Why do we write letters? In the words of Maria Ponomarenko, sentenced to six years in prison for anti-war posts:
I’ve already explained it multiple times that the letters are highly valuable to all of us who are unjustly imprisoned. But I’m ready to repeat it again and again, even 1000 times!
Your letters inspire us, give us strength and confidence that there will be a dawn and the changes are inevitable.
Your letters serve as a support — solid ground beneath our feet.
Your letters are uplifting and help distract us from the unpleasant realities of the Russian penitentiary system.
Write letters to political prisoners! Write, even in the absence of feedback!
The letters are also very important because they demonstrate to the authorities and other inmates that the political prisoner has support outside the prison and is not alone. That we have not been abandoned and have not been forgotten!
Political prisoners find themselves in physical, social and informational isolation. Thanks to the letters, prisoners feel supported and that they are not alone. In pre-trial detention centres, prisons and colonies, it is not often possible to find like-minded people, but letters give prisoners a chance to be heard and a much-needed connection with one another.
In addition, in prison a person quickly ceases to understand what is happening on the outside, so letters are also a way to stay informed about external events: they can be about big news or something less significant, but important for the political prisoner himself (for example, about changes in countries or what is happening in his work\interest spheres, and so on).
Finally, when prisoners receive regular letters, it is an indicator to prison and colony staff that the world outside is paying attention to them, so the risks of pressure are reduced.
This is safe
It is legal and safe to send letters to political prisoners. It is important to remember that all letters go through a censor, but if you follow certain rules you will be safe.
However, there is a list of topics to avoid.
– Do not write about war and combat, such letters will almost certainly not pass the censor.
– Do not write about the details of their criminal case: this may be a painful topic for discussion, but on the other hand, such correspondence may harm them legally.
– Do not write anything about LGBTQ+ people, as based on the history of cases this may harm the political prisoner in the eyes of homophobic prisoners and prison staff.
– Do not write direct insults to the authorities and their representatives or calls to overthrow the government.
– Avoid any topics related to what law enforcement agencies may consider extremism and terrorism.
– In addition, do not use obscure abbreviations, ciphers, foreign words – anything that the censor may not understand or find suspicious. Finally, do not use foul language in your letters.
Where to start
First, you need to decide who you want to write to. You can write to political prisoners whose stories you already know from the news, but it is important that not only media figures receive letters: there are many lesser-known prisoners who need support just as much. You can find their names and stories on our website (general list and religious list of political prisoners), and you can also find addresses where you can write to them. A great reason to start a correspondence would be, for example, a birthday greeting.
What to write about in the first letter
Introduce yourself and tell about your experiences, so that the political prisoner understands who he is communicating with. If you do not want to use your real name, you can sign with a pseudonym – the main thing is that your addressee can later recognize you among other interlocutors.
In an interview with Novaya Gazeta, Elena Efros – founder of the letter-writing project “Tales for Political Prisoners” says: “It’s just the way to write it, a standard text like: Hi, I learned about your case from the media or the Internet, do you want to correspond with me, if yes, what topics are interesting to you. And don’t worry – if you don’t get a reply, just write to someone else.”
How to send letters
The fastest way would be to send one online. Our colleagues from ‘Memorial France’ have launched a service for sending letters to political prisoners in Russia and Belarus.
The website itself is still only available in French, but you can write to political prisoners in different languages: French, English, Belarusian, Russian, and any other are also accepted for translation.
Choose any political prisoner from the lists of Mémorial or Viasna.
Write a letter and paste it into the online form
Our colleagues will translate the text and send it to the addressee
When and if the inmate responds, they will send you their letter
The service has more detailed instructions for each step, as well as recommendations on what to talk about and what to avoid in letters.
You can also use one of the following services available in English:
Letters Across Borders is an OVD-Info project to collect letters to Russian political prisoners in English (or other languages) and translate them for free. You can support the project with a donation.
PrisonMail (payment with international bank cards)
ZT – payment by Russian card only, but the service works in more colonies;
RosUznik – a volunteer project that sends letters in Russian for free or for a donation (you can write from abroad if you translate your letter yourself).
You can also send a paper letter and put something that will please the prisoner: photos, printed pictures, extracts from a magazine, herbarium and so on. You can put unsigned postcards so that the prisoner can send them to their loved ones. Please note that the weight of the letter mustn’t exceed 99 grams and letters in languages other than Russian are highly unlikely to reach the recipient.
Write legibly so that your handwriting can be understood by both the addressee and the censor. When sending a letter, put not only the address but also the full name of the institution on the envelope and write the year of birth after the addressee’s name. If you want a reply, put a blank sheet of paper, another envelope and stamps in the envelope with the letter.
To receive a reply letter, a reply form must be paid for. Usually, the censor sends a scan of the letter to the email address you specify, but it is worth bearing in mind that Prisonmail does not cooperate online with all colonies – then the website when you send the letter will say that you can only receive a reply in paper form.
Yuri Dmitriev is a historian and researcher of Stalinist repressions in Karelia, in the North of Russia, and one of the first political prisoners of the new repressive era in Russia. He searched for the sites of mass executions in 1937–1938 and worked to restore the fates of people who were shot during the Great Terror and died in the Gulag camps. He recognised the terrible nature of the new Russian regime sooner than others did, and spoke openly about it. The conviction of Yuri Dmitriev is an example of the Putin regime’s direct inheritance of the spirit and logic of Stalinist terror.
Since December 2016, Dmitriev has been persecuted on false charges.He has been imprisoned for nine years. His sentence is 15 years.He will turn 70 on January 28, 2026.
For the past four years, the historian has been held in a harsh regime penal colony in Mordovia, central Russia. During his time there, he has been placed in solitary confinement nine times. His health is now in critical condition. We want to raise money to give Yuri Dmitriev and his family a gift for his anniversary. These funds will be used to cover his daily expenses in the colony (purchasing food and necessary items), regular visits from his lawyer, and parcels. This is the least we can do to thank Yuri Dmitriev for his work to restore the memory of the victims of Stalin’s terror and for his uncompromising stance towards the crimes of the present.
Iouri Dmitriev est un historien et un chercheur spécialiste des répressions staliniennes en Carélie, dans le nord de la Russie. Il compte parmi les premiers prisonniers politiques de la nouvelle ère répressive instaurée en Russie. Pendant des décennies, il a recherché les lieux d’exécutions massives de 1937–1938 et s’est attaché à rétablir l’identité et le destin des personnes fusillées durant la Grande Terreur ou mortes dans les camps du Goulag. Très tôt, il a compris et dénoncé publiquement la dérive autoritaire du régime russe contemporain.
La condamnation d’Iouri Dmitriev incarne, de manière tragiquement exemplaire, la continuité entre la logique répressive actuelle et l’héritage de la terreur stalinienne.
Depuis décembre 2016, il est la cible de persécutions fondées sur des accusations fabriquées de toutes pièces. Incarcéré depuis neuf ans, il purge aujourd’hui une peine de quinze années de prison. Il aura 70 ans le 28 janvier 2026.
Depuis quatre ans, Iouri Dmitriev est détenu dans une colonie pénitentiaire à régime sévère en Mordovie, dans le centre de la Russie. Durant cette période, il a été placé à neuf reprises à l’isolement. Son état de santé est désormais extrêmement préoccupant.
Nous souhaitons organiser une collecte afin d’offrir à Iouri Dmitriev et à sa famille un présent pour son anniversaire. Les fonds permettront de couvrir ses dépenses quotidiennes dans la colonie pénitentière (achats alimentaires et produits de première nécessité), les visites régulières de son avocat ainsi que l’envoi de colis.
C’est le minimum que nous puissions faire pour exprimer notre gratitude envers Iouri Dmitriev, pour son travail inlassable de restauration de la mémoire des victimes de la terreur stalinienne et pour sa position sans compromis face aux crimes perpétrés aujourd’hui.
Юрий Дмитриев – историк, исследователь сталинских репрессий в Карелии, на Севере России, один из первых политических заключенных новой репрессивной эпохи в России. Он занимался поиском мест массовых убийств 1937–1938 годов, восстановлением судеб людей, расстрелянных в период Большого террора и умерших в лагерях ГУЛАГа. Он раньше других понял страшную природу новой российской власти и открыто говорил о ней. Осуждение Юрия Дмитриева – пример, проявляющий прямое наследование путинским режимом духа и логики сталинского террора.
С декабря 2016 г. Дмитриева преследуют по лживым обвинениям. Он находится в неволе уже 9 лет. Срок заключения по приговору – 15 лет. 28 января 2026 года ему исполнится 70 лет.
Последние четыре года историк находится в колонии строгого режима в Мордовии в Центральной России. За время своего пребывания там он девять раз сидел в штрафном изоляторе. Его здоровье сейчас в критическом состоянии. Мы хотим собрать денег, чтобы сделать подарок к юбилею Юрия Дмитриева ему и его семье. Эти средства будут потрачены на его ежедневные расходы в колонии (покупку еды и необходимых вещей), регулярные визиты адвоката, посылки. Это то немногое, что мы можем сделать в благодарность Юрию Дмитриеву за его работу по восстановлению памяти о жертвах сталинского террора и за его непримиримость по отношению к преступлениям настоящего.
Source: Memorial France (Helloasso). Thanks to Jessica Gorter for the heads-up. It took me a minute or two to fill out the form to donate money to this fundraiser, and I would urge you to donate as well by clicking on any of the five links (above) in this post. To read my years-long coverage of the Dmitriev Case, go here. ||||| TRR
There are political prisoners whose names are not mentioned often and so they have few chances of making it onto prisoner exchange lists.
In a nutshell: political prisoner Lyubov “Lyuba” Lizunova, who is now nineteen years old, was arrested along with her boyfriend Alexander “Sasha” Snezhkov in 2022, when she was sixteen and still in high school (Sasha was nineteen at the time). This is the so-called Case of the Chita Anarchists or the Case of the Transbaikal Leftist Association. Why were they arrested? For writing the graffiti “Death to the regime” on the wall of a co-op garage on the outskirts of Chita, and for moderating Antifa Telegram channels. She was the drummer, and he was the vocalist in a band. They recorded songs and played concerts. . . . Lyuba was originally sentenced to three and a half years behind bars; Sasha, to six years. They are both behind bars now: Sasha is in prison in Krasnokamensk, while Lyuba is in a penal colony in Ulan-Ude.
I have been corresponding with Lyuba. The last letter I got from her arrived yesterday, the twentieth of January.
Now here’s the bottom line.
The very same day, yesterday, a court ruled that the Transbaikal Leftist Association is a “terrorist” organization, and named Lyuba and Sasha as its organizers and leaders. This means that they could be charged with, and found guilty of, violating Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 205.5 [“organizing and participating in the activities of a terrorist organization”].
The penalty for violating this law is fifteen to twenty years in prison. If she is convicted on the new charges, Lyuba Lizunova could be released in the 2040s.
The 2040s!
She will be around thirty-nine years old.
She wrote me a letter earlier, on the sixteenth of January:
“I don’t know what to expect. […] It’s a rather hefty sentence for a social media post and a bit of graffiti, right? I’m slowly shedding my usual calm confidence that I’ll be released on 19.02.2027. Don’t think I’m complaining or being dramatic—it’s just the way it is. The prisoner transport is also not clear. I will go either this month, or in March. The trip to Yaroslavl is long: it will take two months, including stops, just to get there, and the same amount of time for the return trip. I need to stock up somehow. […] Everything is kind of shaky and unreliable. The only things which are strong are ideals, principles, and love.”
I would argue that very young people should be at the top of the prisoner exchange lists, that we should drag children, schoolchildren, and university students out of prisons by any means necessary. These prison sentences are Stalinist [in their severity].
Actually, this is my main point. What follows are personal details.
I will later publish excerpts from Lyuba’s letters if she permits it.
While Lyuba was jailed in the pretrial detention center, she studied for the Unified State Exam and managed to finish eleventh grade. (I don’t know how she managed that.) During the ten months in jail and later, during the long prisoner transport (in a Stolypin wagon and paddy wagon) to the penal colony in Tomsk and then to Chita, she read about one hundred books (all of Solzhenitsyn, Kafka, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Frankl, and Dante—basically, whatever she could find). She has no time to read that much in the penal colony, although she has recently been reading Anna Seghers: she has only one day off, and that day she is kept busy with “squad” assignments. But she asked me to send her something to read; I’ll try to send something, I’ve never done it before. She is the “detachment artist,” so she designs all the holiday celebrations, posters, and props. She writes poetry for her own amusement and sometimes borrows a guitar from a “local lady.” In the next barracks, someone has a synthesizer.
I am including these details on purpose, as they make it possible to visualize Lyuba’s story: the daily lifestyle, including sewing and cleaning the premises; eating Dosirac instant noodles (Lyuba is a vegetarian and cannot eat the food served in the penal colony, because everything is cooked in a meat broth); and the nitty-gritty of the prisoner transports.
Strikingly, Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression was observed at Lyuba’s penal colony: she drew a poster for the occasion. Actually, our correspondence and acquaintance began that same day: I chose her letter from a long list of letters from other political prisoners to read aloud at our Returning the Names event. It had a particularly poignant ring. I later realized why she takes the Stalinist crackdowns so personally. She wrote to me that her great-grandfather was a bigwig in the Chita KGB. When she was taken to FSB headquarters for interrogations, she was escorted past a stand dedicated to him, featuring a framed portrait, documents, and awards. It sounds like a movie—a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl being led down a corridor past a portrait of her great-grandfather—but it isn’t a movie.
If you have ideas about who can publicize this case, or who can help make the media cover the cases of very young political prisoners, please write to me. And write letters to them, please.
FKU IK-7 UFSIN of Russia in the Republic of Buryatia • Lyubov Vitalyevna Lizunova (born 2006)
Source: Alexandra Selivanova (Facebook), 21 January 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader. Since letters to Russian prisoners are vetted by prison censors, they must be written in Russian or translated into Russian, something that can done more or less decently using an online machine translator. ||||| TRR
A court in Russia’s Transbaikal region has designated the informal youth group known as the Transbaikal Left Association (ZLO) as a terrorist organisation and banned its activities nationwide.
According to the ruling by the Transbaikal Regional Court, the group, which was founded in 2019, operated with its own symbols and maintained pages on social media. The court concluded that elements of terrorist activity were present in its actions, as outlined in a lawsuit brought by prosecutors, Caliber.Az reports via Russian media.
The case named Alexander Snezhkov and Lyubov Lizunova, described by authorities as the group’s unofficial leaders, as defendants. Snezhkov was sentenced to six years in prison, while Lizunova received a sentence of three and a half years. They were convicted on charges including vandalism, incitement to terrorism, and extremism.
Snezhkov rejected the accusations, stating that ZLO functioned primarily as an information platform through which he expressed his personal views. At the same time, he acknowledged that in 2022 he had asked Lizunova to prepare a post that he later published online. He said he subsequently deleted the post after realising that it could be interpreted as justifying terrorist activity, including attacks on military enlistment offices.
I am going to tell you about a political prisoner who seemingly no one has written about yet. I came across information about him quite by accident.
His name is Gordey Nikitin. Thirty-two years old and a native of Ryazan, Gordey worked at an oil refinery before his arrest. According to Gordey, he has been interested in politics and held opposition views since 2014. When the full-scale war [against Ukraine] broke out, Gordey went into shock. He was in this state of shock when he wrote several comments on Telegram.
As Gordey found out when reviewing the files in his criminal case, it was precisely because of these comments that, three years later, FSB officers would come after him, calling him on Telegram and introducing themselves as Ukrainian intelligence.
A few conversations with the “GUR” (actually, with the FSB) sufficed to charge him with and convict him of high treason and sentence him to seventeen (17) years in a maximum security penitentiary facility.
Gordey did not testify at his trial and he refused to make a closing statement to the court. He also did not bother to appeal the verdict, and so he will soon be transferred to a penal colony.
Gordey is currently being held in a remand prison in the town of Ryazhsk, Ryazan Region. He writes that the worst thing about the remand prison is the library: “Mostly third-rate military science fiction.” In the eight months he has spent in the prison, Gordey has only come across six decent books—by Remarque, Dostoevsky, and Chuck Palahniuk.
You can write a letter to Gordey. And if you use a digital service, a New Year’s miracle may occur, and he will receive the letter on January 30. In the worst case, it will arrive after the holidays.
Write to Gordey at the following address:
Russian Federation 391999 Ryazhsk, Ryazan Oblast • ul. Krasnaya, d. 1a, SIZO-2 • Nikitin Gordey Andreyevich (d.o.b. 28.09.1993)
You can also send letters through the online services F-Pismo, Zonatelecom, and PrisonMail.Online (the last should be used by foreign bankcard holders).
Source: Ivan Astashin (Facebook), 26 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. Since letters to Russian prisoners are vetted by prison censors, they must be written in Russian or translated into Russian, something that can done more or less decently using an online machine translator like Google Translate. ||||| TRR
On 22 February [2023], scheduled tactical and drill exercises were held at Ryazhsk Remand Prison No. 2 (Ryazan Region, Russian Federal Penitentiary Service).
Remand prison staff practiced negotiating procedures, organizing combat groups, dealing with the aftermath of mass disobedience, and repelling attacks on the correctional facility.
The exercises were observed by Young Army cadets from Ryazhsk High School No. 3. Remand prison staff showed the kids their weapons and equipment. The boys and girls were able to try on bulletproof vests and hold automatic rifles and pistols. At the end of the tour, the schoolchildren were treated to hot porridge and tea.
“Today, the students got a closer look at the penal system,” said Alexei Ogurtsov, acting chief warden at Remand Prison No. 2. “Our staff demonstrated their professional skills, equipment, and weapons to the students and answered their questions. Perhaps some of them will choose to enlist in our service in the future.”
Mikhail Loshchinin and his mother, Olga. Courtesy of RFE/RL
More and more Russians face trumped-up charges of “high treason.” Anything whatsoever—from commenting on a banned organization’s social media post to wiring a paltry sum of money to a relative or acquaintance in Ukraine—can occasion these charges. Foreign nationals who have retained their Russian citizenship have also faced prosecution. It has become ever more dangerous for them to travel to Russia to visit loved ones.
This past summer, Mikhail Loshchinin, a 48-year-old dual Belgian-Russian national, decided to visit his father, who had suffered a heart attack, and headed to Petersburg.
In recent years, Loshchinin had been living in Germany while working as a database manager in Luxembourg. On 1 July 2025, he crossed the Latvian border on a motorcycle with a German license plate and stopped at the Ubylinka border-crossing station, in the Pytalovo District of Russia’s Pskov Region. He was carrying a Russian federal passport, which he presented to the Russian border guards.
“They staged a provocation at the border”
“Sometime around 2020, before the war, Misha traveled to Russia by motorcycle. He made it there and back just fine. He had good memories [of the trip], and so he decided to repeat his ‘feat,'” says Loshchinin’s mother Olga, who now liveas in Poland. “The goal was to visit his father, who had undergone heart surgeries and had been feeling quite poorly after a heart attack; there was a risk the visit would be their last. [Mikhail] decided to travel with his Russian passport so as not to have bother getting a visa. (As a Russian national, Loshchinin does not need a visa to enter Russia—Sever.Realii.) He’d spent the last twenty-five years in Europe: his mindset had changed, he’d been Europeanized. He’d come to rely on the system’s accountability, on the fact that laws were obeyed.”
According to Olga, the border guards asked to check Mikhail’s telephone, on which they apparently found numerous Ukrainian contacts. Before his trip, Mikhail had not deleted anything from his WhatsApp account, as he did not consider corresponding with friends in Ukraine to be a crime.
“There were no grounds to detain him, so they staged a provocation at the border,” says Olga. “He had been waiting there for a long time for the inspection to end when he asked where he could buy some water. They told him to follow them on his motorcycle to the local store, that they would show him the way. He followed them, but they suddenly made a funny turn and detained him for crossing the border. In other words, they had deliberately lured him there to have a legal reason to detain him.”
Mikhail grew up in a large family: the four Loschinin children were born in the Soviet Union but later moved away. Mikhail had been living in Europe since 1999. His sister became a citizen of Ukraine, and he often visited her. He had many friends and acquaintances in Ukraine. Their contact details were stored in his phone, naturally.
Mikhail had always been apolitical, and his arrest has no connection with his work, says Olga.
“It is, rather, a matter of his being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the police investigator admitted as much to him. . . . Misha has always had an excellent reputation, and his employers have valued him. He’s also a well-rounded fellow: he’s a biker, plays the guitar, and sings and does the lighting for productions by small Russian-language theaters. He bought the [lighting] equipment with his own money and promotes Russian culture among his western friends and acquaintances any way he can: he hasn’t lost his connections with his roots. . . . He falls in love easily, and has had several marriages, but now he’s a bachelor. He has a daughter from his second marriage.”
After Mikhail set off for Russia, he constantly telephoned with his sister and mother, who now live in Poland, but they lost touch with him on July first. Three days later, he called from someone else’s phone and told them he had been detained.
“At 10:27 a.m. on July fourth, there was a call from an unknown Russian number. It was our Misha. He said that Dmitry, an FSB officer, had given him a phone to make the call, that he was under guard at the Hotel Dubrava in the border town of Pytalovo, that they’d confiscated his papers and the keys to his motorcycle, and that the motorcycle itself was parked outside the hotel,” Olga recalls.
Mikhail told his loved ones that he had been given a choice: either he would be sent to a basement somewhere, where he would sit and wait until they decided what to do with him and his papers, or he could go to a hotel and wait there, at his own expense.
“No one wants to sit in a basement, naturally,” Olga continues. “He had some money, and since the rooms were inexpensive, he chose the hotel. They confiscated his telephone, his passport, and the papers for his motorcycle, and they posted guards without whom he wasn’t allowed to leave his room. They had to get the go-ahead for every trip outside the hotel. They escorted him when he would go out to the store and the post office.”
Mikhail spent nearly a month at the Dubrava Hotel.
“Misha’s money was running out. We were by then terribly anxious and contacted a lawyer, who arrived at the hotel on the evening of August first and was able to see Misha and speak with him. On August second, a group of persons unknown took him to an undisclosed location. Those were the roughest days for us. As later transpired, he had been transported from Pytalovo to Stary Oskol, in Belgorod Region, and the journey had taken several days. Misha later told us that along the way they had passed through Smolensk; he had managed to catch sight of that. It turns out that, in his correspondence for 2022, an ex-girlfriend of Mikhail’s had asked him for financial help. Her profile picture now has a Ukrainian symbol on it, but it wasn’t there in 2022.”
The lawyer traveled to Stary Oskol, Olga recounts, but at the local pretrial detention center he was told that they had “no such person” in custody. The lawyer then filed a formal appeal with the prosecutor’s office, the FSB, and the Investigative Committee, asking them to figure out what had become of Mikhail. On 21 August 2025, Mikhail telephoned Olga himself—from Pretrial Detention Center No. 1 in Pskov. The call was again made from an unknown number.
“Judging by how his voice sounded, he wasn’t himself. He was clearly under duress and kept asking whether it was alright to talk now, meaning that the call was made in someone else’s presence,” says Olga. “He said that he had been accused of ‘high treason’ per Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code: ‘financing representatives of a foreign state hostile to the Russian Federation.’ We got a call from someone named Denis, who introduced himself as Misha’s attorney. He called us again and warned us not to hire anyone else, claiming our own attorney wouldn’t even be admitted to the remand hearing. We recorded the call but of course we didn’t do what he asked; he had no right to say that to us, and our own attorney did attend the hearing. Since then, Misha has been in custody at the Pskov detention center. He’s under investigation.”
Later, Mikhail said that, in Stary Oskol, he had been placed in a specialized facility for Ukrainian prisoners of war.
“He was tortured and abused, both mentally and physically, there” says Olga. “First of all, they took away his glasses. He has terribly poor eyesight, minus eight, and he practically lost his sight. He could only walk with his head down, bent over. They stripped him naked and beat him. He told his lawyer about all of it. He was completely crushed, and of course this was done deliberately to squash any hope that he might be released and to make him agree to sign whatever papers they put in front of him. They forced him to sign a paper stating that he had been gallivanting freely around Russia until August twenty-first. He told us this recently. But we have a document stating that he was in Stary Oskol, and it is unlikely that he could have traveled freely around Russia without papers or a means of transport and without informing his relatives. There are many inconsistencies in their ‘body of evidence.'”
“I am horrified by what has happened to my son”
On 10 November, Mikhail Loshchinin celebrated his forty-eighth birthday in the Pskov detention center.
“I am horrified by what has happened to my son,” says Mikhail’s mother. “I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching, since I didn’t expect the authorities to behave as they have behaved. And yet I didn’t have full faith in Russian law enforcement. My grandfather was in prison in 1937. He had been an officer in the White Army. The family was then living in Grozny, and my mom was small. Several former [White] officers lived in the vicinity. They would get together for readings and go on picnics; they were cultured folk. The entire group was arrested. Grandfather was the only one of them to survive because he didn’t sign anything [i.e., a confession]; the rest of them were shot. He never told anyone what price he had paid for this. My mom, still a kid then, brought care packages to him in prison.”
Olga has carefully researched Article 275 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code and argues that it has simply been “misapplied to a completely peaceful, innocent man.”
“We have a really good, tight-knit family. Although [Mikhail’s] dad lives in Petersburg, and we’re divorced, we have a decent relationship, and we’ve even started conversing more often now. And all the kids are tight-knit. Misha was always quite kind; we even wanted him to become a doctor, since kindness is quite valuable in a doctor. But he chose a different path in life. He wanted to be a programmer, and he’s been successful at it,” says Olga.
According to her, many of Mikhail’s friends in Luxembourg, where he had worked in recent years, are now deeply concerned about him.
“He always had a good head on his shoulders, and he became quite well known in Russian diaspora theatrical and cultural circles, and not only in those circles. He even did the sound for the Orthodox Church of Luxembourg,” says Olga. “There are videos on YouTube of him playing ‘Under the Blue Sky’ on the guitar in concert and his boss, a Frenchman, singing it in Russian. It is an ironic twist of fate that a person like can be destroyed so simply. . . . Summer is the time when theaters get ready for the high theatrical season, and right then Misha vanished. A support group has emerged, all of his friends. I honestly had no idea that there were so many of them.”
Mikhail’s friends have been writing petitions requesting his release from police custody, which his relatives have been passing on to his lawyer.
“Although Mikhail lived in Luxembourg, he visited us quite often recently. He has a girlfriend in Slovakia, and when he went to see her, he found ways to come through [Poland] and see us,” says Olga.
According to Loshchinin’s family, Mikhail has begun to suffer from retinal detachment while in custody.
“In 2024, he visited an ophthalmologist, who informed him that surgery was not necessary at the time, but that it would have to be performed immediately if he began seeing flashes in his line of sight. Now he has been seeing those flashes,” Olga explains. “It is hard to get proper medical care in prison, and I’m afraid that he may simply go blind in there. I can’t imagine that my son, who has done nothing nasty in his life, is now being treated as one of the most dangerous criminals, and all because he hadn’t cut off his ties with Russia. If you take someone’s phone and check their messages, every other person could be under suspicion.”
“Thousands of people across the country are being held without charge”
Loshchinin’s defense attorney declined to comment for this article because he is bound by a non-disclosure agreement.
According to our count, at least 148 people in Russia faced criminal charges of treason, espionage, and clandestine collaboration with foreigners in 2023, and at least 88 such cases were brought before the courts. The trend continued in 2024 and 2025. According to statistics on court rulings for the first half of 2025, as published by the Judicial Department of the [Russian] Supreme Court, 115 high treason cases were instigated, which was twice as many as in the first half of 2024. At the same time, according to data from Department One, the Supreme Court has underestimated the number of convictions in such cases by at least threefold.
“Mikhail Loshchinin wired money to a private individual in Ukraine,” explains Smirnov. “According to the security forces, this is a form of high treason, and it has existed for over ten years: providing financial assistance for activities contrary to the security of the Russian Federation. The FSB often takes advantage of this. They might have claimed, for example, that the young woman to whom Mikhail wired money works for the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] or is involved in the Territorial Defense Forces. Something like that. And that wiring her money was thus a criminal offense.”
The attorney is not surprised that Mikhail was detained in Pytalovo for a month without charges, staying in a hotel at his own expense and under guard.
“There are thousands of people across the country being held without charge. Some are under administrative arrest, while others are in former hotels refitted as [detention] centers, or in actual hotel rooms. Most often, police investigators need the time to get the go-ahead to file criminal charges. Moscow gives the go-ahead for such cases.”
“There is no good outcome in these situations,” Smirnov notes.
“They might sentence him up to thirteen years in prison. The only hope for release is through a prisoner exchange, and that would involve a political decision,” argues Smirnov. “How many people in Russia have been released in the last ten years via prisoner exchanges? A couple dozen, probably. And how many political prisoners are there in the country currently? Ten to fifteen thousand. [Mikhail’s] chances are a bit greater since he’s a Belgian national, of course. There are not so many Belgian nationals [in Russian prisons], and if Belgian politicians get involved in the campaign to secure his release, the chances will grow for sure.”
Olga, Mikhail’s mother, says that Belgian consular officers have tried on several occasions to get permission to visit him in the detention center but were turned down.
“He’s a Russian national, but Russia doesn’t recognize his Belgian citizenship,” says Smirnov. “Most countries don’t recognize dual citizenships: it’s a normal practice. So, Belgian consuls aren’t being allowed to see him. It’s been the usual practice for decades.”
Smirnov argues that people living abroad should not travel to Russia unless absolutely necessary “because it’s a big risk.” If travel is unavoidable, you should prepare in advance by purchasing a separate telephone, planning your itinerary with care, seeking advice from those in the know, and being ready for the fact that the border guards will question you and search all your devices.
Kushnir (2025), a film about the late pianist and antiwar protester Pavel Kushnir (in Russian and English, with subtitles)
Pavel Kushnir was a virtuoso pianist, a writer, and a courageous man whom the world discovered only too late. He died on July 27, 2024, in a Birobidzhan detention center following a dry hunger strike. The formal pretext for his arrest was a series of anti-war videos posted on a YouTube channel that had only 5 subscribers.
This film is an attempt to understand the man who played Rachmaninoff until his fingers bled, who dreamed of flying to Mars, who idolized Kurt Cobain, and who called the war by its true name while living in complete isolation.
We have gathered archival footage, previously unknown recordings of Pavel, fragments of his poignant cut-up novel, and memories from close friends and colleagues, including Clean Bandit soloist Grace Chatto, music expert Mikhail Kazinik, and publisher Dmitry Volchek. This is a story not just about a death in prison, but about an extraordinary life that became an act of art and resistance.
In this video:
Unique footage of Kushnir’s performances and artistic actions.
The story of an unmade avant-garde film and friendships with global stars.
The Birobidzhan Diary: a chronicle of loneliness and the fight against fascism.
Why a brilliant musician went unnoticed by the cultural establishment, but not by the prison system.
Our film about the pianist Pavel Kushnir has dropped. […] Honestly, the film was ready to go in late April, but we spent a long while navigating the legal maze around the music, copyrights, and permissions. That was not even the main reason for the delay, though. I wanted to wait until the media hype had subsided and we could take a look at Pavel’s legacy from a certain historical distance, to talk about him not as a victim (although that viewpoint is legitimate, of course) but as a rebel whose choice was deliberate. Similarly, if you will, there are different takes on Christ: some view him as a needless victim who arouses pity, and the more maudlin that pity, paradoxically, the stronger their hatred for his crucifiers; while others see him as a rebel whose heroism was deliberate.
In my opinion, seeing Pavel as a pure “victim” robs him of agency, turning him into an extra in someone else’s play, in which the crucifiers have all the starring roles.
The film is based on Pavel’s own diaries. In terms of composition, I reprised the structure of his screenplay for the unmade film The Six Weary Ones. Three states of madness—prophetic madness, creative madness, and the madness of protest—figure as the three aspects of his personality. As in Joyce, each of Kushnir’s chapters has its own color and symbol. We have added music to these chapters. The music for the red chapter, “Prophet,” is by Rachmaninoff. Bach supplies the music for the blue chapter, “Creator”: blue stands for the heavens and the cosmos, and fugues are cosmic in nature. The third, black-and-white chapter, dealing with rebellion and Birobidzhan, is set to Scriabin’s Prometheus, a [tone] poem about the first rebel in history. Camus writes, in The Rebel, that rebellion confers agency on us, turning us from beasts into human beings. Again, it’s all in the eye of the beholder: some feel pity for Prometheus, chained and tortured by the eagle, while others see in him the power of the unbroken human spirit. And Scriabin’s idea of transforming all of humanity meshes perfectly with the cosmic utopia begun in the previous chapter. Prometheus: The Poem of Fire is a mystery play; as [Russian poet Konstantin] Balmont put it, it is “a vision of singing, falling moons, of musical stardoms, arabesques, hieroglyphs, and stones sculpted from sound.”
The film is chockablock with musical, literary and philosophical allusions which I won’t burden you with now. But if you’re interested, I’ll set up a cozy stream on my tiny Telegram channel where we’ll discuss the film and unpack its hidden layers, and I’ll answer your questions. You can write in the comments about whether this idea seems viable, and I’ll decide what to do based on your feedback.
Once again I want to thank everyone who did their part and helped commemorate a major artist. Thanks to you, we raised 1,185 euros and 533,954.51 rubles [approx. 5,800 euros], which is not just a large sum but a phenomenally large sum, considering that the major media practically ignored our fundraising campaign. That being said, many friends and former colleagues supported us by reposting [our fundraising appealing], which is eloquent testimony to the fact that a person and his reputation are more vital than any institution, and for this I am endlessly grateful to them.
The money we raised was enough for several full-fledged scouting trips and location shoots. Considering the geographical scope of our shoots, which included traveling to Birobidzhan itself, our grassroots war chest was emptied at some point. It became clear that without outside help we wouldn’t be able to complete the project properly, avoid devolving into a Skype interview format, and pay all the courageous artists, editors, and cameramen who had agreed to shoot a film in Russia at their own peril. I understood that asking folks for money again was not a good plan. So, after consulting with our small team, I accepted an offer from the online platform Votvot. They covered our remaining expenses and, most importantly, agreed to our condition that the film would be freely available. Our promises to our donors have not been broken: this grassroots film is being released in a way that is accessible to the grassroots—on YouTube.
I want to thank my friend and colleague Alexander Urzhanov from the bottom of my heart: he was quite emotionally invested in this film and provided us with his fabulous production resources. I would also like to thank all the folks at Narra: they have asked me not to name them, but you know who you are. Misha, Dasha, Ira, and Nastya, I couldn’t have done it without you and by myself! Particular thanks go to Boris Barabanov and Darina Lukutina from Votvot, without whom this film would scarcely have been possible.
I would like to thank Pavel’s relatives for permitting us to use his voice to read his diaries. Getting ahead of myself, I should say that this is the only digitally generated thing in the film. Everything else was filmed or recorded using analog methods: the diaries, the posters, and the drawings of a certain incomparable artists were all done without synthetics or computer glitz. All you see is life’s pleasant graininess.
I thank Pavel’s friends for sharing their archives and letters, as well as everyone who appears in this film.
I have one final request to you. Watch this film tomorrow. More to the point, share this film. I’m afraid that the film will get lost in the ruthless algorithmic desert without your reposts. May this film find everyone who needs it.
Pavel Kushnir was a classical pianist. But according to Russian authorities, he was also a dangerous dissident. In July 2024, he died on hunger strike in a remote prison in Far East Russia. Who was Pavel Kushnir, and why did he end up in jail? Liza Fokht from BBC Russian has been trying to piece together Pavel Kushnir’s story.
“My friends died at the hands of Russian soldiers. Why can’t I talk about it?”
This question will cost Varvara Volkova 7 years in a Russian penal colony. Here’s her story.
Varvara was a flight attendant, not an impassioned political activist. In a neighbourhood chat, she stated the obvious: Russian forces are killing civilians in Ukraine. The prosecution framed it as “fake news” motivated by hatred toward the armed forces, and the court accepted it.
The mechanism used to go after her relies on a Soviet-style culture of snitching: a Russian tank driver complained about her comments, then a professional informer, who intentionally hunts dissidents, amplified the case and demanded she be jailed.
In fact, there’s a whole network of these informers — they call themselves “SMERSH.” For those who don’t know Russian history, it is a reference to Stalin’s WWII counter-intelligence service. It means “Death to Spies” — a direct revival of the terror methods of the 1930s. They published screenshots of her messages everywhere trying to ruin her life; claimed she called the soldier a “fascist”; said she offered to make tea for Ukrainian soldiers if they reached the Moscow region. For words spoken in anger, the system decided to smash her life to pieces.
There is a grim irony in this tragedy: the regime destroyed Varvara to protect the “honor” of the military and her accuser. But the tank driver who reported her is already dead: he was killed in the war earlier this March.
Observers abroad often underestimate the price of resistance in today’s Russia. It is not just a fine anymore, but years and years of one’s life. Varvara Volkova shows us the true bill — and it is devastating.
I track the consequences of speech in modern-day Russia, make sure to follow for more updates.
Preface by the Editorial Board: Below we publish the translation of an article of our Russian comrades about state repression in their country. The article reports, among others, about the situation of comrade Felix Eliseev. He has been in prison for 2.5 years as part of a 14-year prison term. Felix was sentenced for “treason” as he was accused of making propaganda against Putin’s imperialist war against Ukraine and sending money to Ukraine to buy weapons. While the prison authorities do everything to break him, Felix does not lose his spirit and endures his imprisonment stoically. (See https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/felix-eliseev-a-revolutionary-communist-in-russian-prison/)
We call readers to support Felix by spreading this information about a communist and anti-fascist serving an unjust sentence!
According to the human rights organization Memorial, there are currently over 1,000 political prisoners in Russia, while other groups estimate the number could be as high as 2,500. This number is three times higher than in 2020, more than twice as high as in 2022, and continues to grow. In 2025, there was a sharp increase in criminal cases under articles on “justification of terrorism,” “sponsoring terrorist activity,” and “treason.” This is not due to increased terrorism, but to the fact that the security forces, having perfected their repression mechanisms, have begun to intensify their crackdown on “sponsorship” cases, such as those of the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation, recognized as an extremist organization in Russia) or cases related to money transfers to the Ukrainian army, which occurred back in 2022. The term “terrorism” itself has become so vague that even the average person doesn’t always understand what it actually means.
Among political prisoners are many individuals with progressive leftist views, serving time for anti-war activities or “inaccurate” public statements online. The “Foundation for Support of Left-Wing Political Prisoners” provides support to at least some of these individuals. Among them are: defendants in the “Tyumen Case”; defendants in the “Chita Case”; Anton Orlov, a trade union and leftist activist, coordinator of the independent medical workers’ union “Action” in Bashkortostan; Daria Kozyreva, an activist from St. Petersburg known for her anti-war protests and criticism of the Russian army; Gagik Grigoryan, a young activist imprisoned in 2023 at the age of 17; Azat Miftakhov is a Russian mathematician and anarchist, sentenced in 2021 to six years in prison for allegedly setting fire to the United Russia office in 2018. After serving this sentence, he was arrested again in 2023 on charges of “justifying terrorism” in a private conversation with a prison cellmate and sentenced to four years in prison; defendants in the “Kansk teenagers case”; defendants in the “Network case”; Boris Kagarlitsky is a left-wing publicist known in many parts of the world; Ruslan Ushakov is the author of articles published on opposition Telegram channels, sentenced to eight years in prison for posts in a public chat.
The case of the communist Felix Eliseev
Another political prisoner is Felix Eliseev, a Russian communist, blogger, and administrator of the Telegram channels “She Fell Apart” and “Kolkhoznoye Madness.” He was arrested in December 2022 and charged with justifying terrorism. According to investigators, Eliseev posted two anti-war posts on his Telegram channel, one of which endorsed a Ukrainian Armed Forces helicopter strike on an oil depot in Belgorod. The charges were later upgraded, and Eliseev was charged with “treason”. The court alleges that he transferred funds through a cryptocurrency account to a “curator,” who used the funds to purchase equipment and weapons for Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers.
Felix, like many other political prisoners convicted of “terrorist and extremist” offenses, is serving his sentence under intense pressure from the prison administration. He is regularly placed in solitary confinement cells, where they do everything they can to break him mentally and physically.
However, political repression in Russia involves more than just horrific criminal cases of “terrorism,” “treason,” and other “betrayals of the nation.” It also includes the persecution of undesirable and dissenting youth who dare publicly speak out against the war and the ruling elite, thereby gathering many other concerned young people around them.
The “Stop Time” case
One example of such government abuse is the “Stop Time” case. The “Stop Time” case concerns the persecution by Russian authorities of members of the St. Petersburg street music group “Stop Time” – Diana Loginova (pseudonym Naoko), Alexander Orlov, and Vladislav Leontyev – for their participation in impromptu concerts, including one near the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station, where they performed anti-war songs by artists designated by the authorities as “foreign agents.” On October 16, 2025, Loginova was arrested and sentenced to 13 days of administrative arrest for performing a song by an artist unpopular with the authorities. The other members of the band were also arrested and sentenced to 12-13 days. These events resonated in the media (both pro-government and opposition) and society, becoming a topic of discussion in the context of artistic freedom and the tightening of censorship in modern Russia.
On October 29-30, the musicians received another 12-13 days of arrest, and on November 11, two of them were arrested for another 13 days. On November 23, the musicians were released from arrest. The lead singer and one of the band members left Russia that same day.
In many Russian cities, street bands followed “Stop Time’s” example and performed opposition songs by artists-foreign agents to large audiences in public squares. They also faced pressure from the authorities and harassment from Z-Neanderthals.
Also, recently, spiders in a jar have started eating each other. Criminal cases have been brought against several well-known military Z-bloggers for discrediting the army! More than two years after Strelkov’s imprisonment and Prigozhin’s murder, a new steamroller of repression is purging those loyalists who are too undesirable.
All of the above demonstrates that Russian society has no legal means to publicly express its attitude toward the events unfolding around it. For any word “against,” the sword of Damocles of Russian justice hangs over every citizen. Despite this, concerned Russians, especially young people, are finding ways to rally together and show the world that not all is lost in this country.
Meanwhile, cowardly security officials and government officials tremble at the mere thought that the masses will sooner or later awaken from their slumber and rise to deliver justice to the imperialist oppressors in the Kremlin. In Russia, literal punishments are being introduced for thought crimes. Thus, in September of this year, an administrative law punishing “searching for extremist materials” came into force. This law allows the FSB to view any citizen’s internet search history, and if it contains views of materials deemed extremist or terrorist, the user faces a visit from masked officers and a fine. The first cases under this law have already been filed.
Furthermore, the country is introducing a so-called “white list” for the internet—only those websites approved by Roskomnadzor are permitted to be accessed; others are inaccessible, and VPNs cannot be connected. So far, in the spirit of Russian tradition, this system is poorly functioning and flawed, but the day is not far off when Russian society will find itself locked in a “cheburnet.” (*)
Freedom for political prisoners!
For freedom of speech, conscience, and the internet!
Down with political repression!
Radical democratization of the country, not the fascist regime of a dictator!
All power to the working class and the working masses, not to a handful of oligarchic monopolists!
(*) Cheburnet is a mixture of two words: Чебурашка (Cheburashka) and internet. Cheburashka is a character from Soviet cartoon for children. Despite it is kind and helpful, in modern mass consciousness it is associated with Soviet censorship. So cheburnet basicaly means internet under the censorship of Russian government and intelligence agencies.
My name is Elena Nikolaevna Bogatova, and I am the mother of political prisoner Ilya Alexandrovich Shakursky. I am crying out for help to save my son so that he does not rot away in solitary confinement.
They took my only son away when he was twenty-one years old. He is now twenty-nine. He has been tortured. He has serious health problems that we still cannot solve. He still has eight years to serve, and they could turn him into a disabled person. I cannot help him on my own, so I am asking all caring people to help us.
It is impossible for a mother to know that her child is being destroyed, and that she cannot save him!
Although he committed no crime, he is in prison under the harsh Article 205 [of the Russian Criminal Code; Article 205 proscribes “terrorist acts”], enduring all the hardships of prison life, without ever receiving any encouragement; we cannot even hope for parole. Right now, [the prison authorities] want to turn him into repeat offender so that he cannot have any visits, phone calls, letters, or packages. They want to take everything away from him.
I ask you to write an appeal. I understand that there are many of us now, and everyone is exhausted. But we must stand together for the sake of our loved ones, for the sake of the younger generation, which is currently being destroyed. Hear the cry of a mother who cannot bear the pain for her son and for all those behind bars. If we push with our shoulders, the walls will collapse….
OVD-Info Faces a Critical Situation: We Have Lost All Our Ruble Donations
26.11.2025
Russian payment services have refused to continue working with us, without providing any explanation, and have cut off our ability to accept one-time and recurring donations. This has severed our connection to our main source of support—the 12,000 individuals who regularly transfer money to OVD-Info.
The services’ refusal to cooperate with us is one of the many manifestations of state pressure on human rights organizations and independent media. Some of them even had to close due to the loss of donations in rubles.
This is a severe blow to our work. With these donations we were able to pay for the work of defense lawyers and legal experts, travel to the regions, maintain our free hotline, and help those who are politically persecuted in Russia. Furthermore, regular donations allowed us to plan our long-term work and development.
We do not plan to close or reduce the scope of our work, because repression is not diminishing. Any political activity, expressing a view against the invasion of Ukraine, or criticism of Putin instantly becomes grounds for persecution. We simply cannot abandon Russians to face this brutal, repressive system alone. We are defending over 90 defendants in criminal cases, almost every day we send lawyers to police stations, courts, searches, penal colonies, and pre-trial detention centers. We answer dozens of messages and calls daily—and we want to continue doing this.
However, now everything depends on whether we can find another 12,000 people who will regularly support OVD-Info.
Yulia Lemeshchenko. Photo from the Memorial website
The Second Western Military District court in Moscow last week sentenced Yulia Lemeshchenko to 19 years’ imprisonment for high treason, sabotage, and preparing and training for an act of terrorism.
Yulia, 42, is a Russian citizen, born in Staryi Oskol, in Belgorod region. She lived in Voronezh in southern Russia, until 2014. Then she moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine, with her son and her husband, who had found work there. Later on the couple separated.
Yulia took up powerlifting and in 2021 was named Ukrainian women’s champion.
In 2024 Yulia did military training in Kyiv – firearms, explosives and flying drones – and returned to Russia, via a third country. She sabotaged power transmission infrastructure near St Petersburg, and in Voronezh conducted surveillance on Aleksei Lobodoi, an air force commander responsible for bombing Kharkiv.
Yulia was arrested in January this year. She did not deny the facts outlined in the prosecution case, but told the court that “from a moral standpoint” she considered herself not guilty. This is a translation of her final statement to the court, published by Mediazona.
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Ukrainian Champion in a Russian Court: Yulia Lemeshchenko’s Final Statement
As you see, I don’t have any sheets of paper and I haven’t especially prepared, but I think I will improvise. I will now probably say a few things that were already said during this hearing, but let this be a sort of summing-up, in a monologue.
So I already spoke here about the fact that, in any war, two sides clash, and each side insists that it is right and that its cause is just. I took one of these sides. I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but, all the same, for me, Ukraine is home. I love that country. And I love Kharkiv, with all my heart.
There is a district in Kharkiv called Severnaya Saltovka. About 500,000 people lived there. Half a million. A few people I knew lived there. My hairdresser lived there. After the Russian shelling and bombing, not a single house in that district was left undamaged. Not a single one. And I am not just talking about a few broken windows. I am talking about whole blocks of flats in ruins.
Right next to the block where I lived, there were explosions. In my block, on the ground floor, my neighbour Anya lived with her four-year-old son Nikita. A shell exploded right under their window. Their apartment was completely destroyed. What has happened to Anya and her son I don’t know. I don’t know whether they are still alive.
Friends of mine have died in this war, one relative – my second cousin – and colleagues of mine. War is monstrous. I could not stand aside. When war comes, people who are affected can either try somehow to fight, or they can flee. People flee – I don’t know – maybe because they are cowardly or weak. I don’t consider myself to be a cowardly or weak person. So I decided to fight back – to fight against Russian military aggression.
It is possible that, by saying these things, I am getting myself still deeper into trouble. But my honour, and my conscience, are important to me. I did what I believed to be necessary. I did what I could. To regret, to repent – who knows, maybe I will do that on my deathbed. But for now, what will be, will be. I have nothing further to say.
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When the court hearing began, Mediazona reported that the judge, Vadim Krasnov, read out evidence that Yulia gave after being arrested in January. After the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Yulia at first moved to Germany. In 2023 she returned to Ukraine and made contact with the “Free Russia” legion, but did not join.
In 2024, when she did her military training, the instructors – who did not answer questions about which part of the armed forces they served in – said that, by way of payment for her work, she could receive Ukrainian citizenship.
The judge asked if she had done so, to which she replied, with a smile, “not yet”.
During the hearing, Judge Krasnov asked Yulia why she had chosen such a radical method of struggle, rather than, for example, providing medical help to the wounded.
“I can only answer that question with another, rhetorical question”, she replied. “Why did Russia decide to use violent methods to destroy Ukrainian cities? A war had started. Do you understand?”
The judge responded that, by 2022, the war had already been underway for eight years. Yes, but it had become frozen, Lemeshchenko said. After the invasion, she wanted to help Ukraine however she could, and was invited to become a saboteur.
“How far were you prepared to go?” asked the judge. “I did not want to do anything that would take human lives”, Lemeshchenko replied. “They accepted that point. On that we had an agreement.”
The judge said that the sabotage Lemeshchenko carried out near St Petersburg left hospitals without electric light. She replied that the aim had been to paralyse a drone factory, that she was sincerely sorry if anyone in Petersburg had suffered. And that she and her son had many times sat in their apartment, without light, when Kharkiv was being bombed.
Lemeshchenko also told the court that, during interrogation, agents of the federal security service (FSB) had threatened to murder her, and pushed her head against a wall. She had tried to tell them the truth. She said that she did not retract her evidence – and nor would she complain about her treatment, as she did not believe that those responsible would be punished.
□ Here is Yulia’s statement in court, recorded with English interpretation. Yulia is recognised as a political prisoner by Memorial, and her case was reported by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
□ The last word in court by Anton Khozhaev, a trainee officer accused of desertion to the Ukrainian side, and more on Russian anti-war protesters
At the heart of Voices Against Putin’s War are ten speeches made in court by people who opposed Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and were arrested and tried for doing so. Most of them are now serving long jail sentences, for “crimes” fabricated by Vladimir Putin’s repressive machine.
Along with the speeches, we include other public declarations – social media posts, letters and interviews – in which the protagonists made their case; statements by two more persecuted activists, made outside court; and a summary of 17 other anti-war speeches in court. We hope that, by publishing these translations in English, these resisters’ motivations will become known to a wider audience.
Chapters 1-10 are each devoted to one protester, arranged chronologically by the date of the protester’s first conviction. United in their opposition to the Kremlin’s war, they divide roughly into four groups.
First is Bohdan Ziza (chapter 3), who lived not in Russia but in Ukraine – in Crimea, which has been occupied by Russian forces since 2014. In 2022 Ziza filmed himself splashing paint in the colours of the Ukrainian flag on to a municipal administration building. He was tried in a Russian military court and is serving a 15-year sentence.
Second are two young women from St Petersburg, Sasha Skochilenko (chapter 6) and Darya Kozyreva (chapter 8), prosecuted for the most peaceful imaginable protests against the war. Skochilenko, who posted anti-war messages on labels in a supermarket, was freed after more than two years behind bars, in August 2024, as part of a prisoner swap between Russia, Belarus and several Western countries. Kozyreva is serving a two-and-a-half year sentence, essentially for quoting Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, in public.
Third are three young men who deliberately damaged property, but not persons, to draw their fellow Russians’ attention to the anti-war cause. Igor Paskar (chapter 2) firebombed an office of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Alexei Rozhkov (chapter 9) firebombed a military recruitment centre – a form of protest used dozens of times across Russia in 2022. He fled to Kyrgyzstan, was kidnapped, presumably by the Russian security forces, and returned to Russia for trial. Ruslan Siddiqi (chapter 10), a Russian and Italian citizen, derailed a train carrying munitions to the Ukrainian front. He has been sentenced to 29 years, and has said that he can be seen as a “partisan”, and “classified as a prisoner of war”, rather than a political prisoner.
The fourth group of protagonists, jailed for what they said rather than anything they did, have records of activism for social justice and democratic rights stretching back decades: Alexei Gorinov (chapter 1), a municipal councillor in Moscow who dared to refer to Russia’s war as a “war” in public; Mikhail Kriger, an outspoken opponent of Russia’s war on Ukraine since 2014 (chapter 4); Andrei Trofimov (chapter 5); and Aleksandr Skobov (chapter 7), who was first jailed for political dissent in 1978, in the Soviet Union, and who 47 years later in 2025 told the court: “Death to the Russian fascist invaders! Glory to Ukraine!”
Two activists prosecuted for anti-war action, who made their statements outside court, are featured in chapters 11 and 12. Kirill Butylin (chapter 11) was the first person arrested for firebombing a military recruitment office, in March 2022. No record of his court appearance is available, but his defiant message on social media is: “I will not go to kill my brothers!” Savelii Morozov (chapter 12) was fined for denouncing the war to a military recruitment commission in Stavropol, when applying to do alternative (non-military) service.
The ten anti-war speeches in court recorded in this book are by no means the only ones. Another 17 are summarised in chapter 13. These speeches, along with others by defendants who railed against the annihilation of free speech, or protested against grotesque frame-ups, have been collected and published by the “Poslednee Slovo” (“Last Word”) website.
High-profile Russian politicians jailed for standing up to the Kremlin also made anti-war speeches in court, including Ilya Yashin of the People’s Freedom Party, sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in December 2022 for denouncing the massacres of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha and Irpin, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, sentenced in April 2023 to 25 years for treason. Both of them were freed, along with Sasha Skochilenko, in the prisoner exchange of August 2024. Other prominent political figures remain in detention for opposing the war, including Boris Kagarlitsky, a sociologist and Marxist writer, sentenced in February 2024 to five years for “justifying terrorism”, and Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the Golos election monitoring group, sentenced in May 2025 to five years for working with an “undesirable organisation”. Dozens of journalists and bloggers are behind bars too.
These better-known, politically motivated people are only a fraction of the thousands persecuted by the Kremlin.
The cases recorded by human rights organisations include thousands of Ukrainians detained in the occupied territories. In many cases their fate, and whereabouts, is unknown: they may be dead or imprisoned.
Thousands more Russians who have spoken out against the war, or been caught in the merciless dragnet by accident, are behind bars. So are “railway partisans” who sabotaged military supply trains, and others who denounced their regime’s support for Putin’s war, in Belarus.
In Chapter 14, we outline the resistance to the Kremlin’s war, the repression mobilised in response to it, and the scale of the twenty-first-century gulag that has been brought into being. Notes, giving sources for all the material in the book, are at the end.
People resisting injustice have for centuries, in many countries, made use of the courts as a public platform. Irish rebels against British colonial violence began doing so at the end of the eighteenth century. In Russia, the tradition goes back at least to the 1870s, when Narodniki (Populists), speaking to judges trying them for violent protests, denounced the autocratic dictatorship. The workers’ movements that culminated in the 1917 revolutions used courtroom propaganda widely. When Stalinist repression reached its peak in the 1930s, the major purge trials were designed to eliminate it: their format was prearranged, with abject, false confessions. The practice reappeared after the post-Stalinist “thaw”, in the 1965 trial of the dissident writers Andrei Siniavsky and Yulii Daniel.[1]
Courtroom speeches have again become a powerful weapon under Putin – and the Kremlin dictatorship is finding ways to get its revenge.[2] It added three years to Andrei Trofimov’s sentence (chapter 5) – for the fantastical, false “offences” of disseminating false information about the army and “condoning terrorism” – based solely on what he said at his first trial. Other anti-war prisoners, including Alexei Gorinov (chapter 1) have had years added on to their sentences, on the basis of false “evidence” provided by prison officers, or prisoners terrorised by those officers.
Why did they do it? Why did our protagonists make protests that carried the risk of many years in the hell of the Russian prison system? Why, when brought to court, did they choose to make these statements that carried further risk? They have weighed their words and spoken for themselves; no attempt will be made here to summarise. However it is noteworthy that all of them addressed their speeches to their fellow citizens, not to the government.
Andrei Trofimov told the court in his second trial that “Ukraine is my audience”, because “Russian society is dead and it is useless to try to talk to it” – but nevertheless went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that his short, sharp message from his first trial, ending “Putin is a dickhead”, was widely circulated in Russian media.
The others had greater hopes in Russian society, including the Ukrainian Bohdan Ziza, who, in the video for which he was jailed, underlined that: “I address myself, above all, to Crimeans and Russians.” In court he said his action was “a cry from the heart” to “those who were and are afraid – just as I was afraid” to speak out, but who did not want the war.
Alexei Rozhkov had no doubt that “millions of my fellow citizens, women and men, young and old, take an anti-war position”, but were deprived of any means to express it. Kirill Butylin appealed to others to make similar protests so that “Ukrainians will know, that people in Russia are fighting for them – that not everyone is scared and not everyone is indifferent.” As for the government, “let those fuckers know that their own people hate them”.
Aleksandr Skobov, now 67 and in failing health, explicitly addressed younger generations. In an open letter from jail, he recalled how as a socialist he had been a “black sheep” among Soviet-era dissidents, most of whom had now passed away. “The blows are falling on other people, most of them much younger.” While “sceptical about ‘pompous declarations about the passing-on of traditions and experience’”, nevertheless, “I want the young people who are taking the blows now to know: those few remaining Soviet dissidents stood side-by-side with them, have stayed with them and shared their journey.”
Given this unity of purpose, of seeking however unsuccessfully to connect with the population at large, we might see the protagonists as practising the “propaganda of the deed” – not in the sense that phrase was given in the early twentieth century by politicians and policemen, as acts of violence, but in its original, broader sense: as any action, violent or not, that stirred one’s fellow citizens to a just cause. For, while some of those whose words are in this book used violence against property, and some specifically justified Ukrainian military violence against Russian aggression, none used violence against people.
Here are two further observations. First: while all the anti-war resisters shared a common purpose, they started with a diverse range of world views. A profound moral sense of duty runs through some of their statements. “Do I regret what has happened?” Igor Paskar asked his judges. “Yes, perhaps I’d wanted my life to turn out differently – but I acted according to my conscience, and my conscience remains clear.” Or, as Alexei Rozhkov put it: “I have a conscience, and I preferred to hold on to it.”
Andrei Trofimov, in a similar vein, said at his second trial that “writ large, it is a matter of self-preservation” – not “the preservation of the body per se, of its physical health” but the preservation of conscience in this difficult situation, “my ability to tell black from white, and lies from truth, and, quite importantly, my ability to say out loud what I believe to be true”.
Ruslan Siddiqi voiced his motivation differently, in terms of political ideas about changing society. In letters to Mediazona, an opposition media outlet, he described his path towards anarchism. Expressing dislike for the “rigidity” of some anarchists and communists, he nevertheless envisaged a transition “from a totalitarian state to other forms of government with greater freedoms and further evolution into communities with self-government”.
The invasion of Ukraine changed things: anyone who opposed it was declared a traitor by the government. “In such a situation, it is not surprising that some would prefer to leave the country, whereas others would take up explosives. Realising that the war was going to be a long one, at the end of 2022 I decided to act militarily.”
By contrast, Alexei Gorinov founded his defence on pacifist principles, and quoted Lev Tolstoy on the “madness and criminality of war”. Being tried “for my opinion that we need to seek an end to the war”, he could “only say that violence and aggression breed nothing but reciprocal violence. This is the true cause of our troubles, our suffering, our senseless sacrifices, the destruction of civilian and industrial infrastructure and our homes.”
Sasha Skochilenko was still more explicit: “Yes, I am a pacifist” she told the court. Pacifists “believe life to be the highest value of all”; they “believe that every conflict can be resolved by peaceful means. I can’t kill even a spider – I am scared to imagine that it is possible to take someone’s life. […] Wars don’t end thanks to warriors – they end thanks to pacifists. And when you imprison pacifists, you move the long-awaited day of the peace further away.”
Savelii Morozov told the military recruitment commission that he would not refuse to fight in all wars, but in this particular, unjust war. A war in defence of one’s homeland could be justified, but not the “crime” being perpetrated in Ukraine.
For Darya Kozyreva, the central issue is Ukraine’s right to self-determination, asserted by force of arms. The war is a “criminal intrusion on Ukraine’s sovereignty”, she told the court. While identifying herself in an interview as a Russian patriot – “a patriot in the real sense, not in the sense that the propagandists give that word” – Kozyreva justified Ukrainian military resistance. Ukraine does not need a “big brother”; it will fight anyone who tries to invade, she said. In Russia, even some of Putin’s political opponents “do not always realise that Ukraine, having paid for its sovereignty in blood, will determine its own future”. She wants to believe in “a beautiful future where Russia lets go of all imperial ambition”.
Aleksandr Skobov expressed the hope that Russia will be defeated militarily in still more categorical terms. He spelled out in court three principles of his political organisation, the Free Russia Forum: the “unconditional return to Ukraine of all its internationally recognised territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea”; support for all those fighting for this goal, including Russian citizens who joined the Ukrainian armed forces; and support for “any form of war against Putin’s tyranny inside Russia, including armed resistance”, but excluding “disgusting” terrorist attacks on civilians.
Second: these anti-war speeches have much to tell us not only about Russia and Ukraine, but about the increasingly dangerous world we live in, in which Putin’s slide to authoritarianism has been succeeded by right-wing, authoritarian turns in the USA and some European countries. Russia’s imperial war of aggression has been followed by Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza, in which multiple war crimes – mass murder of civilians, the use of starvation as a weapon, deliberate blocking of aid, and the targeting of journalists, aid workers and international agencies – have been facilitated by the same Western powers that offer lip service to Ukraine’s national rights.
The two aggressor nations, Israel and Russia, aligned with different geopolitical camps, are subject to analogous driving forces. Nationalist ideology supercedes rational economic management; expansionist violence supercedes democracy; the decline of Western neoliberal hegemony paves the way for militarist thuggery. Capital’s need for social control underpins near-fascist methods of rule. Readers may recognise, in the Russian state’s dystopian efforts of 2022-23 to punish its dissenting citizens as “terrorists” and “traitors”, patterns that are retraced in the unhinged witch-hunts of 2024-25 in the USA and western Europe, against opponents of the Gaza slaughter.
The powers on both sides of the geopolitical divide are frightened of similar things: the defiance and resilience of the opponents of Putin’s war, and the anger that has brought millions of people on to the streets of north American and European cities, in protest at the Gaza genocide. They are frightened of beliefs that are taking shape, in varying forms, that humanity can and should strive for a better, richer life than that offered by the warmongers and dictators. Some of these beliefs are expressed in the chapters of this book.
□ Thursday 20 November 2025, 7:00 pm. TRY ME FOR TREASON. Readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, and book launch for Voices Against Putin’s War. Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E1 5QJ. Register free on Eventbrite here. Flyer attached.
[1] T.D. Sullivan, Speeches from the dock, or, Protests of Irish patriotism (P.J. Kennedy, New York, 1904); Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: a history of the populist and socialist movements in 19th century Russia (Phoenix Press, 2001), Marshall Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
On May 16, 2022, the Ukrainian artist Bohdan Ziza poured blue and yellow paint – the colours of his country’s flag – on to a municipal administration building in his home town, Yevpatoria, in Crimea.
Ziza posted a video of the action online, with a call to “adherents of graffiti culture, all the vandals of Crimea, Russia and Belarus” to protest against “the most horrific war” unleashed by “[Vladimir] Putin and the machine of state.” He was soon arrested and charged with “committing a terrorist act” and “incitement to terrorism”.
In June 2023, Ziza used his final statement to the Russian military court that sentenced him to fifteen years’ imprisonment to denounce the war again: “My action was a cry from the heart, from my conscience, to those who were and are afraid — just as I was afraid — but who also did not want this war.”
Ziza is one of ten anti-war protesters whose speeches are published this month, in English translation, in Voices Against Putin’s War: protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts. The collection also includes two statements made outside court, related interviews and letters, a summary of seventeen other anti-war speeches in court, and a survey of the anti-war protest movement and the repression against it.
In Russia, dissenters since the Populist rebels of the 1870s have used their final statement in court to urge resistance to power. The tradition flourished in the workers’ movements that preceded the 1917 revolution, was broken by the 1930s Stalinist show trials with their formulaic confessions, and reborn after the 1950s “thaw”, with dissidents such as the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yulii Daniel.
In 2022, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine was followed by a brutal crackdown on civil society in occupied territory, Crimea included, as well as repression of domestic dissent. Protest was driven off the streets. Individual non-violent direct actions like Ziza’s, or writing or speaking against the war, were punished with long jail sentences, such as those now being served by most of the protagonists in Voices Against Putin’s War.
Ruslan Siddiqi, the Russian-Italian anarchist, went further: he is serving twenty-nine years’ imprisonment for derailing a train that was carrying munitions to Russian army units in Ukraine.
In court, he declared himself a prisoner of war, rather than a political prisoner: “My targets were Russian military equipment and the logistical chains used to transport military hardware and fuel. I wanted to impede military operations against Ukraine.”
Acting according to one’s conscience, in a dystopian world of militarism and big lies, was a central consideration for many of the protagonists.
Alexei Rozhkov, who firebombed a military recruitment centre in Sverdlovsk region, fled to Kyrgyzstan while on bail, before he was kidnapped by Russian special forces and returned to be put on trial.
He told the court that sentenced him to sixteen years: “Although I have never been a politician or a statesman, I could not remain indifferent when the war began. I have a conscience, and I preferred to hold on to it.”
The book’s protagonists oppose the war from a wide range of political viewpoints. On one hand, there are pacifists such as Sasha Skochilenko, the artist jailed for seven years for replacing labels in a supermarket with handwritten anti-war messages (and later freed in a prisoner swap between Russia and Western countries), who told the court: “Wars don’t end thanks to warriors — they end thanks to pacifists.”
On the other hand, there are political activists who spoke of Ukraine’s right to resist Russia militarily. Aleksandr Skobov, 67, the oldest protagonist, first jailed for activity in the socialist wing of the Soviet dissident movement in 1978, refused to stand when the judge came into court.
Skobov wished death on the “murderer, tyrant and scoundrel Putin.” He said he would never stop calling on honest Russians to join the Ukrainian armed forces, and for air strikes on Russia’s military facilities.
No less adamant in support of Ukraine was the youngest protagonist, Darya Kozyreva, 19, sentenced to two years and eight months’ imprisonment for laying flowers and a poem at the statue of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, in St Petersburg.
In court, Bohdan Ziza denounced not only the 2022 invasion but also the frenzied assault on Crimean Tatar organisations that preceded it in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. “Those who so passionately seek ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine have not opened their eyes to the Nazism in Russia, with its ephemeral ‘Russian world’,” with which the armed forces have “tried to extirpate Ukrainian identity”.
(Last month Ziza, on his own demand, had the Russian citizenship that was imposed on him along with all Crimean residents revoked. He is today in Vladimir Central jail, where “politicals” have been incarcerated since the 19th century.)
Voices Against Putin’s War results from the work of a small volunteer group of translators supporting Russian anti-war organisations, of which I was part, and is supported by the European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine. On top of the speeches published, we have summarised seventeen more from the wonderful “Poslednee Slovo” (“last word”) website.
The trials highlighted in the book also provide a snapshot of Russia’s wartime lurch towards a form of fascism. Against those who take non-violent direct action, charges under terrorism laws were standardised in 2022, with jail sentences of between ten and twenty years. Torture of detainees is routine.
Long sentences are designed to terrorise people into silence: Andrei Trofimov got ten years for social media posts justifying Ukrainian military actions against Russia.
For his two-minute speech in the military court, which ended “Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a dickhead” he was charged with “condoning terrorism” and “defaming the army”: a further three years were added to his sentence.
The monstrosity of Russia’s domestic repression may properly be understood in the context of the bloodbath it has visited on Ukraine, and especially on the occupied territories.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and wounded in action, and millions of Ukrainian civilians have been uprooted from their homes by bombing. Added to that, people in the occupied areas have faced enforced imposition of Russian citizenship, mass deportations including of children (the basis of a case against Putin in the International Criminal Court), legal nihilism, and an economic slump.
The primary instrument of social discipline in the occupied areas is enforced disappearances, including imprisonment. In September 2024, Ukraine’s register of persons “missing under special circumstances” counted some 48,324 names, of which 4,700 were confirmed by the Ukrainian government to be in captivity, although the true number may be far higher.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe estimated that 16,000 people on the register were adult civilians. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group identified 5,000 victims of enforced disappearances while preparing material for the International Criminal Court, and the Ukrainian ombudsman is working on 1,700 such cases. (All these numbers relate to civilians detained or missing, as distinct from Ukrainian prisoners of war, of which there are some 8,000–10,000.)
In short, Russia has taken many thousands of civilian prisoners in the occupied territories, whose fates often remain unknown. Many are political prisoners: 585 journalists, community leaders and activists from newly-occupied territories identified by human-rights organizations, 265 counted by the Crimean Human Rights Group, and others.
Furthermore, there are the thousands of civilian prisoners jailed by the so-called “People’s Republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk between 2014 and 2022, including for political offences, who have been transferred to prisons in Russia.
Alongside this orgy of violence, Russia’s machine of domestic repression has gone into overdrive.
A swathe of new censorious laws, for instance penalizing “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian military” (which includes calling the war a war) have been added to the pre-existing laws on “foreign agents”, “undesirable organizations” and “extremism” from the last decade. Deranged police sweeps of people whose critical comments are harvested from social media have intensified.
The leading human-rights organisation Memorial: Political Prisoners Support, now based abroad, lists over 3,000 political detainees today, compared to just 50 in 2015 and 420 in 2021. After the post-Stalin “thaw”, historians reckon the number of political detainees in the Soviet Union fell to 5,000-10,000 in the 1970s (in the fifteen-republic union, with a population nearly twice that of Russia alone).
The trend reflected in these numbers justifies the term we have used in Voices Against Putin’s War: a “21st-century gulag.”
Amidst an international tide of rising right-wing authoritarianism and militarism, culminating in the genocide in Gaza, the speeches in the book are significant far beyond Russia. In his foreword, John McDonnell, a left-wing Labour MP in the UK, calls them “an inspiration to all those across the globe who see an injustice, and who refuse to passively comply”, from Israeli draft refuseniks and Palestine Action supporters in Britain to women demonstrating for life and liberty in Iran. That is where hope lies in our dark times.
□ Thursday 20 November, 7:00 p.m. TRY ME FOR TREASON. Readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, and book launch for Voices Against Putin’s War. Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E1 5QJ. Register free on Eventbrite here.
On Chaplygin Street in Moscow. Photo by anatrrra. Used with their permission
EXTERIOR: A neo-classical building in Moscow’s old German quarter. A plaque on the wall reads, “Western District Military Court No 2”. A group of actors and journalists mill around on the lawn.
INTERIOR: A large hall with a grand staircase. Through the frame of a metal detector stands a statue of Lady Justice in her blindfold, holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other.
A commotion. Several portly guards in flak jackets, with a dog on a leash, escort two handcuffed women through the hall. One, about 5ft tall with big eyes and curly hair, is Yevgenia Berkovich, a 39-year-old poet and theatre director. She is dressed in a white shirt and black trouser-suit. The other, slightly taller, wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and large owlish glasses, is Svetlana Petriychuk, a 44-year-old playwright.
The two women are led into a courtroom and placed in a cage of bullet-proof glass. A bailiff lets in the spectators, who sit down on the upholstered, green benches. Berkovich mischievously sticks out her tongue as photographers’ cameras flash and click. Yuri Massin, the judge, looks towards Berkovich.
Massin: Are you ready for the proceedings? Berkovich: Well, it depends on what will happen.
What happened was a show trial that revealed the radicalisation of the Russian state in the past few years. By the time proceedings began on May 20th 2024, Berkovich and Petriychuk had already been in detention for more than a year, having been charged with “propaganda and the justification of terrorism”. In the eyes of the regime, they had committed a crime by writing and staging a play called “Finist, the Bright Falcon”. Part docu-drama, part fable, “Finist” tells the story of the thousands of Russian women who, from 2015, were seduced online by professional recruiters from Islamic State (IS), and travelled to Syria to marry jihadists. Many of these women received lengthy sentences on their return home. The play premiered in 2020 to critical acclaim and was performed across the country.
As with any show trial, this one’s outcome was preordained, and its purpose was to justify the existing system and demarcate the ideological limits of the state. In doing so, it elucidated the ultra-conservative, anti-Western belief system that has expanded across public life since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Berkovich and Petriychuk were the first artists to be jailed since Soviet times for the content of their work—or, more precisely, the thoughts of their characters. But as theatrical professionals, they managed to turn the trial into their show.
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