Thread by @ichbinilya

Russian journalist Ksenia Mironova is a very young woman whose partner Ivan Safronov is in prison on politically motivated charges.

She's written a heartrending and brutally honest Facebook post about her life.

In this thread, a translation of most of it.👇

"Hello. What’s it like when your partner’s in jail?

How can I say it."

"It’s when everyone says 'our friend was taken away,”'and what got taken away from you was half of you, your family, your schedule for the day, your life plans, your holidays, your important events, your future."

"It’s when, in your loneliest moments, you hug yourself tightly, because that’s all you have."

"It’s when you’re constantly gnawing at yourself because you can still move around the city, and they can’t."

"It’s when you laugh because in 'A Handmaid’s Tale,' a dystopia where they literally use people as incubators, they give them boiled eggs for breakfast — and in Russian prison, they don’t."

"It’s when you hate yourself for being obsessed with these topics, but you can’t stop talking."

"It’s when you know that no open relationship is even theoretically possible, not only because you don’t want to, but because this will hurt your partner, and for you any stranger is a provocateur with a camera."

"It’s when you know that you will never trust anyone again like you once did."

"It’s when, if you got 'lucky' and your partner is already in a prison colony, you leave there with a UTI, and tears, and thoughts that a video, with yourself in a starring role, is already on a few web sites."

"It’s when some of your relatives haven’t known for half a year what happened, because you wanted to save them from worry. And then it went too far. You’re tired of saying 'everything’s all right, he’s on a trip.' Now you just try to see them as little as possible."

"It’s when people who wouldn’t walk even a hundredth of your path condescendingly give you advice."

"It’s when you think that all the best things in your life happened before you were 22, and will never happen again."

"It’s when every day you wonder whether they’re torturing your loved one right that minute, and you hate yourself for crying because no one has given you flowers in a long time. Because there’s no room in the world for such girly desires."

"It’s when you can’t write each other for half a year, and you don’t know if your partner still remembers what you look like."

"It’s when everyone thinks that they know something about you and your relationship, because it was written about in the media or in social networks."

"This isn’t for me or for you. It’s for every girl who will encounter this in the future. And there will be more and more such girls in Russia."

Here's Ksenia's original post. This is the reality of Putin's Russia. facebook.com/10000367599006…

And here's a story about the case. rferl.org/a/russia-safro…