badly’.  State prosecutors want the remaining detainees’ incarceration extended by three months.  Six activists were detained on Red Square yesterday for protesting ‘in defense of political prisoners’.  Lawyers say Russia’s use of court cages, which has recently come under new scrutiny, is an obstacle to ‘maintaining equal rights in the courtroom’.  Masha Gessen unpicks the current popularity of the hooliganism charge.  President Vladimir Putin’s whitewashed school textbooks are drawing criticism from those who see it as a ‘vanity project to boost Putin’s political standing’; Vladimir Rhyzhkov says the textbooks’ ‘common thread’ is ‘the intrinsic value of the state’.  Amnesty International published a piece by Lev Ponomaryov on the law that requires internationally-funded NGOs to register as ‘foreign agents’.