I'm going to come out of lurk mode long enough to comment on this. While I personally abhor the WTBTS and what it represents, misleading the membership through less than ethical cultlike means, if you have been following this battle since it first started in Russian courts six years ago, then you know that the courts were heavily influenced by the leaders of the Russian Orthodox church in their decision making process. Not unlike the current administration in the USA where they are being heavily influenced by the leaders of conservative christianity, these religious leaders in both countries have delusions of godhood, and would make the political leaders mere figureheads while running a State Religion from behind the scenes. Did the world learn nothing from the Taliban's near-destruction of Afghanistan and its society?
If you are going to ban Jehovah's Witnesses, ban the publishing company, not the belief system. By banning the JWs as a religious entity, this will only serve to make them martyrs (i.e. "another fulfilment of the prophecies of the 'last days'"), and drive them underground, thus strengthening their resolve and making them more difficult to reach through the educational process that would teach them that the WTBTS is misleading them.
Back in the early to mid 1970s (when I was a JW), Russian movie theatres played an announcement that simply stated "Do not listen to Jehovah's Witnesses" on the screen before the movie started. Well, since the JWs were underground back then in the old USSR, most people had never heard of them, and they started asking questions about who these people are that the government felt the necessity to put an on screen warning about them in the theatres. Their numbers multiplied because of this. The same could happen again, therefore attracting even more people into the JWs.
Interference by religious leaders into matters of politics is as old as time itself, and is no less dangerous now than it was centuries or millenia ago. When Russia was part of the USSR, you were told to be an athiest under Stalinistic Communism. Now the Russian Orthodox church wants to swing the pendulum in the other direction, making theirs the official State Religion. If a person is told what to believe by their government (as directed by religious leaders), then they have no freedom of choice, even if that choice is a bad one. A society run by religion can create a society of reluctant hypocrites, interested only in obeying the laws of the religion to stay out of trouble with the law, not because they believe the tenets of that forced faith.
A society that successfully separates religion from politics allows individuals to be educated by others who see their belief system as harmful, as we do with the JWs. If the Russian government wants to declare the JWs illegal, they should do so from a corporate standpoint, without any influence from religious leaders. You cannot take away a person's belief system, just because you've made it illegal.
