When Ilya Yashin was sent to Moscow’s Lefortovo jail for condemning Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he knew life would be tough. Yet his months spent languishing in solitary confinement, locked in a bare “punishment cell” just two metres long, were bleaker than he could have imagined.
“It’s in the basement. Very humid, very cold,” says the Russian dissident. “They wake you up at 5am. They lift up the bed and lock it to the wall so you can’t lie down. All you have in this cell is a toilet and a sink.
“You are given a pen, paper and books for one and a half hours a day. The rest of the day, you just look at the wall. You gradually, very slowly, go insane. It can be compared to torture… Every day, you feel like your health is going, your eyesight is going.”
When his close friend Alexei Navalny was fatally poisoned in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024, Yashin wondered if the same fate awaited him.
He was surprised to be released through a prisoner exchange with the West a few months later. Two years on, lives are still being lost in the war he criticised – and he genuinely believes his country’s “psychopath” president may attack Nato.
