Political prisoners of the Kremlin, past and present
Date and time:
Tuesday 30 September, 2025
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
Swedenborg Hall
20–21 Bloomsbury Way
London
WC1A 2TH
Join us for a powerful conversation on the experiences of Ukrainian political prisoners in history and today. The discussion will feature Maksym Butkevych, human rights defender and member of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and Stanislav Aseyev, journalist, human rights activist, and veteran, both of whom were imprisoned by the Russian regime. They will be joined by historian Oksana Kis to examine patterns of repression and resistance across eras, and to consider how these histories shape the ongoing struggle for freedom, justice, and accountability today.
Speaker
Maksym Butkevych
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.
Speaker
Stanislav Aseyev
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.
Speaker
Oksana Kis
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.
