Clutching his toothbrush and toothpaste, Kevin Lik waited for six hours in the main office of penal colony 14, near Arkhangelsk in Russia’s far northwest.
It was the afternoon of Sunday, July 28, and the 19-year-old says he had no idea what was about to happen.
“Maybe you are taking me to be shot,” he told the governor of the colony.
“Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” was the reply.
Kevin says an official from Russia’s state security agency FSB told him the same thing a year and a half ago, before he was locked up.
“I lost a lot of weight at the camp,” he explains timidly as we speak via video call. Kevin is 1.90 m tall but weighs only 70 kg.
Together with American journalist Evan Gershkovich, he is One of the 16 people released by Russia on August 1st in a prisoner exchange with the United States and other Western countries.
The teenager -with dual Russian and German citizenship– was arrested last year while still in school and became the youngest person in modern Russian history to be convicted of betrayal.
I ask him if he considers himself more Russian or German. “It’s a very complicated question,” he replies.
Interest in politics
Kevin was born in 2005 in Montabaur, a small town in western Germany. His Russian mother, Victoria, had married a German citizen and although the marriage did not last, she and her son stayed.
They visited Russia every two years until Victoria decided she wanted to return permanently – she missed her relatives and her hometown of Maykop in the North Caucasus. Kevin was 12 when they moved there in 2017.
They lived on the outskirts of the city, in an apartment with views of the mountains and a military base. Kevin says he loved country walks and collecting plants for his herbarium, and also studying at school.
It was the 2018 Russian presidential election that sparked her interest in politics, she says.
Her mother, a public health worker, came home and said that she and her colleagues had been taken by bus to the polling stations, where they had been told: “Vote for Putin or we will take away your bonus.”
At that time he was only 12 years old, but he says that He understood that “there was almost no democracy in Russia.”
Kevin was furious because almost every classroom in his school had a picture of Putin.
“We were constantly told that school was not a place to engage in politics. So it is not right to hang portraits and promote a personality cult of that kind,” he says.
About a year later, he sparked a scandal when he swapped a school portrait of Putin for one of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“One teacher said that in Stalin’s time I would have been shot,” Kevin recalls, while another, more sympathetic teacher, he recalls, advised him to be careful.
The school called her mother: “They scolded her, they yelled at her,” she explains.
The BBC contacted the school but received no response.
Frustrated escape
As Kevin approached his senior year, his mother decided they should return to Germany.
By then, 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 arrived there on 9 February 2023, she was met by the police. Kevin says she was unfoundedly accused of public insults. She was sentenced to 10 days in detention, which meant they had to delay their plans to leave.
Left alone, Kevin stopped going to school. One day he ventured out for a few hours and says that when he returned to the apartment “things were all over the place.”
When Victoria was released, they attempted to reach 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 drink and he noticed a man wearing a medical mask and a hoodie filming them with his phone. Within seconds, Kevin claims a minibus pulled up.
“Eight or nine FSB officers came 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: betrayal“’”.
“I was in shock.”
The minibus took them to the hotel, where they collected their luggage. On the way back to Maykop, they were put into a car without license plates and taken to a pizzeria.
“They ordered pizza and offered us some. They didn’t handcuff me or restrain me. I was going over everything in my head, but I couldn’t understand how I had committed treason,” Kevin says.
He asked if he would be jailed. “Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” was the reply.
Kevin recalled a former FSB agent, Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for killing a man in Berlin on the orders of the Kremlin.
He began to wonder whether Russia was planning to use him – a German citizen – “as a hostage” to get Krasikov back.
“There was no justice”
They arrived at the house in the middle of the night. Kevin shows me the video that the FSB agents recorded while searching the apartment. They found a broken telescope, an old birthday present from his mother.
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 photos of the base.
Kevin freely admits that he took the photos, but says he had no intention of passing them on to anyone.
At 03:00, Kevin was taken to the local FSB building for interrogation. As he was only 17, his mother accompanied him. He was scared.
Kevin says that the lawyer assigned to him immediately told him that he should confess to reduce the sentence.
As we speak, he lists details of the Russian criminal code and uses legal terms to explain why he was wrongly accused. But back then, he had no idea how to handle the situation.
The confession was already written and Kevin agreed to sign it, something he later regretted.
He says he was afraid that if he didn’t sign, things “would have escalated because they might have started putting pressure on my mother.” The FSB investigator told them he had the power to seize their apartment, Kevin says.
“The testimony made no sense,” he recalls. “It was like a game of chess, it was clear that there was no justice.”
As he was still a minor, he was taken to a special facility two hours away by car in Krasnodar and placed in solitary confinement. He had been awake all night but was unable to sleep.
“They brought me food but I couldn’t eat it. I really wanted to see my mother.”
A few months later, when he turned 18, he was transferred to another prison on the outskirts of Krasnodar, where he mingled with other inmates.
Kevin says he was terrified after a group of inmates beat him. “They tied my hands, They beat me up and even burned me with a cigarette“They hit me so hard in the chest that I couldn’t breathe.”
All the while, the authorities continued to investigate him. His class teacher testified against him, stating that when they had gone to an academic competition in Moscow, Kevin had wanted to go to the German embassy to contact the intelligence agents.
Kevin tells me that all he wanted was to get an official German ID because he had just turned 16.
A Defense Ministry expert analyzed the photos taken by Kevin and concluded that they were not a state secret, but that in foreign hands they could have been detrimental to Russia.
The FSB file on him also included details of childhood trips to Russia, including one when he was two years old. Kevin says he also discovered that his phone had been tapped in 2021.
Sentenced to four years in prison
Ten months after his arrest, at the end of December 2023, he was Found guilty of treason and sentenced to four years in prison in a penal colony.
Apart from his mother, no one he knew in Maykop contacted him after his arrest, but after the media reported on his case, strangers began writing to him.
“The cards helped me a lot,” she says. “On my birthday I received 60 cards. I made it my mission to respond to each one.”
The letters and cards were later confiscated.
Kevin’s journey to the Arkhangelsk penal colony took a month, passing through other prisons. He arrived there at the end of June this year. In the following weeks, he says, time passed reading and studying.
“Too good to be true”
Suddenly, on Tuesday, July 23, a high-ranking prison official approached him and told him he had 20 minutes to “urgently write a petition” for presidential pardon. He did it immediately.
Then, on the 28th, a prison officer stopped him and told him to go get his toothbrush, toothpaste and slippers.
“Normally, you get these things when you’re going to be put in the punishment cell,” Kevin explains. But instead, he was locked in an office.
At 1:00 a.m. on Monday the 29th, a convoy arrived to take him away.
The idea of being traded was floating around in Kevin’s head, but it seemed too good to be true.
He was flown to Moscow, where he was held until Thursday, August 1, when he was put on a plane with the other prisoners who were being exchanged.
He was never told he was being exchanged, he says, but when he was on the plane to Turkey, it was clear what was happening.
As Kevin had long suspected, the killer Vadim Krasikov was among those being returned to Russia.
In Germany, after a check-up at the hospital, Kevin was finally able to greet his mother, who had obtained a visa to fly from Russia.
“She started crying. I told her everything was fine, not to worry, that I loved her very much.”
Mother and son now live in Germany and Kevin is excited to finish school.
“I have no desire for revenge, but I do have a very strong desire to participate in opposition activities”, he tells me.
Kevin still has his prison uniform, stored in a bag in the corner of his room.
When I ask him what he wanted most while being forced to wear it, he simply replies, “Hugging Mommy, of course.”
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