“Of course letters are an emotional support. They gave me strength,” answers 20-year-old Kevin Lick when asked by taz what importance letters had for him during his year and a half in prison in Russia. Letters also mean protection, says Lick – if a prisoner receives a lot of mail, it signals to the prison staff that people are following his fate.
The German-Russian dual national Kevin Lick was arrested in February 2023 and sentenced to four years in prison for treason in December of the same year. Lick had taken photos of a military unit in Maikop, southern Russia, where he was living at the time, and tried to forward them to the German embassy in Moscow. Lick later wrote in his Telegram channel that he wanted to help solve Russian war crimes. On August 1, 2024, he was released in a major prisoner exchange and now lives in Würzburg, where he is in the 12th grade of a high school.
People Lick didn’t know personally sent him numerous letters and postcards, both in traditional paper form and electronically, for which there are special services. “Various people from all over Russia wrote to me. There were also letters from abroad – from Salt Lake City, from Munich, from Paris,” says Lick. But the letters from abroad were always written in Russian, because prison censorship does not allow foreign languages. Once, he says, he didn’t receive any letters at all for two weeks. “Because the prison authorities wanted to put pressure on me.”
Lick is one of the youngest “politzeki”, or “political prisoners”. With their words or actions they oppose the regimes in Russia and Belarus. They usually receive draconian prison sentences. The fact that Licks was comparatively mild was due to his young age. At the human rights organization Memorial There are currently 1,386 political prisoners in Russia listed. The NGO Viasna currently ascribes this status to 1,145 people in Belarus.
Strong instrument of support
Until recently, 25-year-old anarchist activist Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada was one of them. “When you receive a letter from an unknown person from another country, he tells you in detail about his life, includes photos and has clearly made a great effort, it makes you very happy,” he tells taz in an interview. “This really is a powerful tool of support – letters are the most valuable thing an inmate has.”
Gaevsky-Khanada, who has both Belarusian and Japanese citizenship, was arrested in Minsk in 2020 shortly after the protests against the fraudulent presidential elections began and was released in June 2025 along with 13 other political prisoners. He was deported from Belarus to Lithuania and is now studying at Vilnius University.
Before his arrest, he sent letters to political prisoners himself and often didn’t know what to write. Now he says: “Even everyday little things are very interesting. People there lack a lot of visual variety; they need photos, printouts, pictures.” This is so important because there are no colors in the Belarusian prisons, everything is gray and anonymous. The letters are not only the only way to receive photos, but also to find out what is going on in the world. “Every letter means joy. Not only for yourself, but also for others.” You also show the mail to your fellow prisoners.
Unfortunately, letter traffic is now severely restricted; often only mail from close relatives gets through to the prisoners, says Gaevsky-Khanada, but there is no guarantee there either. Withholding letters is intended to give political prisoners the impression that they have been forgotten. “The prison staff even tell you this directly: ‘You don’t get any letters, so you’ve been forgotten.’”
Letters as a means of solidarity
Because of this problem, Marco Fieber from the NGO Libereco, which campaigns for human rights in Belarus and Ukraine, recommends sending photos of the letters to his organization so that they can be forwarded to them electronically after the prisoners are released. The organization provides information on how letters can be sent to Belarusian political prisoners and to Ukrainian civilians abducted in Russia or Russian-occupied territories. Letters are a means of showing solidarity, fever told the taz.
“In general, we call for people not to just select the most prominent prisoners because they already get a lot of mail,” says Fieber. Libereco not only provides instructions on the homepage, but also regularly organizes workshops. There, people from the Belarusian and Ukrainian diaspora as well as people without language skills can write letters – supported by machine translation and native speakers.
In addition to organizations, there are also private individuals like Ira P. (the full name is known to the editors), that encourage you to write letters. The self-employed PR manager for cultural projects left Russia after the major invasion began. She came to Berlin on a humanitarian visa and now regularly writes letters to political prisoners. From time to time she also organizes informal collective writing workshops.
While you are not allowed to write about politics or the prisoner’s criminal proceedings under any circumstances, a film you have recently seen is a suitable topic, she tells the taz. She often writes about her travels. One of the prisoners once wrote to her in a reply that she had never traveled as much in her life as she did through her letters. Ira P. hopes for more comrades-in-arms in the future: “I would like people to develop a new habit – writing letters to political prisoners over coffee in the morning.”