Boris Kagarlitsky on the Trump administration’s 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine

Boris Kagarlitsky was first arrested in July 2023 in connection with a since-deleted YouTube video about the 2022 Crimean bridge explosion. His case reveals the cruelty and absurdity at work.

Kagarlitsky is perhaps Russia’s most prominent left-wing intellectual, a Marxist critic of both Western imperialism and Putin’s domestic authoritarianism.

After spending almost five months in pre-trial detention 1,000 kilometers from Moscow, Kagarlitsky was found guilty, but released with a fine of 609,000 rubles.

Supporters raised the money in less than an hour. Paying the fine was complicated, however, by the fact that Kagarlitsky had already been designated as both a “foreign agent” and a “terrorist or extremist” (common terms used against war supporters remaining in Russia) and was therefore prohibited by law from carrying out financial transactions.

The state then appealed his release in December because the fine had not been paid. Eight weeks later, the military court overturned the December verdict and imposed a harsher prison sentence of five years.

Kagarlitsky is currently serving his sentence in penal colony No. 4 in Torzhok, 155 kilometers from Moscow. On November 8, he was sent to solitary confinement for three days; no reason was given. On November 20, lawyer Yulia Kuznetsova appealed to the head of the penal colony with a request to hospitalize Kagarlitsky: according to Kuznetsova, the 66-year-old prisoner’s health had deteriorated.

Kagarlitsky is one of Russia’s best-known political prisoners. There are others, much less visible, including many labor rights advocates, environmentalists, defenders of ethnic and racial minorities who no one writes or speaks about. According to the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Russia, more than 2,000 political prisoners remain incarcerated in Russia, including at least 120 “in imminent danger due to their critical health, age or disability.”

Kagarlitsky demanded that he not be included in any exchange. “I have stated several times and I repeat it again,” Kagarlitsky insisted, “that I do not wish to participate in such exchanges… I see neither the interest nor the advantage for me to emigrate. If I had wanted to leave the country, I would have done it myself.”

Last weekend, Kagarlitsky posted these comments on the Trump administration’s 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine:

Trump’s twenty-eight points, as currently published, seem quite strange. Many aspects are written in an unclear, vague, ambiguous and rather contradictory manner. The only thing that is described in very depth and detail is the financial part. It is clear that Donald Trump has remained true to himself here: everything that concerns money is the only important and significant thing in this situation.

It is clear that all these documents will be processed and settled in the near future; there will be further negotiations where something will be clarified and explained. The resulting document will most likely be very different from what we read today.

But if we take today’s document, the main conclusion that comes to mind is this: Ukraine appears to be the losing camp, and Russia, in this situation, does not seem to be the winning camp. According to Trump, the only winner in this war is the United States of America.

And yet, the most important thing is that the conflict ends. Regardless, if people stop being killed, if cities stop being destroyed, if camps stop exchanging blows, that will already be good news. We must therefore still hope that this document, even if it is very crude, very strange and sometimes even unpleasant, will nevertheless become an important step on the path to peace.

—Boris Kagarlitsky, from Penal Colony No. 4