Kachin said he launched the dry hunger strike after staff subjected him to physical violence and abuse, First Department reported, citing his letter. He described being held in a punishment cell almost continuously: seven days at first, then ten, then two consecutive 15-day terms.
According to his account, guards force him to lift and lower a heavy bed on his own, a task he is not supposed to perform, carry out nighttime checks and remove personal belongings from his cell.
On the morning of 21 October, after an exchange of insults, Kachin said he was knocked to the floor. He struck his face on the ground and was left with abrasions on his elbows and knees. "In the morning I declared a hunger strike without water or food. Tell everyone," First Department quoted him as saying.
The project said Kachin, who is 182 centimetres tall, weighs about 60 kilograms. It is not his first dry hunger strike: in September 2025 he went without food after more than two months in the punishment cell of penal colony No. 8, known as Khokhryaki, in Udmurtia. He said at the time that he had lost weight down to 53 kilograms during that strike and that his heart and kidneys had suffered most. Inmates in the punishment cell cannot receive parcels, and he was unable to follow the vegan diet he has kept for 14 years.
Kachin was detained in Birobidzhan in autumn 2022, and it later emerged that he had been sent to Moscow's Lefortovo pre-trial detention center. Before his arrest he worked as a junior researcher at the Bastak state nature reserve. On social media he supported Alexei Navalny and the protests in Belarus and spoke out against the war in Ukraine, according to Ostorozhno, Novosti; Kachin himself linked the prosecution in part to his position on the war.
On 27 January 2025 the Birobidzhan City Court sentenced Kachin to 14 years in a strict-regime penal colony. According to the Federal Security Service (FSB), he passed information about critically important infrastructure facilities in the Jewish Autonomous Region to a representative of a Ukrainian intelligence service and planned to travel to Ukraine, obtain citizenship and join the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Kachin has a wife and a daughter.