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Lawyer Maria Bonzler is not receiving medical assistance or a sufficient supply of water at Kaliningrad pre-trial detention centre No. 1 (SIZO-1), according to the Telegram channel ZPCH citing her lawyer, Ilya Sidorov.
Bonzler is given only three litres of drinking water per week. This cannot be purchased in the detention centre’s shop, as only carbonated water is sold there. The tap water in her cell is technical water, unfit for drinking.
The detainee is not being given medical support even at the minimum standard set by the Ministry of Health. Bonzler has high blood pressure; on 26 June she suffered a hypertensive crisis during a court hearing. The medication she had long been unable to obtain was finally passed onto her on 1 July.
“Yesterday I was at the medical unit at last, but I never want to go again—all procedures are carried out in a cage, as if I were a wild animal. The chief medical officer said there’s no such thing as a ‘vegetarian’ in the prison system. Alternative meals are only available if you have gastrointestinal diseases. And I do have them,” the woman wrote in a letter to her son. She was diagnosed with an ulcer and gastritis in 2022.
Bonzler also complains about meagre meals. “Here, breakfast and lunch are porridge or pasta, dinner is potatoes. So there is absolutely no fat or protein, which is bad,” she said. She noted she needs fruit, dried fruit, vegetables and nuts. Once a month she can receive a 30kg parcel. In one package, someone brought her seven kilograms of cigarettes, tea and chocolate instead of the food she needed.
Bonzler faces regular pressure in the detention centre. On one occasion, she was “forgotten” for an hour on the exercise yard in pouring rain: “She begged for them to let her back in, knocked, shouted, but it was as if no one could hear… Inhuman, that’s all there is to say!,” her lawyer recounted. After this, she became seriously ill, but could not get a visit to the doctor. “We are certain this inhumane treatment is purely revenge for her legal and human rights work,” Sidorov summed up.
Bonzler is charged under a criminal case of confidential cooperation with a foreign state, an international or foreign organisation (Art. 275.1 of the Criminal Code). “According to investigators, in 2024 the lawyer passed information about local security service staff, which she learned in her legal work, to the special services of a hostile country,” the Investigative Committee’s press release stated. The case is being heard behind closed doors, and Bonzler has had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so details of the charges remain unknown.
She was detained at the end of May. On 28 May, security officers came to three lawyers in Kaliningrad—Bonzler, Roman Morozov, and Ekaterina Selizarova. All of them had represented Igor Baryshnikov, who was convicted for anti-war posts.
You can support Bonzler by writing to her via the Vestočka online service or by sending a letter to:
236022, Kaliningrad (a city on the Baltic Sea), ulitsa Ushakova, 2-4, SIZO-1, Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for Kaliningrad Region, Bonzler Maria Vladimirovna, born 1960
- Since the start of the war, Bonzler, Morozov, and Selizarova have defended Kaliningrad residents involved in protest actions. They were also the lawyers for Igor Baryshnikov, who was sentenced to seven and a half years in a general regime colony under charges of “spreading fakes” about the Russian army “motivated by political hatred” (section “d,” part 2, art. 207.3 of the Criminal Code). Bonzler represented his interests in cooperation with OVD-Info.
- In 1995, Bonzler founded and led the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Kaliningrad Region. The organisation worked to protect the rights of conscripts, military personnel, and their families. In 2017, Bonzler qualified as a lawyer, and six years later became a laureate of the Moscow Helsinki Group Prize for defending human rights in court.