Two years ago, a bearded young Russian man sat quietly on a bench in the German city of Hamburg, drawing no particular attention from passersby. But Yury Shekhvatov was not simply enjoying the summer weather — he was bracing himself for news that would change his life.
More than 1,100 miles away in Moscow, a military court was behind closed doors delivering a verdict in the trial of his wife, playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, and theatre director Zhenya Berkovich.
“I took several phones with me, and I sat and waited,” Shekhvatov recalled.
The news arrived through online feeds and messages from friends, and it was exactly what he had feared. The two women, who had been arrested in 2023, each received six-year sentences in a penal colony. The charge: “justifying terrorism” through a play that Petriychuk had written and Berkovich had directed.
At trial, the women argued that their play — “Finist the Bright Falcon,” which portrays Russian women who wed Islamic State fighters — was meant to stand against terrorism, not encourage it. The court was not persuaded.
Human rights advocates described the convictions as a troubling new low in the Russian government’s crackdown on free expression during wartime. The Kremlin offered no response to the case.
On Wednesday, July 8 — the second anniversary of that sentencing — Shekhvatov says he plans to return to that same bench overlooking a canal, sit in silence, and look through old photographs of his wife.
When asked what infuriates him most about the ordeal, he pointed to what he described as the cold indifference of Russia’s judicial system.
“Once you’re caught up in this system, things just roll along on autopilot,” he told Reuters.
“They opened the case, and it just dragged on; the investigator shuffled some papers around, and then the judge sat there putting on an act, pretending to be a rather intelligent man who was well-versed in literature… He went through the motions of looking into everything, yet he knew all along that the verdict would simply be handed down to him.”
Russia’s constitution calls for an independent judiciary insulated from political influence, but human rights organizations say the reality — particularly in high-profile or politically sensitive cases — is very different, with acquittals being extremely rare.
Shekhvatov, who had served as Petriychuk’s theatrical agent, said many people in the arts community publicly rallied behind her, sometimes at considerable personal risk. But he was deeply hurt by others who had worked closely with her and never reached out — not even with a private message of support.
“To me, that is just monstrous — something I will never be able to understand,” he said.
Petriychuk, now 46, is currently held at a penal colony in the Moscow region, where she and other inmates spend six days a week working in a sewing workshop. Her sentence still has three years left to run.
Following her arrest in May 2023, Shekhvatov wrote lengthy letters to her every single day for the first two years. These days, they communicate mainly through brief messages on a prison service app and are permitted to speak by phone a few times each month.
Shekhvatov, 38, said he developed a deliberate approach to supporting his wife emotionally — meeting her wherever she was mentally rather than trying to steer her toward a different mindset.
“From the outside you could see that things would hardly turn out well, but when she had moments of hope I always supported her and said, ‘Yeah, yeah — we’ll fight, absolutely, we’ll do it.’
“And when she was sad, on the other hand, I didn’t try to shift her mindset — like ‘No, let’s be positive, let’s fight…’
“It’s hard to describe how a person feels when they’re in prison… What they really want is total support in the broadest sense — just to be understood and supported.”
He maintains a website, freesveta.org, dedicated to raising awareness about Petriychuk’s case and keeping her play in the public eye. “Finist the Bright Falcon” has now been performed more than 75 times across the globe in 13 different languages.
While working as a massage therapist and health coach to make ends meet, Shekhvatov is also building knowledge of the publishing world with the goal of one day becoming his wife’s literary agent.
“She has always dreamed of writing prose, not just plays… (After her release) it will all happen — global bestsellers,” he said. “I haven’t the slightest doubt, not for a second, that when she gets out and starts writing, it will sell all over the world, get translated and so on. And I’ll make sure it happens.”
