This is Lilia Chanysheva.
Lilia lives in Ufa and loves her native Bashkortostan very much. Here she is at Republic Day, dancing in traditional dress.
She loves skiing and going for walks. She plays soccer and volleyball. She loves hockey and cheers for her hometown team, Salavat Yulaev.
Lilia recently got married.
An ordinary young woman. She works, relaxes, goes hiking and to the theater, takes vacations. She lives a completely normal life.
And this is Putin. And he hates Lilia.
He believes she is an enemy, a traitor, a criminal, and belongs in prison. Not for one year, not two, but ten.
You might say: such a pleasant young woman—what could she possibly have done? Ten years for what?!
The thing is, Lilia Chanysheva is a politician. That is her job. For four years, she was the coordinator of Navalny’s headquarters in Ufa.
She conducted investigations, spoke at rallies, and publicly criticized officials. She even had her own political platform, which she took into the competition for Ufa city manager.
On November 9, police broke into her apartment.
They searched the apartment and took Lilia in for questioning. She never walked out of that interrogation—right there, she was detained for 48 hours pending a court hearing. The charge: creating an extremist organization.
On November 10, the court sent Lilia to pretrial detention. At the moment, she is the only person arrested in connection with the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) being declared an extremist organization. In other words, the most dangerous criminal of all. Right now, apparently even more dangerous than Navalny—he has not even been formally charged yet.
Lilia came to work with us in 2017, when we had just opened the headquarters in Ufa. At the time, we were building such a huge regional network for the first time, and it was unclear how we would organize it at all, or whether it would be easy to find people. Before that, Lilia had worked at Deloitte, one of the Big Four accounting firms. She had a good salary there, health insurance, excellent prospects: she could have become head of the office, moved to Moscow for a promotion. Life was stable and predictable. But Lilia decided to leave Deloitte and work with us, even though we could pay her three times less. Because she genuinely, truly wanted to be involved in politics.
In the four years since the headquarters were opened, there were reshuffles everywhere; people came and went. But throughout all those years, Lilia remained the coordinator of the Ufa office. More than that, under her leadership, the Ufa headquarters was one of the best.
When the presidential campaign ended, the work of the headquarters changed—they focused on their own regions and local corrupt officials. And that was when it became absolutely clear that Lilia was an ideal politician. She was not just a manager who handled administrative duties well; she was genuinely passionate about the work, knew how to do it, and was afraid of nothing.
Lilia organized rallies. Lilia defended Kushtau (a shihan hill in Bashkortostan threatened by industrial development). Lilia tried several times to run in elections, but she was never allowed to take part. She conducted investigations into Bashkir officials and, above all, the local governor, Khabirov. She led election monitoring in Novosibirsk in 2020—and it was then, with the help of Smart Voting, that we managed to get the coordinator of our Novosibirsk headquarters, Sergei Boyko, elected to the local parliament.
And of course, the more Lilia did, the more the pressure on her intensified. Courts ordered her to pay enormous fines for organizing rallies. Several times she was held in a special detention center. Her car was vandalized with paint. In 2019, she came to public hearings on Bashkortostan’s draft budget to criticize it—and she was forcibly removed from the State Assembly building.
And none of this frightened Lilia.
When an extremism case was opened against ACF in the spring, we shut down our regional network. We did it in advance, before the court ruling, to protect the people who had worked with us. For Lilia, this was a major blow, because in essence she had to give up the work she loved most and start a new life.
She tried. In April, Lilia got married. She and her husband firmly decided not to leave Russia. Lilia started making custom macramé. They were planning to have a child.
But Putin did not let her begin a new life. They burst into her home with a search warrant, took her in for questioning, detained her pending trial, and the court sent her to pretrial detention as an extremist.
At the hearing, Lilia said that she was probably pregnant. The term was very early—14 days—and she had not yet had time to get examined. And the prison medical staff, of course, established nothing.
Just imagine it. For four years, a person works completely openly and legally. Rents an office in downtown Ufa. Pays taxes. Every year, ACF and the headquarters file reports with the Ministry of Justice as a nonprofit organization. No one has any questions. And then suddenly a court declares that work extremist. It is madness, but FINE. The law is not supposed to apply retroactively. Since June, working for Navalny is extremism—but before that it was completely legal. How can someone be imprisoned after the fact for work that, for four years, drew no objections whatsoever? It turns out, they can do exactly that. And of everyone, they jailed Lilia—because she is brave, honest, and uncompromising.
The first time Lilia was arrested, she was given five days for the rallies of January 28, 2018. And it seemed simply unthinkable—a woman jailed over a protest! Back then, arrests still seemed extraordinary in general; people had not even yet grown used to the court cases against Alexei. And here was an интеллигентная young female auditor—and suddenly in a detention center.
Then many things became normal. Administrative arrests became normal. House arrests. We saw that it cost them nothing to turn a plane around and imprison a person.
But right now, before our eyes, they are trying to make yet another nightmare seem normal. We are right at the epicenter of it. It depends on us whether this becomes routine. If we quietly swallow the fact that Lilia Chanysheva has been accused of extremism and jailed for her official work, they will go further. And tomorrow, anything could happen to any of us.
It is truly important to understand this. Before our eyes, a court sent a young woman to pretrial detention. Journalists were allowed into the hearing—but her husband was not. For no reason at all. The judge took 20 minutes to “make” the arrest decision—barely enough time even to type it up on a computer from dictation.
We have seen many political trials, but until now the Kremlin at least tried to disguise the charges. As if to say: we are not imprisoning you for politics, but for fraud. But here they have said it outright: we will jail Lilia Chanysheva because she was involved in politics, accused officials of corruption, found evidence of it, organized rallies. We will jail her because she wanted fair elections, decent wages, and justice. We will jail her because she did not want to leave. We will jail her as a warning to everyone else, so that you sit quietly and do not dare make a sound while we go on robbing you.
Lilia faces 10 years on extremism charges. With a single move, Putin can shatter her life and the lives of her loved ones. But we absolutely can stop this. We must stop this. This is not just another arrest, of which there are now so many. It is another step toward destroying everyone. Toward leaving Russia with nothing but corrupt officials who steal, and impoverished, rightless people who have learned only to survive in silence and see no hope at all. If we stand aside and stay silent now, this will become our future.
So here is the most important thing to do right now: talk about Lilia as much as possible. Tell everyone what she did, what she is accused of, and why. This story really is absolutely unimaginable, exceptional. But most people simply will not hear about it unless you tell them. If you do not want to explain it yourself, just send them this video. Post it on social media.
The more we talk about this, the greater the chance that Lilia will not spend the next 10 years in prison. That her life, and the lives of her husband and parents, will not be turned into hell. And that our own lives will not be either. We cannot allow this to happen.