Lost generation: Russia’s mephedrone teen crisis

Warning! This text contains details about drug use and production which some may find distressing

“Dreams come true”

On 22 July 2023, 18-year-old Maxim (name changed) woke up in a rented apartment in the centre of a small town in southern Russia. By 10 in the morning, the sun was already shining brightly, and Maxim was late for work in a nearby café. The apartment was a mess: tables were covered with a jumble of rags, glass flasks, and plastic syringes; a pile of garbage bags sat in the corner; the kitchen was cluttered with boxes of baking soda mixed with empty vials.

Maxim was used to sleeping in his clothes without a blanket. Broad-shouldered and tall, with a close-cropped haircut and a heavy watch on his wrist, he looked older than his age. Jumping up quickly, he grabbed a lump of damp white powder, wrapped it in a striped towel, stuffed it into a sports bag, and left the apartment.

He peered out the stairwell window. Down in the courtyard, overgrown with hazel trees, he could see two men in tracksuits. Maxim hesitated — for weeks he had been plagued by constant paranoia: at night, nightmares tormented him that the apartment was about to be stormed. During the day, when leaving for work, he circled the block to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

But on the morning of 22 July, he was in a hurry and decided to ignore his fears, stepping quickly out of the building. Immediately, blows rained down on him; a bag was pulled over his head and he was shoved into a car. As he wrote later in his diary, being caught was actually a relief: “I relaxed. A long-awaited rest.” Left alone briefly in the car, Maxim began to sing words from a popular Soviet pop-song: “Dreams come true. And don’t come true… But all the good things are never forgotten.”

“I can make money out of this”

Credit: BBC

Over the next several months Maxim documented his life in two school exercise books which he later shared with the BBC. He called these diary-memoirs his “confession,” and on the title page of one notebook (the cover shows a ginger kitten cuddling a Teddy bear, playfully tilting its head) he wrote his alias: MANDRAGORA – a name taken from the Harry Potter books.

“It was a hard time for our family.” Maxim wrote. “We lived in poverty for a long while.”

The family moved from the Urals to a small town in southern Russia and began building a house. They had to sleep on jackets laid out on the concrete floor and heated themselves by burning planks left over from construction. “A year later my stepfather died, and we were left alone — me, my mother and my four-year-old sister.”

Tatyana, Maxim’s mother, worked as a nurse, but money was tight. Maxim “felt like a loser” compared with classmates who had “new clothes, phones and school lunches.” To earn some money he sold cigarettes individually, then decided to look for something more lucrative.

Realising there were no legal opportunities for work as a 15-year-old, Maxim moved his job search to the messenger app Telegram where in no time at all he came across adverts recruiting illegal drug couriers.

Drug dealing in Russia happens online and has become completely depersonalized: buyers are given coordinates to a stash (usually a small batch of drugs) and go to pick it up. Themselves. These stashes are made by a stashman, or kladman in Russian — who receives a wholesale supply from a dealer, breaks it into small portions and sends the coordinates to a curator, who then passes them on to the specific buyer.

Stashmen usually get paid for each drop (payments are sometimes made in cryptocurrency), but they risk far more than they earn. In Russia, stashmen are often young people who end up with long prison terms for just a handful of drops.

Maxim remembers his first experience as a stashman. He was told he would be sent the coordinates of a wholesale batch of drugs. His job was to retrieve it, divide it into smaller portions and then to hide them around the city. “I was sitting with a friend at the back of the class. He was doing his own class work and mine, while I sat sweating and trembling, waiting for the address. During the 4th lesson I got the address, and by the end of the 6th I was on the bus heading into town.”

The coordinates led him to a snow-covered wooded area. “I dug in the snow until dark, messaging my curator that I couldn’t find the stash. My phone was blowing up with calls from my mother, but the curator didn’t allow me to postpone the job until the next day, so I went home and that night I sneaked out again to make the drops.”

Maxim was paid 200–300 roubles (roughly £2.00-£3.00) for each stash. “It was stupid to work for that kind of money,” he reflected years later. But he was motivated not only by money, but also by the adrenaline rush of selling banned substances: “And I can make money out of this too? That was just ‘wow.’”

With the money he earned, he sometimes bought groceries for the house, and once he treated himself to a quality fur-trimmed coat. “For the first month that coat stayed in a bag under my bed,” Maxim recalls — he couldn’t explain to his mother where such an expensive thing had come from, so he was afraid to wear it around her.

Maxim kept at this work for a couple of years. By age 16, after finishing nine grades of school, he was working part-time as a sous chef when he saw that a drug seller was recruiting ‘chemists’ — people who could synthesize Russia’s most popular drug: mephedrone.

“Poor man’s cocaine”

Mephedrone first appeared in the early 2000s, when it was popularized by an Israeli chemist working under the pseudonym Dr Zee.

Mephedrone penetrates the brain faster than other synthetic drugs, producing euphoria, a surge of energy, sexual desire, and sociability — but it also wears off more quickly, causing a severe withdrawal syndrome (anxiety and depression) and, as a result, rapid addiction.

In 2010, Russia banned mephedrone and its components, but this did not stop its growing popularity, especially among teenagers. According to psychologist and rehabilitation centre staff member Irina Medved, as well as the director of another rehab centre interviewed by the BBC, children in Russia now try drugs as early as age 12, and by 14 many are already using mephedrone regularly.

Denis, a practicing narcologist and employee of a charity organization that works with drug users, stresses that dependence develops very quickly in teenagers, and without help they risk dying — whether by accident or suicide. At the same time, getting help is extremely difficult: addicted teenagers fall into a “grey zone.”

“We are losing an entire generation,” he warns.

It’s estimated that about one third of all illegal drugs sales in Russia now involve mephedrone.

The Russian research project DarkMetrics, monitors and studies activity on darknet marketplaces. Incredibly Russians buying drugs on these sites often leave reviews. The researchers looked at reviews posted on four popular marketplaces and found that in just one month one third of all the reviews (more than 300,000 posts) were for mephedrone. Since most users only leave feedback after their second or third purchase that means that the real number of mephedrone purchases every month on these four sites alone could be as high as 700,000.

Continuing their number crunching the researchers also took one random day in 2024 and counted the amount of mephedrone available for sale across Russia on the country’s two biggest darknet marketplaces. They found 617 kg worth of mephedrone on offer stored in ready-to-pick-up stashes in cities across the country – about a third of the total volume of all illegal substances on sale on the darknet on that particular day.

“A merciless drug”

Eighteen-year-old Olya has come to a Moscow lab to get tested for HIV and hepatitis. She’s carrying a backpack with a sweater for the evening, some makeup, and — always — a supply of clean syringes.

For the next 15 minutes, two nurses try unsuccessfully to find a vein in Olya’s arms; they manageto draw blood only after several attempts — the veins in her arms are almost collapsed from intravenous drug use.

Olya was first introduced to mephedrone at the age of 15 by her boyfriend. At the time, she was living on the outskirts of Moscow in a large family and was still in school. “It just opened up a whole new world.”

Within a couple of weeks, Olya was snorting mephedrone several times a week — it turned out her boyfriend was also dealing. She remembers the period of her life between ages 15 and 17 like this: she went without mephedrone “for at most a couple of days in a row.” Soon after, she dropped out of school and started to tusovat’sya — hanging out and partying.

Credit: BBC

At first, Olya liked her new life: “Everyone’s out there looking for money or for drugs. But I’ve got a guy who is dealing drugs. Well, that’s it, I’ll stick with him.”

But soon problems began — Olya’s boyfriend was arrested, while her dependence on mephedrone deepened: “I wasn’t using to get high anymore, but just to wake up. To get out of bed. To stay alive.”

To get money and mephedrone, Olya went to parties organized in Moscow chat groups where men invited girls to “snort together”. She would post on Telegram asking friends to come with her: “Girls, a guy invited me to a party, who wants to come with me? They’ll order us a taxi from my place.”

Things got even darker when a friend gave her contacts to a 60-year-old Moscow businessman. Before meeting, the man asked her seemingly innocent questions in chat: “Do you do well in school? What grade are you in? What do your parents do?” Olya’s friend insisted he just wanted to talk, but it quickly became clear what the man really wanted from 15-year-old Olya was sex.

“He would give me either mephedrone or money, which I then spent on mephedrone anyway.”

Olya met him several times: “I’d get loaded on drugs and go to him. Sober it was impossible.” Soon he suggested that Olya bring along some of her friends.

Credit: BBC

For every new girl, Olya says, she got a cut: “He wanted schoolgirls. I’d text this man that I could bring a girlfriend. — ‘Show me her photos. How old is she, where does she study?’ It was like a questionnaire. If he liked her he’d say: ‘Okay, come over.’ We’d go to him, there’d be sex, we’d take the cash and leave. Later I even started demanding a cut from the girls themselves — I wanted more drugs, and the prices kept rising. I’d lie on the bed, hold their hand and try to calm them, while in my head there was only one thought: ‘Just do your thing, I’ll take my money or my mephedrone. And you don’t interest me anymore.’”

“Mephedrone erases everything: your sense of worth, your self-respect, love for yourself, for your family, for your friends. Like if you took a cigarette butt and put it out on your own skin — you’d get a hole [in your flesh]. That’s what mephedrone does — it burns everything away. It’s a merciless drug,” Olya says.

In March 2023, Olya’s mother decided to send her 17-year-old daughter to rehab. “I looked like a skeleton, my nose was burned through [from the drugs], I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep — nothing interested me except the next dose,” she recalls. Olya spent seven months in a closed rehab centre, counting down the days until her release.

Four months after she got out, in March 2024, Olya got in contact with the BBC. She told us she had found a job. She said she had relapsed once but after that experience she had decided she was finished with mephedrone for good.

Unfortunately, it was not to last.

“Every schoolkid can cook it”

All the rehabilitation-centre staff and narcologists interviewed by the BBC agree on one thing: mephedrone is popular because it’s accessible and cheap — it’s easy to buy or, if you know where to look, you can even just find a stash hidden for someone else,

Mephedrone is also popular with producers because it’s cheap and simple to make. It costs between 30,000 to 150,000 roubles (£270 – £1,330), to produce a kilo of mephedrone, according to dealers who spoke to the BBC. The street value of one kilo of mephedrone is around two million roubles (£17,800) according to data from the DarkMetrics research group.

“To make other synthetic drugs you still need high precision and some expensive equipment,” says Nikolai (name changed) — a chemist who writes how-to guides for people learning how to ‘cook’ up synthetic drugs.

Credit: BBC

“Mephedrone became popular [with producers] because you could make it in the kitchen. Now any schoolkid can cook it.”

His view is echoed by Renat Kuramshin — a former investigator with the Ministry of Internal Affairs who has investigated large drug shipments into Russia: “We shut down big supplies of hashish. We shut down big supplies of heroin. Something had to replace them. And mephedrone came along. It’s an easily synthesized drug that can be produced anywhere from central Russia to beyond the Arctic Circle. You can set up labs anywhere and cook in peace.”

The BBC obtained access to a number of manuals for synthesizing mephedrone. They describe the production process in detail. “These instructions are aimed at a person who has done chemistry at school received a grade of three or higher,” says the introduction to one such 157-page manual.

The manual advises buying necessary chemicals in household-chemical stores or shops for home distillers (but in either case, it’s better not to draw attention), explains how to find private houses or apartments for labs, and gives step-by-step instructions on masking smells and disposing of liquid toxic waste (which, the authors complain, inexperienced cooks pour into the sewer).

It also offers general advice (the main one being — don’t use what you produce, and always have a reliable cover story for why you might be on a vacant lot at one in the morning: “needing to pee is also a legend”).

Despite all these precautions, mephedrone labs in Russia are shut down every two to three days — in 2024 alone more than 138 such laboratories were dismantled (about half of all drug labs closed by the law enforcement).

Credit: BBC

To start cooking, Maxim the sous chef ordered a basic kit for synthesizing mephedrone from one of the darknet marketplaces. These kits are called konstruktor because of the simplicity of production — the set contains several numbered vessels, and you just follow the instructions: “mix one and two, pour into three.”

“It’s like building a dragon out of LEGO. You don’t have extra pieces in a LEGO box, right? The kit has no extra parts either. And by following the instructions you’ll assemble mephedrone from the reagents,” Maxim explains. He told the BBC that the kit was sent to him to be picked up at a regular parcel collection point in a supermarket.

Credit: BBC

The young man decided to cook drugs in an abandoned bathhouse — he checked that there was electricity, set up the flasks, and began following the instructions. But he did something wrong, and a flask exploded during the reaction, spilling reagents outside.

“The bath house became deadly dangerous to be in. My body was burning, my eyes refused to open, and my nose could no longer breathe.” Running outside, Maxim lost control of his bowels and felt very nauseous. “I thought I was going to die,” he recalls in diaries he handed over to BBC. On the way home in the bus, Maxim noticed that passengers were turning away from him because of the smell.

The next experiments also failed, and only on the fourth or fifth attempt did Maxim manage to synthesize mephedrone. “And those hundred grams sold out very quickly,” the young man recalls. “[Synthesizing drugs] — it’s not scary at all. It’s just that you don’t understand what you’re actually doing. Here it says: mix one and three. So you mix one and three. I had this youthful maximalism. I didn’t understand what it could lead to. I even created a channel and showed my successes online.”

Credit: BBC

BBC asked Maxim if he felt any responsibility for the fact that many of his peers became dependent on the mephedrone he produced.

“So what? I also became addicted to mephedrone,” Maxim quickly replied. “I don’t blame some dealer who sold it to me when I was 15. It’s everyone’s own business. Everyone decides whether to use it or not. Whether to put a cross over their own life or not.”

By the age of 17, Maxim was leading a double life — living in a rented apartment and working as a (real) cook in a café. In the mornings, he would go to work, and by noon he would return home and start cooking mephedrone: he moved the laboratory from the abandoned bathhouse to the rented apartment, where he installed a ventilation system and sealed the door gaps to hide the strong smell of the chemical reaction. In one room he would set up the large flask where the reaction took place; the process took about 12 hours, so by morning Maxim was free again to head off to his legal job.

At work, people noticed a strange smell from the young man and asked what it was — Maxim referred to it as some chemical work being done in his residential block of flats. He explained the smell to his mother by saying that he left clothes next to vegetables at work. Tatyana (his mother) visited his apartment more than once but noticed nothing suspicious.

Credit: BBC

But his double life was beginning to take its toll.

“Once a week I dreamed that I was being arrested. I would wake up in a cold sweat, flush everything down the toilet, and break the flasks.”

When asked why he still continued synthesizing drugs, Maxim, after a slight pause, quickly answered: “It’s also like drugs. You sell once. You realise you can make money from it. You realise it brings adrenaline, new emotions…When you’ve been doing it for a long time, dependence appears, and it’s already hard for you to stop yourself internally and say: ‘No, that’s it, we’re not selling drugs.’ That doesn’t happen. It’s as if something inside you drives you to do it.”

In his diary, Maxim was more direct: “Drug trafficking is my addiction, without it I start going through withdrawal.”

How raw materials for the drug are reaching Russia

On a sunny Saturday in a town outside Russia, 17‑year‑old Dan (name changed) is sitting on the balcony of a rented apartment vaping and checking his phone constantly. He’s wearing an immaculately-ironed white shirt and is sipping a non-alcoholic beer.

Dan works for a business on the darknet coordinating the supply of raw materials, chemicals, and equipment for drug production. On the day the BBC met him he was remotely overseeing the production of mephedrone — advising the ‘chemists’ who were supposed to carry out the work.

While we were speaking to him he was getting regular calls from people inside Russia checking details of how to ‘cook’ mephedrone. He showed us some of the conversations. Before meeting Dan, BBC reporters spent months talking to him and verifying that he was indeed involved in supplying raw materials and producing drugs.

During one of the calls that day, the ‘chemists’ were complaining about leaking equipment. The internet connection was unstable and eventually the line went dead. Dan was left guessing – maybe the police arrived, maybe they were overwhelmed by fumes, or maybe their phone just ran out of battery.

Credit: BBC

Dan says little about himself: he is not yet 18, but he has already been in the drug business for several years. One of the main challenges, he says is the supply of precursors for mephedrone to Russia. There are two which each cost between 18–40 thousand roubles (£160-£355) per kilogram. The main difficulty is not the price, but the import process: since 2022, both substances have been included in the list of drug precursors, and their circulation is now very restricted.

Renat Kuramshin, a former investigator with Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, says illegal drug producers in Russia now have two options for obtaining precursors: legal chemical production in Russia (but this option has its drawbacks — law enforcement closely monitors precursors used in legal industry, so any “leak” of precursors to illegal use will immediately arouse suspicion), or importing from China.

The Chinese route mirrors the way the precursors for the synthetic opioid fentanyl are being smuggled into the US – with packages hidden in high volume legal Chinese imports – often with the collusion of both Chinese and Mexican organised crime groups. In 2022, fentanyl use in the U.S. resulted in 73,654 deaths — eight people per hour.

Drug traffickers in Russia are using exactly the same scheme, the BBC has discovered.

“In China chemical production is developed,” former narcotics detective Renat explains, drawing maps on a school exercise book. “They produce not only common chemicals, but also precursors for narcotics. But the border checkpoints between China and Russia are well known and controlled. It’s dangerous to transport directly.”

“In China, a batch is prepared, disguised as legal goods that at first glance will not arouse suspicion from law enforcement. They go where there is less inspection, so they bring all this into Kazakhstan.”

Since Kazakhstan and Russia are part of Eurasia Customs Union, Renat continues, “there is practically no border,” and then “the batch is distributed”. Some of it is stored in Moscow, which acts as a logistics hub for supplies, and the rest is sent directly to the regions.

Dan, the importer, confirms that he buys in precursors from China disguised as other legal chemicals — for example, pesticides: “Completely legal logistics are used. A truck carrying the precursors from China could be bringing in anything from sneakers to vibrators,” he says.

The BBC also gained access to a closed chat of wholesale drug traffickers where the synthesis and supply of precursors were discussed. The BBC monitored the chat for more than six months: users congratulated each other on national holidays, griped about unreliable suppliers and personnel shortages, and periodically discussed precursor deliveries. According to the correspondence, the “standard route” for delivering precursors is from China via Kazakhstan.

To confirm the route and method of delivery, posing as a buyer, the BBC contacted several Chinese factories that sell fentanyl precursors. In particular — the Amarvel Bio factory, some of whose representatives were arrested in Fiji in 2023, and extradited to the US on charges of money laundering and trafficking fentanyl precursors. Soon after, the same factory started expanding its focus to Russia, actively advertising and targeting buyers of mephedrone precursors.

A BBC reporter contacted the factory posing as a buyer, the factory representatives assured that delivery would be carried out safely and sent a tracking number for the cargo, which, according to them, had already been sent to a client in Russia. This cargo also passed through Kazakhstan. Other factories also sent the BBC correspondent tracking numbers for shipments, and these deliveries were also carried out through Kazakhstan.

Representatives of the Amarvel Bio factory sent the BBC a photo of a storage facility where, according to them, the cargo could be picked up. The photo showed a yellow portable building, in front of which were boxes wrapped in yellow tape. In October 2023, the BBC was able to geolocate this photo — the portable building is located on the territory of the ‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ (Southern Gates) market in Moscow.

And in January 2024, ‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ was mentioned in correspondence among drug traffickers in a closed chat — according to participants, arrests became more frequent there when couriers came to collect precursors.

‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ in publications about goods delivery from China is called a “centre of ‘grey’ customs clearance.” In the constant flow of goods from China and Kazakhstan a barrel with precursors can easily be hidden.

Renat Kuramshin confirms that such markets can be widely used by drug manufacturers and suppliers: “Every such market is a city within a city, where anything can be hidden — from a luxury car to a tonne of heroin or mephedrone,” he says, standing about a hundred meters from the yellow portable building whose photo was sent to the BBC correspondent by employees of the Amarvel Bio factory. Behind Renat, boxes wrapped in yellow tape are being actively unloaded.

‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ is owned by the influential Moscow-based entrepreneur God Nisanov, who also owns the ‘Sadovod’ market and the ‘Moscow’ trade fair complex. According to reports in the Russian news online news outlet ‘Baza’ the ‘Moscow’ trade complex has also been used as an endpoint for precursor deliveries from China. The management of ‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Dan, the supplier, told the BBC that for drug traffickers ‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ is a favoured destination because it is easy to hide barrels of precursors in the nearby forest for producers and couriers to collect.

To show us the system Dan sends an instruction to a courier in Moscow— telling them that several barrels of precursors have been left for them to pick up under a big fir tree in woods near the highway, 60 kilometres from the Moscow Ring Road.

As we are talking to Dan, the ‘chemists’ he had been in touch with in Russia get back in contact. He’s obviously relieved that this particular strand of his business model is safe for now, but he acknowledges that everyone gets caught in the end. They’ll probably last three or four years,” he says. Almost all of them start off just wanting to earn money and then leave, but the environment pulls them in — “you want more, and life changes”. Cooking can bring in up to 200 thousand [roubles, £1780] at a time.”

— Do you feel responsible for selling drugs?

— Well, I’m not running around playgrounds with a syringe anymore.

— So what? It destroys people’s lives.

— I don’t really care. People sell tobacco, alcohol, and so on.

— Yeah, alcohol is quite a destructive substance too.

— Yeah, my dad drank himself into ruin.

— So you’ve personally felt how destructive addiction can be. And now you act, in a sense, as a sponsor of addiction for others. Don’t you see a contradiction there?

— Not at all.

— Why not?

— Well, back then alcohol companies made money, now it’s me.

Credit: BBC

Mephedrone to opiates

Back in Moscow, and after just a few months clean, Olya has relapsed.

She began by injecting mephedrone intravenously — to achieve a stronger effect. But then one night at a party with friends, realising mephedrone wasn’t giving her the same high it used to, she decided to try heroin instead.

The following morning her friends found Olya “on a mattress, blue with a bloody mouth.” A 17‑year‑old boy sleeping on a nearby mattress had died.

After that incident, Olya and her friend were called into the police station for questioning. “We haven’t even been in school for a long time,” the 18‑year‑old girl explained in response to the officers’ questions.

Dying doesn’t seem scary

After the party, Olya thought about it — she too could have died that night: “But they revived me? [So] let’s just keep going.”

By the summer of 2024, Olya had switched to the heroin substitute methadone, which she used intravenously.

She posted videos about her life. In one she is staggering through a Moscow metro underpass in high heels, clearly high. She is wearing a white faux-fur coat, her bright pink eyeshadow contrasting with her deathly pale face.

“Let’s shoot up again? she asks the friend filming her. “Shall we?”

The BBC caught up with her one evening as she was walking through a park. Still slightly sleepy after a party the night before, she describes how she and her friends stroll through the city looking for drug stashes — “you just have to look where stashers usually hide things”.

“I don’t even like Moscow. There are so many drugs here. So many temptations,” she says. Olya speaks of her plans to leave the city to stay with her grandmother in Vladimir and try to come off drugs there. But it never happens.

After walking in the park, Olya returns to her friend’s apartment — in one room blood-stained mattresses are piled up, in the corner there is a basin with dried vomit or blood. In the grim kitchen, with walls yellowed from cigarette smoke Olya and her friend Vlad make instant noodles and try to remember where they put the money they’ve put by for their next hit.

Credit: BBC

By the evening they still haven’t found it so they decide to go for a walk in a nearby park to see if they can find any stashes hidden there.

“Honestly, I’ve been thinking that I just want to throw myself out a window, just to forget all of this, for none of it to exist,” Olya says. “I do want to live — but dying doesn’t seem scary either. I’m grabbing onto anything I can.”

“It’s impossible to stop”

In the summer of 2023, Maxim was arrested — the two guys in tracksuits who had been watching his building turned out to be police operatives. During the search of his rented apartment, they found synthesizing equipment, 700 grams of mephedrone, precursor remnants, and several bank cards. Maxim and his partner were sent to a pre-trial detention centre.

“When I was arrested, I felt so relieved,” Maxim recalls. “My head was overloaded. I had to go to work, prep food at the restaurant, pay rent…” In detention, Maxim started keeping a journal, which he later gave to BBC correspondent.

“A grey winter sky hung over the city. The air was enriched with the sharp taste of freedom, and outside, a light rain began to fall. In the distance, the streetlights flickered,” Maxim wrote, lying on his bunk in the cell.

Relations with his cellmates were tense — the young man was forced to do dirty work in the cell, and they reproached him for producing drugs. On days when the pressure from his cellmates intensified, Maxim’s journal entries became more emotional: “My consciousness has shrunk to 4 meters wide and 10 meters long. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. It kind of feels like a dorm: TV, phone, fan, kettle. All the conditions for living — but it’s impossible to live.”

His mother, Tatyana (name changed), tried to find an answer while her son was in detention — why had he spent several years distributing drugs?

“He saw how hard his mother worked and how little she earned. And how much you could make just by going and leaving a stash under a bench somewhere. After trying easy money, it became hard for him to stop,” she says.

One day, while shopping for T-shirts, Tatyana caught a familiar scent — the same smell Maxim used to have when he made up excuses. In front of her stood a young man picking out a flashy tracksuit, and Tatyana realized: he was a cook (someone who synthesizes drugs). She wanted to approach him, tell him about her son, and say: “Stop.” But looking at his “satisfied face,” she understood — “no pleas from a stranger’s mother” would make a difference.

“My son is gone — and two hundred others have taken his place. This will never end,” she says.

“Lost generation”

In detention, Maxim was thinking through possible ways to “escape from prison” — he was facing a long sentence, which meant he wouldn’t be released until he was nearly 30.

“Who needs a guy who’s been in prison, has no education, and spent half his life behind bars?” he wrote.

To avoid serving the full sentence, Maxim decided to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defence and go to fight in Ukraine. When his accomplice Nikita found out that Maxim was planning to sign the contract, he sent him a note from the neighbouring cell: “Brother, if you’re going to the special military operation [SVO – Russia’s official name for its war in Ukraine], maybe you could take all the blame, so I get a lighter sentence. You’re going to the SVO anyway, and there it doesn’t matter how long your sentence is.”

Credit: BBC

In January 2024, Maxim, who had entered a pre-trial agreement, was released from detention and placed under house arrest.

Before the ankle monitor was installed, he was free to move around the city. Standing in the forest where he had once found his first stash, wearing a balaclava and a hoodie with a darknet shop logo, he recorded himself on video: “I would’ve ended up in prison sooner or later anyway. We know what we’re getting into. But 12 years — that’s a lot.”

His mother told the BBC that Maxim signed the military contract in July. In August, his fellow soldiers informed her that Maxim may have died during a combat mission.
By autumn 2024, Maxim’s official status was “missing in action.” Nikita, Maxim’s partner in crime, according to Nikita’s father, was also planning to sign a contract and go to war.

At a meeting with BBC correspondents, Maxim’s mother read his journals for the first time and began to understand the deep despair her son was feeling.

“A lost generation. We didn’t know what to do. Deception all around […] I lost everything because of these drugs, because of insomnia and endless work. I let down my family, I let down my mother. I let down my sister, I let down everyone. I said it couldn’t get any worse. But it did. […] The guilt I feel toward my family is endless. I’ll never be able to make up for it. Will I get a chance? I’m in deep trouble.”

Credit: BBC

Back in Moscow, in the autumn of 2024, Olya was using heroin again.

She bought drugs using money awarded to her as moral compensation — the man who had sex with Olya in exchange for money or drugs was arrested and prosecuted. Olya was also considered a suspect because she had brought her friends to this man and took a cut from them, but she wasn’t charged since she was under 18 at the time of the crime.

In November 2024, she was detained and put under house arrest.

In May 2025, she was sentenced to six years in a penal colony for attempting to sell drugs.

Olya’s mother declined to speak with the BBC.

In December 2024, Dan got back in touch with the BBC.

He said the chemists he had been calling during our earlier meeting were now in prison, but that he was now running a much larger lab capable of producing mephedrone on an industrial scale. He even sent a video referring to production cycles of several kilos of the drug at a time.

More money for the suppliers and dealers. More broken lives and more misery for families across Russia.

The BBC asked the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs to comment on the scale of illegal mephedrone trafficking and precursor supply. We did not receive a reply.

Andrey Gorianov — editor
Yaroslava Kiryukhina — data journalist

Marwan Barghouti, the World’s Most Important Prisoner

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This spring I took a walk through the farming village of Kobar in the West Bank. Its low-rise buildings wound around shrubs and bushes; pale pink blossom was just starting to bloom on the almond trees. On the surrounding hillsides you could see Jewish settlements – neatly ordered rows of identical villas with red tiled roofs. In the months before my visit, armed settlers from places like these had been attacking Palestinian villagers, largely with impunity. The buildings of Kobar were covered in graffiti, some of which read “Death to Israel”.

Yet on the day I was there the mood in the village was cheerful. I was being shown around by the son of Marwan Barghouti, Palestine’s most famous prisoner. Arab Barghouti, a smartly dressed life coach in his early 30s, cuts a different figure to his scruffy, moon-faced father, whose image is stencilled all over the walls of Kobar. Palestinian drivers who spotted us flashed victory signs as they passed by. “One more week!” they shouted. The release of Arab’s father, everyone felt, was imminent.

Barghouti, a Palestinian politician, activist and militant leader, was convicted of murder by an Israeli court more than two decades ago for ordering operations that killed five civilians. Though he has been shut away from the outside world since then, he is more popular with Palestinians than any other politician. A poll published in March 2024 by Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian researcher, suggested that if there were an election he would win more votes than both his nearest rivals combined. When Hamas seized 250 Israeli hostages during a murderous assault on Israel on October 7th last year, it raised the possibility of a prisoner exchange in which Barghouti might finally be freed.

The Israelis seem to be contemplating such an outcome. Weeks before I was in Kobar, a senior Israeli intelligence officer had come to the home of Barghouti’s younger brother, Moukbil. The officer politely asked if the family had heard any news about the famous prisoner. Moukbil sensed that the Israeli, who obviously knew far more about Barghouti’s situation than the family, was fishing for insights into what might happen if he were freed. Would Barghouti protest? Seek office? Fight?

It is a strange moment in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By most measures the situation is bleak. The brief optimism sparked by the Oslo accords in 1993, which were supposed to usher in a Palestinian state existing peacefully alongside Israel, was extinguished years ago. The current round of fighting is the deadliest of any since the state of Israel was created in 1948: nearly 40,000 Gazans are reported to have been killed and around 1,500 Israelis. In both cases the dead are mostly civilians. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, shows no inclination to stop the campaign.

Yet Netanyahu remains under pressure to free the Israeli hostages, which will almost certainly mean an exchange. A mediator involved in discussions told me Barghouti’s name is second on the list of prisoners Hamas wants out. If he is released, the dynamics of the conflict could shift. Unlike the lethargic head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, he is widely respected. Hamas’s Islamist commanders speak of him with admiration, even though he is from a secular faction. And unlike them, he has a track record of campaigning for a two-state solution. He is said to speak Hebrew flawlessly and without an accent. Several Israeli politicians count him as a friend.

“The only leader who believes in two states and will be elected against any other competitor is Marwan Barghouti,” said Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. “It’s in our interest he’ll compete in the next Palestinian elections – the sooner, the better.”

There are many Israelis who believe Barghouti is not interested in peace now – if he ever was – and that his release will come back to haunt them. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s military leader, was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2011, and went on to plan the massacres of October 7th. “Barghouti is as bad as Hamas,” said one retired intelligence chief. “He didn’t change in prison. He became more extreme.”

In truth, it is hard to say what Barghouti believes these days. His most recent interview took place almost 20 years ago. The last known photograph of him – shackled, pale, stubbly, with thinning hair – is more than a decade old. Who is the man incarcerated beneath the high walls of Meggido prison? And could he really be, as some claim, the Palestinian Mandela?

***

The region known as Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans for hundreds of years until the British took it over in 1917. The British quickly found themselves enmeshed in a messy intercommunal conflict, exacerbated by the promises they had made to both sides. The land contained holy sites to which both Muslims and Jews claimed ownership, and both groups went on to oppose the British presence – violently at times.

In 1948 the British withdrew and the new state of Israel fought its Arab neighbours in a war for independence. During the fighting Israeli forces drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. They were not allowed back.

When an armistice was reached, Israel established itself within a boundary that became known as the “green line” (supposedly after the colour of the pen used to mark it on a map).

Barghouti was born just over a decade later in the West Bank, which fell outside Israel’s green line and was under Jordanian control. His family of nine lived crammed into a two-bedroom house; the sleek white Bauhaus buildings of Tel Aviv shimmered in the distance. There were few jobs to be had in the village: Barghouti’s father, who was a builder, sometimes travelled as far as Beirut in search of work.

In 1967, when Barghouti was nearly eight, the six-day war broke out and Israeli forces seized East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. The Barghoutis now lived under Israeli occupation. Their neighbours were beaten up or arrested for flying Palestinian flags. Military bases and Jewish settlements sprang up around their village. Israeli soldiers shot dead the family dog for barking.

According to childhood friends Barghouti became involved in the communist party, which was influential in the occupied territories at the time. While some parties called for the destruction of Israel, the communists believed in non-violent resistance and the two-state solution. After school, Barghouti would march round central Ramallah at the head of protests. When he wasn’t studying or protesting, he helped his father build an extension on their relatives’ house and tried to steal glimpses of the family’s daughter, Fadwa.

Over time Barghouti became frustrated with how little marching seemed to achieve, and began looking elsewhere. There were many different groups jostling to represent the Palestinian cause, mostly from abroad. The best known of these was the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) which was dominated by the Fatah movement. Fatah cadres operated in the shadows, launching violent attacks on Israel from their base in Lebanon. Increasingly, Barghouti came under their sway.

When he was 18, before he’d had the chance to get to know Fadwa, he was arrested in a night-time raid on his home in Kobar. Prison guards put a filthy bag over his head, stripped him naked and beat his genitals with a stick until he fainted, he later alleged. When he came round they taunted him that he’d be unable to have children.

According to his brother, Barghouti was accused of being part of a terrorist organisation and preparing Molotov cocktails. He spent the next four and a half years in prison.

Many of his fellow inmates were from big towns and, for the first time in his life, the village boy was surrounded by people who read books. Their families and lawyers smuggled them in, and the young prisoners studied together. As the end of his sentence neared, Barghouti told his brother to ask Fadwa’s father for her hand in marriage. After he was released in 1983, the couple tied the knot.

Barghouti enrolled at Bir Zeit, the leading Palestinian university, where he studied history and politics. But he didn’t renounce activism, and spent the next few years leading campus protests against the occupation. Before his first son was born, he was arrested again.

This time he was detained for six months. While there he acquired enough Hebrew to read the Israeli newspapers which were brought to the cells each day and answer his guards back with verses from the Torah. Some of his fellow inmates had enrolled in history classes at Israel’s Open University, and he devoured the textbooks. He read about how Jewish militias had set about creating the state of Israel: setting off bombs in cinemas and hotels in their campaign against the British; unifying splinter groups into a single army; acting ruthlessly in pursuit of their goals.

He was in and out of prison after that. In 1987 Israeli authorities decided they didn’t want Barghouti stirring up any more trouble so they shoved him across the border with Jordan. Fadwa joined him in Jordan’s capital, Amman, with their toddler. He warned her not to expect a conventional life just because they were no longer being harassed by Israeli soldiers. “When Palestine is free, I will be back as a family guy,” he said.

Not long afterwards an uprising broke out across the occupied territories. Known by the Arabic word for “shaking off” – intifada – it was a campaign of civil disobedience, strikes and protests, though it also involved stone-throwing and, later, shooting. Barghouti had by then become a senior figure in Fatah’s exiled leadership and travelled around the world raising money for the uprising. At home his family kept growing, and soon he had four children. The Amman years were the most peaceful of Barghouti’s life and, the way Fadwa tells it, the most boring.

In 1993 he won a reprieve – Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s leader, struck a deal with Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, which ended the intifada. Thanks to the Oslo accords – named after the city in which they were secretly negotiated – exiles such as Barghouti were allowed to return to the occupied territories. Many of them had spent decades abroad and were out of touch with the people they presumed to represent. Palestinians scornfully called them olim hadashim – “new immigrants” in Hebrew. Barghouti, who had been away from Palestine for only five years, acted as a bridge between the occupied Palestinians and their would-be leaders.

For the first time, Fatah was able to operate openly in the West Bank, and Barghouti organised rallies against the occupation without having to fear arrest. Surreally, he also found himself socialising with Israeli politicians. Western governments supported the Oslo agreement by hosting endless peace-building conferences. Israelis and Palestinians were thrown together in English stately homes, airport lounges and fancy restaurants. Some of them developed a genuine rapport.

Barghouti liked putting his fluent Hebrew to use. Following his election to the first Palestinian parliament in 1996, he enthusiastically attended gatherings of Israeli and Palestinian MPs. His infectious good humour at these events won him friends . “Between us we have 145 years in jail,” he said as he waved at the assembled Palestinian delegation at a beachside restaurant in Tel Aviv. “And I was the one who put you all there!” replied Gideon Ezra, a former Israeli intelligence chief.

Meir Shitreet, an Israeli parliamentarian from Likud, the right-wing party currently led by Netanyahu, was particularly taken with Barghouti. He still remembers a joke that he used to tell about Arafat. The Palestinian leader was reluctant to be associated with violence, the joke went, so when his wife prepared him a dish containing the tongues of songbirds, he ordered her to keep the creatures alive. The mutilated birds then perched at the window watching Arafat devour their tongues, and tweeted: “Thun of a thitch!” (It may have been funnier in Hebrew.)

When Shitreet fell ill during a peacemaking conference in Italy, Barghouti sat at his bedside all night. “He supported peace, totally,” recalled Shitreet. “Real peace with Israel. We became really friendly.”

A commander in Shin Bet also noticed the charismatic young activist, and dropped in on his house in Ramallah to introduce himself. The commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Farah, has had many cordial interactions with prominent Palestinians over the years: coffee with Ahmed Yassin, the paraplegic founder of Hamas, a Jewish new year card from Arafat. But it was Barghouti who left the best impression. “He was someone we could work together with in the peace era,” said Abu Farah. Barghouti’s door was always open, said his former assistant, Samer Sinijlawi, a touch pointedly. “He never said no to meeting any Israeli.”

***

Under the terms of the Oslo accords, the Palestinians agreed to recognise the state of Israel, but the Israelis agreed only to acknowledge the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. A state would come at the end of an “interim” process, the end date of which began to look hazy.

Islamist groups seeking to derail the peace process stepped up suicide-bomb attacks on Israeli civilians. In their talks with the PLO, Israeli negotiators seemed only to want to discuss clamping down on these militants, rather than charting the path to Palestinian statehood. “Our main concern was how to deal together with terrorists,” said Abu Farah of his many meetings with Barghouti.

Meanwhile, Jewish settlements expanded in the West Bank and Gaza, and brought armed Jewish zealots with them. Deployments of soldiers followed, and Palestinians wondered whether there would be enough unoccupied territory left in which to build their state.

As disillusionment set in, Barghouti toured Israel and Palestine, warning that moderates like him would be marginalised if the Oslo process failed to deliver a Palestinian state. By then Barghouti had been promoted to secretary-general of Fatah in the West Bank, a senior position in an organisation that was trying to be a resistance movement, a political party and a government all at the same time. He was given the task of running the Tanzim, the grassroots activists who had led protests during the intifada and now acted as Fatah’s muscle on the streets. (Arafat’s office paid their budget.)

Arafat, the head of the PA, was growing reclusive – the contradictions of his position were hard to reconcile. He promised the Israelis security and the Palestinians liberation, but struggled to deliver either. Increasingly Barghouti appeared at public gatherings on Arafat’s behalf. Some spoke of the young man from Kobar as a possible successor. “Arafat looked at Barghouti like his son,” said Abu Farah. “He was thinking of him as a future leader.”

In July 2000 Bill Clinton, the American president, hosted a summit to map out a final settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. The atmosphere was tense from the beginning, and talks broke down over the status of Jerusalem, among other intractable issues. Both sides knew violence would follow. The trigger was a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon, the leader of Likud, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of one of the most sacred mosques in Islam as well as Judaism’s holiest place. Barghouti was there waiting for him, with a posse of young men. They furiously denounced Sharon and hurled chairs at his security detail. The second intifada had begun.

***

Riots quickly spread across the West Bank. Barghouti said goodbye to five-star hotels and returned to more familiar territory: dodging Israeli gunfire in the back alleys of Ramallah.

Most mornings he would rally protesters and lead them to the checkpoint at the foot of Beit El, a settlement and military base on the outskirts of the town. Many protesters threw stones; Israeli soldiers responded with rubber bullets and sometimes live rounds. Occasionally Apache helicopters joined in. The protesters kept coming. After several weeks of mounting casualties, Palestinians started shooting back from the rooftops. Unlike the previous intifada, the second quickly spiralled into armed conflict.

Towards the end of 2000, Barghouti helped Arafat set up a military wing of the Tanzim, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. At first the brigade restricted itself to attacking settlements and soldiers in the occupied territories. This was enough to make Barghouti a target. A former Shin Bet commander said that plans were drawn up to assassinate him, but never carried out. Barghouti had some near misses however. Once a tank fired a shell at his vehicle as he was walking towards it, killing his bodyguard, which he saw as a warning. Each night, he slept in a different house.

His old Israeli friends tried to steer him away from militancy. “I warned him, I called him, I said ‘stay away, don’t touch terror’,” said Shitreet, who was by then justice minister. But Barghouti wanted to prove occupation had a cost. “I’m not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist,” he wrote in an editorial in the Washington Post. “I do not seek to destroy Israel but only to end its occupation of my country.”

He claimed to oppose attacks on civilians inside Israel, but within Fatah people were starting to worry the organisation looked weak compared with its Islamist rivals. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another militant group, were pursuing a relentless suicide-bombing campaign inside the green line. One of the most devastating attacks took place in the summer of 2001, when a militant blew himself up in a nightclub in Tel Aviv and killed 21 people, 16 of whom were teenagers.

Around that time Ron Pundak, one of the Israeli architects of the Oslo process, held a secret meeting with Barghouti in a safe house in the West Bank. According to a Palestinian present at the encounter, Pundak reproached Barghouti for his turn towards violence. Barghouti replied flatly: “We can’t lose the street to Hamas.”

Towards the end of 2001 the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade decided to start dispatching suicide-bombers to kill civilians within Israel. There could scarcely have been a less diplomatically astute time to adopt such a policy. Al-Qaeda had just killed nearly 3,000 American civilians on 9/11, and Israel persuaded America that its one-time partner, the PLO, was cut from the same cloth. With what some saw as the tacit acquiescence of the White House, Israeli tanks pummelled Palestinian towns and cities. Many Palestinians began to regret the adoption of violent tactics. By the spring of 2002 Barghouti himself was mulling a unilateral ceasefire, according to a diplomat who spoke to him at the time.

On April 15th Barghouti made the mistake of using a mobile phone that Shin Bet was tracking and revealed that he was hiding in the home of a Fatah official. According to Gonen Ben Yitzhak, the Shin Bet officer who ran the operation to capture him, commandos found Barghouti using his comrade’s mother as a human shield. But unlike other Fatah leaders, Barghouti was not assassinated. Instead his captors led him off in chains crowing, “We’ve caught the head of the snake!”

***

Moskobiya, a prison in the Russian Orthodox district of Jerusalem, has been used as an interrogation centre for over a hundred years. It was here that Barghouti had been held as a teenager. On his return in 2002, Barghouti immediately asked for a meeting with Shin Bet’s head, Avi Dichter, whom he knew personally. Quick to disabuse him of any illusion of status, the Israelis offered a junior interrogator instead.

Questioning began in the early evening and continued till mid-morning, day after day, week after week. Sleep deprivation and blindfolds were de rigueur. According to the account he gave his lawyers he was shackled to his chair in a stress position. When he leant back, nails pierced his skin. Within four months, the interrogators had compiled their case. He was accused of involvement in 37 attacks or attempted attacks. Among them was a shooting in a seafood market in Tel Aviv in March 2002, in which three civilians were killed.

Barghouti wasn’t directly involved in operational matters, so the case hinged on the degree of responsibility he had for enabling these missions. Much of the evidence against him was deemed too sensitive to be made public, but Abu Farah, the Shin Bet officer, said that during his interrogation Barghouti had confessed to ordering the operations. “He didn’t connect the wires of the devices,” said Abu Farah, “but he was the commander. He was the leader for those people.”

But Ben Yitzhak, the Shin Bet officer who helped arrest Barghouti, was surprised at the charge sheet. True, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was overseen by Fatah’s supreme committee, of which Barghouti was a member. But these cells were only loosely controlled, and other Fatah leaders were more directly implicated in military operations. (Barghouti himself has always denied supporting attacks on civilians inside Israel.) A little dismissively, Ben Yitzhak pointed out that Barghouti had no military background. “I never saw him as a big fighter,” he said. “He was always in politics.” Ben Yitzhak suspected the Israelis wanted to make an example of Barghouti because they felt personally betrayed by his espousal of violence. Abu Farah certainly seemed to feel this, complaining to me: “He did it after sitting with us. He was a partner.”

Barghouti was tried in a civilian court rather than the more opaque tribunals generally used for terrorism suspects. Perhaps by trying him as a common murderer, Israel hoped to make him seem less like a hero. The decision backfired: it gave Barghouti a platform, which he used to denounce the proceedings. From the moment he entered the courtroom, his hands clenched above his head as if in victory, he stole the show. His son Arab, then 13, was the only relative allowed into the gallery, and he leapt over the wooden benches to try to reach his father. Barghouti delivered a rousing speech in which he called himself a “fighter for peace for both peoples” – which prompted the judge to retort that a fighter for peace wouldn’t turn people into bombs.

For much of the two years of his trial, Barghouti was held in solitary confinement, in a cell little bigger than a photo booth. On June 6th 2004 he was summoned for sentencing. He was acquitted on 21 of the counts, but found guilty of involvement in five murders. His sentence was five life terms, plus an additional 40 years. Some still wonder whether his desire to play to the gallery cost him. “He could have got 20 years in prison. By now he would have been out,” said Sinijlawi, his former assistant. “We don’t want a symbol in prison, we want a leader.”

***

Barghouti remained in solitary confinement for several more years. In late 2005 the authorities began to let him mingle with the other inmates, possibly in the hope that he might check the growing popularity of Hamas. Once out of solitary, he turned the prison into a university, organising lectures from 9am to 5pm. “You’ve captured our bodies, not our minds,” he would say to the guards.

External examiners from universities in Israel and Palestine marked the inmates’ papers, and conducted vivas over mobile phones when possible (the prison authorities would sometimes interrupt the process as punishment). Over 1,200 inmates graduated under his programme.

Barghouti himself completed a doctoral thesis in Palestinian democracy, which his lawyer had to smuggle out one page at a time. He lectured, too, often on the books that captured his wide-ranging curiosity – the political economy of China or religious tolerance in classical Islam. Other prisoners called him “professor”.

Wardens usually allowed visitors to bring two books each time they came, but Barghouti traded other inmates’ allowances for chocolates he had bought from the prison shop. He managed to assemble a library of more than 2,000 volumes. “He loved history. He loved to read about Israelis, about the leadership,” said Yuval Bitton, who oversaw intelligence collection in prisons at the time. More recently Barghouti is said to have enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens”, a bestselling history of humanity.

Barghouti had a kind of celebrity status. Israeli politicians visited his cell. It was much harder for Palestinians to do so. If his wife wanted to see him she had to go through the arduous process of applying for a permit to enter Israel. She would get up at 5am on the appointed day, then undergo humiliating searches at checkpoints and prison gates – all for a 45-minute conversation behind glass that the authorities might cancel on a whim. For more than 20 years Barghouti’s family have seen him only in occasional glimpses.

***

In 2004 Arafat died. He had not been a particularly effective leader, but he had been a talisman for the Palestinian cause. His successor, Abbas, was a different figure. He had no background as a fighter, and his instincts were those of a cautious bureaucrat. According to one of his former ministers, he was anxious about angering the Israelis.

Under Abbas’s watch the PA started to resemble the bloated security states of the Arab world. Money donated by the Japanese government helped build a sleek compound for the presidential headquarters. Inside were barracks for Abbas’s 2,800-strong bodyguard and a helipad. Abbas acquired a private jet, but since his realm had no airstrip he was obliged to keep it in Amman.

Abbas hasn’t been associated with as much corruption as some Arab leaders, but for Palestinians struggling in refugee camps his life seemed a world away from theirs. “We’ve seen so little of him he might as well be in prison with Barghouti,” said one Palestinian journalist in Ramallah.

Barghouti had always been more outspoken than most about corruption in Fatah. After Arafat died he twice toyed with the idea of running from prison as an independent candidate in Palestinian elections, but was persuaded to return to the Fatah fold both times.

In 2006 his ability to work with other blocs in Palestinian politics was urgently needed. That year Palestinians were given a chance to choose their government for the second time. Hamas won the election by a crushing majority, shocking the world. Abbas had no desire to invite the Islamists into government, but it looked undemocratic for him to ignore the result.

Barghouti was well-placed to broker a solution. The prison he was in at the time, Hadarim, had been built to house Palestine’s political elite. Its main block had 80 inmates and contained both Fatah and Hamas leaders, including Sinwar, the future mastermind of the October 7th attacks. Together with Hamas representatives, Barghouti thrashed out a programme for reconciling the two factions, checking how Israel might respond to different kinds of power-sharing arrangements by discussing the proposals with his Israeli visitors.

In May 2006 the group released a statement that came to be known as the Prisoners’ Document. It called for a national unity government and “resistance” to Israel but, crucially, only in the territories it occupied beyond the green line. The document drew up the constitutional outlines of a Palestinian state: democratic, with equal rights for all, including women, and conforming to the pre-1967 borders. With Barghouti’s encouragement, Hamas seemed finally to have accepted a two-state solution.

Abbas, desperate to re-establish authority after Hamas’s election win, accepted the first step of the Prisoners’ Document and agreed to a national unity government. It comprised Hamas, Fatah and a smattering of independents. Salam Fayyad, an economist who had worked at the International Monetary Fund, was to be the finance minister.

But opponents of working with Hamas prevailed. America helped a Fatah warlord in Gaza set up new PA battalions designed to crush the Islamists. Hamas counter-attacked and Abbas’s forces had to flee. The national unity government collapsed.

In his rump fief, Abbas became paranoid. Poll after poll showed his unpopularity. Barghouti meanwhile became so beloved that Abbas’s allies could not be seen to undermine him, however much they would have liked to, and paid the requisite lip-service to his heroism. “No one can criticise him,” said one.

***

On October 7th 2023 Hamas and other factions breached the security barrier separating southern Israel from Gaza. Their fighters stormed kibbutzim, towns and a music festival, slaughtering more than 1,100 people. It was the bloodiest day the state of Israel has ever experienced.

It responded with unparalleled ferocity, not just in Gaza but also in the jails where Palestinian prisoners were kept. According to a prisoner who was released in February, inmates of one institution were forced to strip naked, kneel down and kiss the Israeli flag before mealtimes. “The sadism made Abu Ghraib [an Iraqi prison where American forces abused inmates] look like a picnic,” said the prisoner. At least ten Palestinians have reportedly died in custody.

According to his lawyer, Barghouti himself was put in solitary confinement, at times in complete darkness. Israel’s national anthem was piped into his cell at top volume all day. His books, television and newspapers were confiscated, and food and water severely rationed – he lost 10kg. The Israeli press reported that Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s hard-right security minister, suspended a prison guard for giving Barghouti food. The Israeli authorities say that Barghouti and other prisoners have been treated according to the law.

Barghouti’s wife and spokesperson, Fadwa, stopped speaking to journalists. “I don’t want to say anything to provoke anyone because I don’t want to put him in danger,” she told me in the only interview she has given since the start of the war in Gaza. “I’m very worried about his life.”

In recent weeks the families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza have stepped up their campaign for a prisoner swap. Some have protested outside Netanyahu’s home. Even as it tries to crush Barghouti, the Israeli security establishment is having to grapple with what his freedom might mean for Israel.

Shitreet, the former justice minister, is convinced that Barghouti’s release would be in Israel’s interests. “If it would depend on me, I would release him, I would pardon him and give him the possibility really to be a leader and arrive at a Palestinian state, living in peace with Israel,” he said.

Abu Farah can’t make up his mind. “He would be a very good leader, he is very clever, he is very intelligent,” he said. “I think that we could make peace with such a leader.” Then he backtracked. “We don’t trust them. How can you choose somebody that was a terrorist to be the president of the Palestinian people?”

Fadwa said that her husband still believes in the two-state solution, and that this fact was inconvenient for Israelis who wanted to dismiss him. “The Israelis would prefer someone who says ‘we don’t want Israel’,” she told me.

The question is what he might be willing to do to achieve a Palestinian state. Opinions differ on this. Some Palestinian journalists say he now espouses non-violent resistance alone. Others, including the manager of the campaign for his release, Ahmed Ghneim, reckon he thinks violence is necessary under certain circumstances. “We’re not being occupied by soft power. It’s brutal occupation by force,” said Ghneim.

One Western diplomat who has exchanged messages with Barghouti said he has prescribed strict limits on militant activity, for instance, not targeting women and children and not conducting operations outside “the area of occupation”.

What is clear is that Barghouti is less inclined than Abbas to wait patiently to be handed a state. In 2016 a political ally unveiled papers smuggled from prison which he claimed contained Barghouti’s plans. They hinged on mass disobedience.

According to the papers, Palestinians should march in their hundreds of thousands on Jerusalem, the settlements and Israeli army posts, with young and old people in the front line. The occupation’s infrastructure – its walls, road-blocks, checkpoints and electricity pylons should be destroyed. Sure, the Israeli army might open fire. But, said Ghneim, “You can’t get your liberation for free. Abbas is afraid of the price.

***

The past nine months have been deadly for Palestinians in the West Bank as well as those in Gaza. In the aftermath of October 7th, the Israeli army has been carrying out raids in its towns and cities, while settler violence has increased. Around 500 Palestinians have been killed.

When I went to Kobar, Israeli soldiers had recently pulled down the poster of Barghouti from the billboard in the village square. Nonetheless, when the intelligence officer visited his brother Moukbil in January he behaved with exceptional friendliness. At the end of their conversation the officer saluted Moukbil as “the brother of the future leader of Palestine”.

Up the road in Ramallah, I saw Abbas’s supporters gathered in restaurants beneath clouds of sheesha smoke, gaming out what they would do if Barghouti got out. What, if buoyed by the celebrations, he led the crowds to march on Abbas’s compound? “There will be a Palestinian civil war,” predicted a Fatah security chief, staring glumly into his coffee cup.

Officially, Abbas’s aides told me that Barghouti would have a “very important” role in the PA were he to be freed. But the current leader seems to be in no hurry to get his potential successor out of prison. Those close to the hostage negotiations said Abbas urged Qatari mediators to remove Barghouti’s name from the list of prisoner exchanges.

There is a reason that Hamas wants him released, apart from the prestige it would bring them. They see Barghouti as crucial to their political survival in post-war Palestine. A veteran Western diplomat thinks that Barghouti could broker a deal whereby the Islamists become members of a national unity government in exchange for recognising the state of Israel.

There is something bizarre about all the plotting going on around a man no one has seen for so long. Nelson Mandela emerged from his decades in prison wiser and more self-disciplined. No one knows what kind of transformation Barghouti has undergone. Most visits were cut off in 2016. Even his wife has not seen him for more than a year.

Bitton, the Israeli prison-intelligence officer, suggested that the Barghouti he knew in jail was less impressive than the icon whom Palestinians celebrate. He didn’t muck in with ordinary prisoners the way that Sinwar did. “He thought he was the big figure of Fatah. He always says he’s number one,” said Bitton. He added that Barghouti’s influence with other prisoners was quite limited.

Even if Barghouti doesn’t disappoint Palestinians, they might disappoint him. How many would heed him if he called for a march on Jerusalem now – especially given the greater tolerance that the Israeli army has shown for Palestinian casualties since October 7th? “People are with the movement in their hearts but with the company in their pockets,” said one Palestinian journalist, referring to the network of patronage through which the PA maintains its power.

For all his popularity, Barghouti lacks a base. His Tanzim are now led by an Abbas loyalist. “He essentially has no organisation,” said Shikaki, the pollster.

But for the peaceniks, there’s no one else who has Barghouti’s potential. “I don’t know if he’s Mandela, but he’s Barghouti, and he will be our partner in negotiations,” said Haim Oron, a former Israeli cabinet minister. “He spoke about the right of the Palestinians, and when I spoke about the right of Jews, he understood.”

Barghouti’s allies told me he has resisted the urge to despise his enemies, even after all these years of war and incarceration. “He wasn’t driven by hatred and revenge. He was purpose-driven,” said Qadura Fares, a former adviser. “He always knew that even with two states we both have to find a way of living in this bit of land together.”

ILLUSTRATIONS : DEBORAH STEVENSON

SOURCE IMAGES: GETTY, NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE, BRIDGEMAN, REUTERS

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