Imprisoned brother of Russian opposition leader sketches ‘Telegram stickers’ about life behind bars

In December 2014, Oleg Navalny—the brother of the famous Russian opposition leader—was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for fraud. The trial was criticized around the world, but Oleg has spent the last year and a half behind bars (often in solitary confinement), nonetheless. 

Today, a man named Pavel Akimov, who corresponds with Oleg Navalny in prison, revealed that Oleg decided to draw a series of emojis, which are now available as stickers on the messaging app Telegram. If you use Telegram, you can download the stickers here.

In a recent letter to Akimov, Oleg apparently used toothpaste to attach some cartoon artwork from the prison newspaper. “I realized that we couldn't stop there, and that's how I got the idea to make Oleg into a digital-artist,” Akimov said on Facebook. “I wrote to him about my idea, attaching a list of emojis, and at the end of last week I found in my mailbox a collection of firstrate drawings about life in prison.”

Oleg Navalny added captions to each of his sketches. Some of the stickers are pretty straightforward, but there are a few, Akimov notes, that need a bit of extra explanation.