Two political prisoners are in danger of dying—two people may be dying right now—in Russian prisons. Theirs are two very different stories. One of the dying is a grown man who has made a series of conscious, well-articulated choices. The other is a teen-age girl who seems confused by her predicament. In both cases, the inmates’ families are issuing a cry of despair, and a broad community of supporters is watching the chronicle of deaths foretold in silent horror. In both cases, the machine of state terror seems intent on crushing a human life in order to demonstrate its power over the meek and the honorable.

The more widely known of the two cases is that of Oleg Sentsov, a forty-two-year-old Ukrainian writer and film director. He was arrested in Russian-occupied Crimea in May, 2014, and sentenced to twenty years in a high-security facility on trumped-up charges of terrorism. The Russian human-rights organization Memorial considers Sentsov to be a political prisoner. Last year, PEN America gave Sentsov its Freedom to Write Award, given annually to a writer who is behind bars. (I am a vice-president of PEN America.) On May 14th of this year, Sentsov declared a hunger strike; he was demanding the release of all Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia. He apparently timed his protest to draw maximum media attention, in the lead-up to the World Cup in Russia, which began on June 14th. The science of hunger strikes, passed down through generations of Gulag inmates, holds that the body begins to succumb to hunger around the thirty-day mark, and then the countdown begins. The World Cup came and went, and Sentsov’s hunger strike continued. Last week, his cousin, who visited him in prison, said that he was near death. Over the weekend, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, asked Vladimir Putin in a phone call to save Sentsov. Hours later, a rumor spread through Russian social networks: Sentsov, barely hanging to life, had been put on a plane to Ukraine. The rumor was false.

Sentsov is not demanding freedom for himself. He is striking on behalf of other Ukrainian political prisoners, most of whom have been arrested and sentenced without anyone but their friends and loved ones knowing about it. Sentsov’s action prompted the Russian online publication OVDInfo, which tracks politically motivated arrests and trials, to create a tally of Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia. After several weeks of research, OVDInfo located eighty-eight people whom the organization believes are in Russian custody for political reasons stemming from the war in Ukraine.

OVDInfo started six and a half years ago, at the dawn of Russia’s current political crackdown. It has evolved from an ad-hoc effort to publicize arrests made during the mass protests of 2011-12 to a full-fledged media outlet, at which more than a dozen reporters track cases of people accused of violating the rules of protest, the laws against espionage and so-called extremism, and other laws used to prosecute freedom of thought.

Gratuitous and downright absurd prosecutions have proliferated over the years, but, this year, one case has stood out. Ten young people, six of whom are in custody and four under house arrest, are facing charges of organizing an extremist organization in connection with an organization called New Grandeur, which, it appears, was created by Russian law enforcement for the sole purpose of entrapment. Before the security services got involved, New Grandeur was a raggedy collection of strangers of different ages who grumbled about the authorities in a Telegram chat. Then at least three people infiltrated the chat and turned it into an offline group with a leader and officers. The group had several meetings over the course of four months; by March, it was discussing disbanding. But then its participants were arrested and charged with plotting a violent overthrow of the government.

One of the accused, Anna Pavlikova, was seventeen years old when she was arrested, in March. According to her family, she suffers from a congenital heart defect and, separately, has been hospitalized for what appears to have been extreme anxiety. In pre-trial detention, Pavlikova has been continuously hospitalized. Her family members have said she has become disoriented and forgetful, and they fear she is showing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, which afflicts her mother. (Multiple sclerosis can run in families.)

Pavlikova’s defense has repeatedly tried, and failed, to get the now eighteen-year-old released pending trial. During the teen-ager’s most recent hearing, last week, her defense attorney broke down and said, “I am tired of speaking legalese. I’m going to speak as a person: this child is dying!” The court extended the term of Pavlikova’s arrest to September 13th.

In a society that still carries the memory of Stalin, the Gulag, and show trials, the state’s indifference to two people who appear to be dying in its prisons sends a strong and familiar message. The message is: there will be no rhyme or reason to the arrests and prosecutions. Anyone can be swept up for a small or even imaginary transgression, though not everyone will be swept up. There will be no exceptions once the system has marked you. It is clear that no amount of heroism or weakness, no hunger strike, no illness, no death can compel the Russian persecution machine to treat its subjects like human beings.