Political prisoners of the Kremlin, past and present

Political prisoners of the Kremlin, past and present. 30 September 2025. Swedenborg Hall.

Speakers

Maksym Butkevych is a human rights advocate, journalist, public figure, former military serviceman, and former prisoner of war. He is a co-founder of Hromadske Radio and the ZMINA Human Rights Centre, was a board member of the Ukrainian branch of Amnesty International. From the first days of the full-scale Russian invasion, he joined the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In June 2022, was taken prisoner. In occupied Luhansk, the so-called ‘LPR’ court sentenced Butkevych to thirteen years in a high-security penal colony as a ‘war criminal’ in a fabricated case. After two years and four months of imprisonment, he was released from captivity. He returned to Ukraine as part of an exchange on 18 October 2024. Photo: Oleksii Arunyan.

Stanislav Aseyev is a writer, publicist, and veteran of the Russian-Ukrainian war. He spent two-and-a-half years in captivity in occupied Donetsk in the secret Izolyatsia prison. Aseyev is the author of six books, including The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, and numerous articles on systems of torture and the destruction of personality in totalitarian systems, including Syria’s Sednaya death camp.

Oksana Kis is a feminist historian and anthropologist, and Head of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine. Her book Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag was included in the Ukrainian Book Institute’s list of the thirty most significant books of the Ukrainian Independence in 2021. Dr Kis is the President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History. Her areas of expertise include the Ukrainian national anti-Soviet resistance in the 1940–50s, gendered experiences of Ukrainian female political prisoners in the Gulag, and gender transformations in post-socialist countries.

Moderator
Samantha Knights KC is a barrister at Matrix specialising in public law and international human rights. She is Chair of the Advisory Board of the Human Rights Advocacy Centre, former Adjunct Professor at the University of Miami School of Law, and author of two books on law, rights and religion. She has worked on numerous cases before the European Court of Human Rights as well as the domestic courts in England and Wales.

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