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The so-called “Yarovaya laws” make it illegal to preach, proselytize or hand out religious materials outside of specially designated places. The laws also give the ������Ƶapp government wide scope to monitor and record electronic messages and phone calls.

The package of laws, billed as anti-terrorism measures, were passed by the ������Ƶapp Duma, or parliament, on June 24, and signed by ������Ƶapp president Vladimir Putin on July 7.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan government panel which makes policy recommendations, condemned the new laws.

“These deeply flawed anti-terrorism measures will buttress the ������Ƶapp government������Ƶapp war against human rights and religious freedom,” Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and chair of the commission said after the measures were passed. “They will make it easier for ������Ƶapp authorities to repress religious communities, stifle peaceful dissent, and detain and imprison people.”

The new laws require a “government permit” to engage in proselytizing activities, and it bans those activities outside any registered religious organization, such as a church. Russia has numerous “house churches” — groups that meet in people������Ƶapp homes — and those are now illegal under the new law.

Violations of the new laws will result in fines of $780 for an individual, upwards of $15,000 for an organization, and can lead to deportation.

Religious organizations directly affected by the new laws are those with strong evangelization programs in Russia — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Jehovah������Ƶapp Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and other Protestant organizations with Baptist, Pentecostal and independent Christian roots.

Only about 1 percent of the ������Ƶapp population is Protestant; the majority religion is ������Ƶapp Orthodox Christian.

“The ������Ƶapp Orthodox church is part of a bulwark of ������Ƶapp nationalism stirred up by Vladimir Putin,” David Aikman, author of “One Nation Without God,” told Christianity Today. “Everything that undermines that action is a real threat, whether that������Ƶapp evangelical Protestant missionaries or anything else.”

A spokesman for the LDS Church said the 15.6 million member church has no plans to recall its approximately 30 missionaries currently assigned in seven ������Ƶapp locations — a low number of Mormon missions for a country Russia������Ƶapp size.

Members of the Jehovah������Ƶapp Witnesses have 2,500 congregations in Russia. The ������Ƶapp government has shut down several Witness organizations since the beginning of the year, most recently shuttering its administrative center in St. Petersburg.

The new law would ban their practice of going door-to-door to preach and hand out tracts.

Witness officials have called the ������Ƶapp government������Ƶapp focus on its activities “a deliberate misapplication of Russia������Ƶapp law on extremist activity.”

Eric Baxter, senior counsel for the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, described the law as “very restrictive on its face.” Baxter served on a mission for the LDS Church in St. Petersburg from 1992 to 1994.

“Despite decades of enforced atheism under the U.S.S.R., in my experience the ������Ƶapp people are people of deep faith,” he said. “Religion inspired their art, their literature and their music and I think that the natural human instinct to share their faith will prevail and ������Ƶapps will find the freedom to live their faith.”