Yevgenia Berkovich weighs 42kg in prison, lawyer says

Jailed Russian theatre director Yevgenia Berkovich weighs 42 kilogrammes and has been placed in a punishment cell for the third time, her lawyer Ksenia Karpinskaya said Wednesday.

Karpinskaya said Berkovich was sent to the punishment cell on September 16 and is due to be released from it on October 1. The lawyer said she was still able to see Berkovich on Monday.

Berkovich, 41, wrote anti-war poems and is serving an almost six-year sentence on terrorism charges. She is being held in Penal Colony Number Three in the Kostroma region, north-east of Moscow.

Karpinskaya said Berkovich had previously been sent to isolation cells for “marching out of step” and for not putting her hands behind her back. She also said Berkovich was not receiving all the psychiatric medicine prescribed to her.

Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were sentenced for “justifying terrorism” in a 2021 play about Russian women lured to marry Islamic State fighters. The Memorial rights group recognises both women as political prisoners.

Nobel Prize-winning editor Dmitry Muratov called Berkovich's treatment “torture” in an interview with CNN and urged international efforts to free Russian political prisoners.