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Love behind bars: the Russian imprisoned poet and his fiancee
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Alexandra Popova, 28, shows a photograph of her jailed friend Artyom Kamardin, 32, during an interview with AFP journalists in Moscow on November 17, 2022. (AFP/Alexander Nemenov)
I
n a Moscow prison where he is held for reciting an anti-war poem in public, Artyom Kamardin scribbled some hearts in a letter to his girlfriend Alexandra Popova.
Showing AFP a scan of the letter on her computer, Popova bursts into laughter, pointing at what looks like a potato with legs.
"This is a cat," her prisoner boyfriend had written next to his drawing.
Popova, 28, giggles looking at it.
She even got the clumsy drawing tattooed on her arm to "keep a bit of Artyom forever" on her body, she said. Unless, she jokes, someone was to "cut her skin off."
Her boyfriend Kamardin, 32, says police officers raped him when they arrested him for reading out the poem against President Vladimir Putin's military attack on Ukraine.
Her tattoo and dark humour helps Popova shield herself from the horror unleashed on the couple.
