2021 Winter letter marathon for the Ukrainian political prisoners of the Kremlin

Most of us will spend the cozy winter holidays with our family and good food. But there are at least 102 Ukrainian political prisoners of the Kremlin who will spend them inside damp prison walls, with prison grub, thousands of kilometers away from their family, despite having committed no crime, forgotten by the world…

Or are they not forgotten? We can show them that we remember and that the world is watching the Putin regime’s crimes closely. That’s why we are launching the traditional winter letter marathon for the Ukrainian political prisoners of the Kremlin, to give them a bit of warmth before Christmas and the New Year.

This year, at least 102 Ukrainian citizens sentenced without a crime will meet the winter holidays behind bars in Russia and occupied Crimea. At least 200 Ukrainian citizens will spend them in the prison basements of occupied Donbas, i.e. the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics.” Among them are the human rights defender Emir-Usein Kuku; Server Mustafaev, coordinator of Crimean Solidarity, the human rights NGO helping families of political prisoners in Crimea; citizen journalists Marlen Asanov and Remzi Bekirov, jeweler Victor Shur, journalist Dmitry Shtyblikov, servicemen Yuriy Gordiychuk and Pavlo Korsun, museum employee Olena Pekh, musician Valeriy Matiusenko, and many others.

For them, letters from the free world are a gulp of freedom; they connect them with the outside world and offer huge moral support. Letters remind them that they are not forgotten, that people are fighting for their liberation and waiting for their release. We have full instructions for writing a letter to prisoners in Russia and occupied Crimea below.

If you want to write to a person in occupied Donbas, please send the letter to the Center of Civil Liberties: 01024 Kyiv, Baseina 9-G, of.25. Even if we don’t find a way to get them into occupied Donbas, we’ll give them to the relatives of the prisoners.

Invite your friends to join in! Make a photo of your letter or take a selfie with a postcard and post it on social media with the hashtags #WinterMarathon #LetMyPeopleGo #PrisonersVoice. You can also invite them to the Facebook event.

The marathon will continue until the end of January.

NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF THE PRISONERS

You can open this table in a separate tab as well.

There are three ways of writing to the prisoners:
(1) by traditional mail;
(2) via the Russian online service RosUznik (not for all the Kremlin’s hostages);
(3) through FSIN-pismo, a system for sending prisoners electronic messages in the Russian prison system (also not for all the hostages).

In all cases, the message you are conveying should be politically neutral.

A certain challenge is that Russia’s penitentiary system delivers to its prisoners only the messages written in Russian. De jure the prison staff has to translate the correspondence in foreign languages, but this is not always the case. Thus you can either try writing in Russian or use RosUznik, and its activists will make the translation.

…Thank you for the letter. Receiving letters cheers you up and gets you morally distracted from melancholy, sadness, and pain… All the best and, God willing, see you one day.