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Pavel Kushnir, a Russian anti-war activist and a pianist, has died in police custody as the result of a hunger strike, according to a report by the independent publication Mediazona citing Kushnir’s mother Irina Levina.
Friends and activists reported last week that Kushnir, aged 39, died in a pre-trial detention center in the Jewish Autonomous Region, a remote area in Russia’s Far East.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested Kushnir in May on charges of “public calls for terrorist activities” on his YouTube channel.
“I was informed by the FSB investigator in [the regional capital] Birobidzhan. [My son] died on July 28 this year. From hunger strike,” Levina told Mediazona. Further details, and the official cause of her son's death, remain unknown, according to the publication.
According to Levina, the investigator claimed that the prison authorities tried to help her son before he passed away.
“They say they were helping. They say there were IVs and they tried to support him somehow, but apparently it wasn’t enough,” said the 79-year-old Levina.
According to her, Kushnir's body will soon be transported to his hometown of Tambov, where Levina currently resides. She did not discuss the criminal case against her son, saying that she knows little about it and is deeply affected by the news of his death.
On August 2, the publication Vot Tak, a Russian-language affiliate of the Poland-based broadcaster Belsat, was the first to report Kushnir's death from a hunger strike, citing Olga Romanova, head of the human rights organization Russia Behind Bars. Pavel's childhood friend, pianist Olga Shkrygunova, was also cited as a source.
Pianist Pavel Kushnir grew up in Tambov and graduated from Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatory before going on to work as a soloist in several regional philharmonic orchestras across Russia. He became a soloist with the Birobidzhan Regional Philharmonic in 2023.
Before his arrest, Kushnir published an anti-war book and ran a YouTube channel called “Inoagent Mulder” (translated as “Foreign Agent Mulder”) — a likely reference to the eponymous detective Fox Mulder from the X-Files series — where he used poetry to criticize the policies of the Russian authorities, newly passed laws, and the war in Ukraine. In one of his videos, Kushnir also mentioned taking part in protest actions in Moscow in 2011-2012. The channel had five subscribers until the news of Kushnir’s death became public — the count that has now grown to just under 600. The last entry features a speech calling for an end to the invasion of Ukraine, the end of “Vladimir Putin's fascist regime,” and freedom for all political prisoners.
Kushnir’s is the second death of an opponent of the Ukraine invasion to occur in a Russian detention center within the past week. On July 31, Mediazona reported that Ukrainian POW Oleksandr Ishchenko, who served in the Azov Regiment, died in an isolation facility in Rostov-on-Don. The cause of his death remains unknown.