About Navalny
16.02.2026
It’s Ksenia, and today my letter is going to be quite personal.
Two years ago this day started well for me. For the second time that month my parents had managed to visit me in the detention centre — almost four hours with the people closest to me, even if it was through glass, on a phone line that was being listened to. Isn’t that happiness? Visit days are the happiest days of all for any prisoner. You wait for them, crossing off the dates on the calendar. We had a good chat. My parents, of course, had brought all sorts of treats in a parcel. So I went back to my cellmates with bags of food.
It was a Friday. After lunch a guard, as always, passed a huge stack of letters through the hatch in the door. I climbed up onto my “palm tree” (that’s what the top bunk is called in prison) with the letters and started going through them. The weekend was ahead; there was no hurry.
My cellmates — two women accused of economic crimes — tried to keep up with what was happening in the world and never missed the news. I’d made my peace with that, and every time they turned on the TV I just tried to retreat into my own thoughts and get on with my own things.
But what the newsreader said that evening was impossible to miss. As if it were a completely routine item, he read out a prison service press release: “…Alexei Navalny has died in the colony in Kharp.”
It was news you couldn’t believe. And I didn’t. Over the weekend there was nothing about Alexei on the news. Silence. As if nothing had happened. On Monday morning my lawyer came and confirmed it was true. And honestly, even now, two years later, I still can’t fully accept that Alexei is gone.
I worked as coordinator of his office from 2017 to 2021, until we were declared extremists. Alexei lived and worked in Moscow, and I in Tomsk. I met him in person three or four times: at conferences in Moscow and when he and his team came to our city. That’s where he was poisoned for the first time, in 2020. After that poisoning and his miraculous survival, it seemed that Navalny was somehow invincible, a hero out of myths and legends.
Every time Navalny was given a new sentence, there were people who said confidently, “He won’t serve that long, he’ll get out sooner.” I wanted to believe it too.
Two years ago on this day, another illusion collapsed — that “Alexei will be out soon anyway”. And today there are hundreds of people in prison about whom we sometimes say the very same words: “he won’t serve the full term”, “she’ll be exchanged”, “he won’t be in there that long”.
Of course we have to hope for the best. But at the same time we can’t sit idle. We don’t know when a new thaw, an amnesty or new prisoner exchanges will come to Russia. Unfortunately, it’s possible that political prisoners will be behind bars for years to come. For those of us who are free, what is happening around us is sometimes hard and depressing, but for those behind bars it is even harder. To get through these dark times and stay healthy, political prisoners need our support.
This help isn’t something abstract. It’s the journey for parents to a visit, it’s medicines that could save someone’s life, it’s a decent food parcel with fruit and vegetables.
I know how much people’s support means; sometimes it’s literally the difference between despair and the strength to keep going. I know for sure that Alexei wouldn’t want us to give up and despair.
Let’s not sit idle, and let’s help those who need our support so much right now.
Kind regards,
Ksenia Fadeeva