The report, titled "Without Living to See Freedom," was released by Memorial's Support for Political Prisoners project. Its authors counted deaths in places of detention, during searches, under house arrest and shortly after release.
The dead include 63 men and six women, with an average age of about 51. The youngest were 18-year-olds Daniil Dakhov and Pavel Grimak from the occupied city of Melitopol; the oldest was 81-year-old scientist Valery Mitko, who died of illness.
By year, the report records four deaths in 2022, ten in 2023, 26 in 2024 and 13 in 2025. In the incomplete ten months of 2026, 16 people have already died — more than in all of last year.
At least 29 people, or 42%, died of disease or because they were denied medical care. Ten such cases were recorded in 2026 alone, more than in any previous year. The report describes how prisoners' complaints about their health were dismissed as malingering: 64-year-old Oleg Tyryshkin, convicted over a comment on VKontakte, lay on the floor of his cell during a video-link hearing because he could not stand, but a pre-trial detention centre paramedic told the judge that all his readings were normal. Tyryshkin later died after a heart attack.
Courts in Krasnoyarsk three times refused to release 46-year-old Sergei Sviridov, who had progressive cancer, including on the grounds that there was no one to care for him in freedom. He was sent to a hospice only after he fell into a coma, and he died two weeks later.
The rights defenders link at least 20 more deaths to beatings, torture and their consequences. Twelve of the dead were Ukrainian citizens, mostly residents of occupied territories and prisoners of war. The same category includes Krzysztof Galos, a Polish citizen abducted by Russian security services in Ukraine.
Ten people are believed to have killed themselves or died under similar circumstances. The report's authors warn that the system's opacity makes it hard to establish whether a person actually committed suicide: some such deaths may have resulted from torture, and some may have been killings. The causes of eight more deaths are unknown.
The report separately addresses pianist Pavel Kushnir, who died after a protest hunger strike, and the death of Alexei Navalny, which the rights defenders consider a deliberate killing.
The last name on the list is Alexander Kondratov, a production designer on the series "Liquidation" accused of high treason, whose death after being hospitalised from a pre-trial detention centre became known on 26 October. Also in October, Igor Yakovenko died — sentenced to five years for attempting to join the Freedom of Russia Legion, he was found in detention to have an inoperable brain tumour — and the death of Rustam Khalikov, convicted in the Hizb ut-Tahrir case, became known.
The report's authors place responsibility for these deaths on investigators, courts, prison staff and doctors who refused medical care, security service officers, the entire repressive system and the Russian authorities as a whole.
The report does not cover Ukrainians held outside the framework of criminal cases. Memorial estimates that significantly more of them have died, but there is almost no information about such cases.