TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Love behind bars: the Russian imprisoned poet and his fiancee
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Alexandra Popova, 28, shows a photograph of her jailed friend Artyom Kamardin, 32, during an interview with AFP journalists in Moscow on November 17, 2022. (AFP/Alexander Nemenov)
I
n a Moscow prison where he is held for reciting an anti-war poem in public, Artyom Kamardin scribbled some hearts in a letter to his girlfriend Alexandra Popova.
Showing AFP a scan of the letter on her computer, Popova bursts into laughter, pointing at what looks like a potato with legs.
"This is a cat," her prisoner boyfriend had written next to his drawing.
Popova, 28, giggles looking at it.
She even got the clumsy drawing tattooed on her arm to "keep a bit of Artyom forever" on her body, she said. Unless, she jokes, someone was to "cut her skin off."
Her boyfriend Kamardin, 32, says police officers raped him when they arrested him for reading out the poem against President Vladimir Putin's military attack on Ukraine.
Her tattoo and dark humour helps Popova shield herself from the horror unleashed on the couple.
More from The Weekender
Jakarta’s padel moment
From FOMO to full-blown obsession, padel has captured the city. What comes next may depend less on courts and more on the communities that grow around them.
The battle over memory
And why the government’s plan to rewrite its history books should alarm us all.
Are younger workers getting something right about work?
As micro-retirements gain traction, Gen Z and young millennials are challenging traditional ideas of ambition, success and when it’s okay to pause.
