This is a letter from Oleg Sentsov from the Yakut zone. I have nothing to add, just repeat the words of Sokurov, thrown into the face of Putin: MERCY ABOVE JUSTICE. The trouble is that we do not have neither one nor the other here in my unhappy Motherland.

What an amazing, delicate, gentle, intelligent, inflexible and beautiful person Sentsov appears! Someday this letter will be in the textbooks. I would like to live. Lord, hear our prayers..

Here is the text:.

"Prison is a meat grinder of human destinies, in which you cease to believe in justice, but you do not cease to fight for it. Here everything is different, here you try to live and survive, although you feel that your real life has stayed somewhere beyond the fence. And that the real you stayed also at liberty, it's planted someone else. That all this is temporary, that soon everything will be resolved and change. But nothing changes and is not allowed.

Finding yourself in prison, you learn to live in hope, even if it is not there. But there is time to think. Long and many things. About how he lived and what's left after you, and whether. You start to look at yourself as if from outside, on the one who stayed there, at large. Yesterday you are looking at you today, more sober, more cynical and something even cruel. The portrait from the outside does not at all seem so attractive, as from the inside. And how did someone like to communicate with such a person? And I want to be better than him.

And all that is superfluous, foul and dirty goes away. And the main thing begins to come out, then, for the sake of what it really costed to live. What can you find out only here or at war.

You understand that those close people who were with you, the time that you spent with them and the warmth that they gave you - this is the most important thing in life. Only this remains, everything else goes somewhere and is forgotten. For nothing you do not yearn for more than that. Previously, it seemed unimportant and natural, like air, which you do not feel until you block it.

Once on the street a little girl gave me a postage stamp and said that she would bring happiness. I put the gift in the jacket pocket and dragged it with me for a long time. And then happiness is lost somewhere. It's very hard to feel like a person who has lost the most important thing. Close people are not always the ones you see every day. But children, even strangers, even those you meet once, will always be close to you. Because it is so unbearable to hear the children's voices, which sometimes blows the wind from behind the fence.

Children are probably the only valuable thing that will remain after us, these are those in whom we will live and after our death. Therefore, they should not spoil the life, educating them, it is necessary to bring up only themselves, and children simply to love. And if it does, then teach them to two really necessary things: reading books and telling the truth.

When I last went to Maidan, where people started to die, my mother said: "Why are you going there? You have two children!" I replied that that's why I'm going there - I do not want them to live In the land of slaves. We then won, but it turned out that not yet to the end. And the struggle continues, but without me.

And I'm in prison, and like any prisoner, it's very difficult for me to answer a simple childish question: "Daddy, when will you be back?".

Oleg Sentsov was awarded the award of the American PEN Center. And it's good! Yesterday this award was given to Oleg by his sister.

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