Moscow’s most infamous prison now forbids inmates from writing the phrase ‘political prisoners’ in private correspondence

Guards at Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison have forbidden inmate Ilya Vasilyev, jailed for supposedly “false reports” about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from writing the phrase “political prisoners” in his personal correspondence. 

According to Vasilyev’s defense attorney, he was recently summoned for a conversation with a Federal Penitentiary Service officer and told that his mail had been confiscated because he writes the term “political prisoners.” “That language is prohibited because there are no political prisoners in Russia. There are just prisoners,” the officer told Vasilyev. He was also instructed not to discuss his criminal case in letters, even though his trial is being held in open court without any classified evidence.

The meeting ended with the officer demanding that Vasilyev sign a document stating that he had no complaints about the prison’s censorship policies. The inmate’s attorney, human rights lawyer Gevorg Aleksanyan, told the news outlet OVD-Info that he has never encountered such a document before.

Police arrested Ilya Vasilyev in June 2024 on charges of spreading illegal “disinformation” about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because of a Facebook post written in English where Vasilyev criticized Vladimir Putin’s rejection of a Christmas 2022 truce in Ukraine.

Last month, the head of the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council denied that political repressions continue in contemporary Russia, describing the persecution of antiwar citizens as “minimal contamination control.”

According to OVD-Info, the Russian authorities have prosecuted at least 4,590 people for political reasons since 2012.