Supreme Court, arrest, emigration. A Moscow couple came out to support Yabloko, survived torture, and fled Russia

Daria Bunkova: I’m 23 years old. I went to my first rallies [in support of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny] in 2021, which is also when I experienced my first arrests. I was 17 at the time. Later, as a volunteer, I participated in the election campaign for Boris Nadezhdin, as well as campaigns for the Moscow City Duma. I even ran as a Yabloko party candidate in the municipal elections in Podolsk [near Moscow]. We also worked on restoring the memorial plaque for [murdered Novaya Gazeta journalist] Anna Politkovskaya. I worked briefly as a journalist for RusNews [, an independent outlet]. Sadly, I’ve had to cut my studies short, I was a third-year political science student at the State Academic University for the Humanities (GAUGN).

Nabi Balabekov: I’m 21. For me, it all started with Yekaterina Duntsova’s initiative group in 2023. From there, it was a “slippery slope”: Boris Nadezhdin’s campaign, the Moscow City Duma campaign. I put up Last Address memorial plaques [a civic initiative commemorating victims of Soviet political repression] several times, and sang anti-war songs on the streets—last year, I sang Pornofilmy’s “This Will Pass” on Nikolskaya Street in central Moscow, and I plastered homemade leaflets around. I was studying advertising and public relations at the Institute of Modern Education and Information Technologies (ISOiIT).

Daria: Nabi and I met during the Nadezhdin campaign. We got married in May of this year.

Nabi: [At the rally supporting the Yabloko party outside the Supreme Court in Moscow], law enforcement didn’t pay any specific attention to us. [Riot police] OMON were photographing people’s passports, forcing some to take out their phones and delete photos of the officers. At most, a Centre E [the anti-extremism police] operative snapped a few photos of us, but he was photographing everyone.

Daria: I think that Centre E guy was new, he was acting like a total idiot.

Nabi: He took a picture of us, walked away, then decided to take another one.

Daria: I was brushing Dasha Kozyreva’s hair at the time, and he photographed that several times. Basically, yeah, we figured he wasn’t very experienced.

Nabi: And when the police started clearing everyone out, he was on his phone saying, “Mom, I’ll call you back, mom!”

Centre E officers detained the activists a week after the Supreme Court formally struck Yabloko from the ballot. Daria Bunkova was detained on the evening of August 17 in the stairwell of her apartment building. Nabi Balabekov was taken to the police station by plainclothes officers after he went there to find out why his wife had been detained. Both were brought to the Tsaritsyno district police station in Moscow.

Nabi: At the station, we went up to the second floor, and the Centre E guys said, “We need a private room for a talk.” A female police officer gathered her things and left her office. The door was locked with a key. They showed me my phone and said, “Unlock it.” I said, “No,” and they immediately started beating the shit out of me. Slaps to the face, then they threw me face-down on the floor. They tried to handcuff me, attaching my hand to my leg, but they couldn’t manage it because the handcuffs were the wrong size. They kept telling me, “There’s nothing manly about you!” I don’t know what that was about—how can you even say that while beating up a guy who had just spent the last four days in bed with a fever?

Then they threatened to start drowning me. They said something about Dasha, implying I was going to end up disabled. They threatened to shoot me, one operative said to another, “Give me a gun, I’ll fucking shoot him right now.”

This was not the first time security forces had beaten Balabekov. On February 17, 2024, the day after Alexei Navalny died in prison, Nabi was detained at the Wall of Grief memorial in Moscow. The young man had staged a solo picket, holding a sign that read, “All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Eight police officers dragged Balabekov off a snowbank and began beating him—a scene partially captured on video by Sota.vision.

Nabi: There were two of them [in the room] at first, then four. Police officers kept coming in and out—they didn’t physically assault me themselves; they just stood nearby, laughing, and chiming in with their own bullshit. I decided to unlock my phone: it wasn’t worth the risk. I didn’t know when a lawyer would arrive or if they’d even be allowed in. It was my fourth day with a fever nearing 39°C, and I was completely drained.

I unlocked it, and they started digging through my phone, asking questions: What do you do? Where do you work? How long have you been married? You’re from Dagestan—how are your relatives? They asked about everything. I lied, made things up, and when I refused to answer, they’d step in close and raise a fist at me. They told me I wouldn’t be allowed to see a lawyer because “it’s not required for administrative cases.”

Daria: They told me the same thing. We were on different floors. I was in this holding cell—just a small corner with a table and a bench. I was sitting there with a few men, and the Centre E operatives would come by, try to talk to me, and leave. They didn’t explain anything or tell me what charges I was being charged with. They tried to threaten me. One of them said, “Is your little group of like-minded friends more important to you than your life and your husband’s life?”

They kept swearing and screaming: “You’re an extremist, you’re a Navalny lover!” Sometimes they played ‘good cop’: “Look, let’s talk off the record, just heart-to-heart, as people, come on.” They tried to convince me that Nabi was cooperating and had told and showed them everything. They asked for my phone password countless times.

Nabi: They asked me for it, too.

Daria: Did they ask you for my password?

Nabi: Yes.

Daria: But I was simply confident that they wouldn’t beat me because I’m a woman. It’s not a guarantee, but this time it turned out that way. <...> Some of the men in the cell were also asking me: “What are you in for?” Blah, blah, blah, asking about politics. And to this day, I’m not sure if they were asked to do that, or if they had just been sitting there a long time.

Nabi: They repeatedly offered me “confidential cooperation.” They said, “Look, you can keep going to whatever rallies you want, but you work for us.” Like, some police officer would be detaining you, and you just tell him our number, and they'll let you go immediately. They asked, “Why don’t you want to? Are we lepers or something?”

Lawyers were finally allowed to see the detainees several hours later. The activists spent the night at the police station. On August 18, Moscow’s Nagatinsky District Court sentenced Bunkova to 10 days in jail and Balabekov to 15 days on charges of “violating the rules of holding a public event.” Both served their sentences in separate blocks of the notorious Sakharovo special detention center outside Moscow.

Nabi: The windows of their block faced the exercise yard, and Dasha and I were able to shout to each other through two sets of bars. We passed each other cigarettes and tea. They were like mini-dates. One time, Dasha made a bird gesture with her hands: we are flying away [from Russia]. I nodded.

Daria: I said, “I’ve decided for myself that yes.” And Nabi said, “I’ve decided for myself that yes, too.” I think the red line for me was the fact that Nabi was tortured.

Nabi: I just felt it in my gut... the closer it got to the end of my sentence, the more anxious I became. I thought they were going to put me on the “carousel” [a tactic where Russian security forces rearrest activists immediately upon release on new fabricated charges while quietly deliberating a criminal charge]. The fact that those Centre E guys went through my phone, what happened at the station... In total, they had our phones for about four hours. I didn’t even know what they could have done with them. I felt like if I got detained one more time, it would be my last time. And I felt it—this was the limit.

Dasha got out of the detention center on August 27, quickly wrapped up all our affairs while I was still locked up, and bought tickets to Georgia. I was released on September 1, and by the 3rd, we flew out.

Daria: So far, the realization [of leaving Russia] hasn’t fully set in. It feels like the time people normally spend on vacation—a week or two. Once that time passes and we don’t go back, that’s when the realization will hit harder. Right now, we’re just riding the euphoria: new places, we’re walking around, and I feel like I can breathe more freely. But I think all the missing-our-homeland stuff is still ahead of us.

Editor: Maxim Litavrin