A 64-year-old Russian political prisoner, Oleg Tyryshkin, has died in prison. Tyryshkin, a former miner, trade union activist and opposition political activist, had been convicted of alleged “justification of terrorism” over a comment on VKontakte about the death of Akhmad Kadyrov, the father of the current Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
According to SotaVision and RusNews, citing Tyryshkin’s family and activists who had corresponded with him, Tyryshkin died “because of his heart”. OVD-Info said the death occurred about a month ago. The exact place of death is unknown. According to RusNews, Tyryshkin was being transferred between prison facilities, while volunteers told Novaya Gazeta Europe that he may have died in a hospital attached to a prison colony in Kemerovo. His body was buried in Anzhero-Sudzhensk, a town about 80 kilometres north of Kemerovo.
This is already the fourth death of a political prisoner in a Russian prison in the last two months.
Tyryshkin was a former miner, a former leader of a miners’ trade union and the former head of the Kemerovo branch of the United Civil Front, an opposition movement founded by Garry Kasparov. He was arrested in March 2023 directly in a hospital, where he was receiving treatment at the time.
The criminal case against him was opened over a comment about the death of Akhmad Kadyrov. According to Tyryshkin himself, he wrote: “They blew him up — and good riddance. He killed many Russian soldiers.” In December 2024, a court in Khabarovsk sentenced him to two years in a general-regime penal colony for “justification of terrorism”. The defence appeal was dismissed.
Akhmad Kadyrov was one of the key figures of the Second Chechen War. During the First Chechen War, he sided with the Chechen separatists, but later switched to Moscow’s side and became the pro-Russian leader of Chechnya. He was killed in 2004 in an explosion at a stadium in Grozny. His son Ramzan Kadyrov later became the head of Chechnya and one of Vladimir Putin’s most loyal allies. In today’s Russia, Akhmad Kadyrov is officially portrayed as a hero and a symbol of Chechnya’s “reconstruction” under Moscow’s control, while his critics point to the wars, violence and repression in the republic.
Tyryshkin’s case fits into a broader pattern of criminal prosecution in Russia for online statements. The article on “justification of terrorism” is often used against people who make critical or provocative comments about violent events, especially where those comments concern war, Chechnya, Russian security structures or the Kremlin’s political allies.
