Clutching a toothbrush and toothpaste, Kevin Lik waited for six hours in the main office of penal colony 14, near Arkhangelsk in Russia’s far north-west. It was late in the evening of Sunday 28 July, and the 19-year-old says he had no idea what was about to happen. “Maybe you’re taking me to be shot,” he said to the governor of the colony. “Don't worry, everything will be fine,” came the reply.
Kevin says he was told the same thing by an officer from Russia's FSB state security agency a year and a half ago, before they locked him up. “I lost a lot of weight in the colony,” he explains shyly, as we speak on a video call. Kevin is about 6ft 4in tall (1.9m) but weighs only 11 stone (70kg).
Along with American journalist Evan Gersh kovich, he is one of 16 people released by Russia on 1 August in a prisoner swap with the US and other Western countries. The teenager – with dual Russian and German citizenship – was arrested last year while still at school and became the youngest person in modern Russian history to have been convicted of treason.
I ask if he considers himself more Russian or German. “It's a very complicated question,” he replies. Kevin was born in 2005 in Montabaur, a small town in the west of Germany. His Russian mother, Victoria, had married a German citizen and, although the marriage didn’t last, she and her son stayed. They visited Russia every couple of years until Victoria decided she wanted to go back permanently – she missed her relatives and hometown of Maykop in the North Caucasus. Kevin was 12 when they made the move there in 2017.
They lived on the outskirts of town, in an apartment with views of mountains and a military base. Kevin says he loved walks in the countryside and collecting plants for his herbarium, and also studying at school. He enthusiastically shows me certificates from national and local academic competitions that he won. It was the 2018 Russian presidential election that sparked his interest in politics, he says. His mother – a public sector healthcare worker – would come home and say she and her colleagues had been bussed to polling stations where they were told: “Vote for Putin, or we’ll take away your bonus.”
He was only 12 at the time, but says he understood “there was almost no democracy in Russia”. Kevin was enraged that almost every classroom in his school had a portrait of Putin.
“They constantly told us that school is not a place for politics. It’s just not right to hang portraits and promote a personality cult like that,” he says. A year or so later, he caused a scandal when he swapped a school portrait of Putin for one of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. “One teacher said that during Stalin’s time, I would have been shot,” Kevin recalls – while a sympathetic teacher, he says, advised him to be careful. His mother was called to the school: “They scolded her, yelled at her,” he says. The BBC has asked the school for comment, but has not had a response. As Kevin approached his final school year, his mother decided they should move back to Germany. By this time, Russia had invaded Ukraine and, in order to leave the country permanently, Kevin’s name had to be removed from the military register.
Victoria was invited to the enlistment office to sort out her son’s paperwork. When she got there on 9 February 2023, the police met her. Kevin says they groundlessly accused her of swearing in public. She was sentenced to 10 days’ detention, which meant they had to delay their plans to leave.
Left alone, Kevin stopped going to school. He ventured out for a few hours one day, and says that when he returned to the apartment “things had been moved around”. When Victoria was released, they tried to get to Germany by heading south to the city of Sochi, which has an international airport. After checking into a hotel, Kevin says they went out for a snack and he noticed a man in a medical mask and hoodie filming them on his phone. Within seconds, he says a minibus pulled up. “Eight or nine FSB officers jumped out. One grabbed me by the arm. Another came up, showed his ID, and said: ‘A criminal case has been opened against you under article 275: treason.' “My eyes were wide with shock.”
The minibus took them to the hotel, where they collected their luggage. On the way back to Maykop they were put in a car without licence plates and taken to a pizzeria.
“They ordered pizza and offered us some. They didn’t handcuff me or restrain me. I was thinking everything over in my head but couldn’t understand how I had committed treason,” says Kevin. He asked if he would be put in jail. “Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” came the response.
Kevin remembered a former FSB operative, Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for killing a man in Berlin on Kremlin orders. He started wondering if Russia planned to use him – a German citizen – “as a hostage” to get Krasikov back.
‘It’s a chess game – there was no justice’
They got home in the middle of the night. He shows me the video FSB officers made as they searched the apartment. They found a broken telescope – an old birthday present from his mother. The authorities suspected he had used it to photograph military vehicles from his window to send to German intelligence. They took his phone and laptop and found pictures of the base.
— CutC by bbc.com
