Aleksandr Litreev was on their way to a business meeting last February when his life changed forever. En route to a hotel in Yekaterinburg, a day’s drive east of Moscow, Litreev was pulled over by police. When they asked him to hand over his phone, the then-24-year-old knew it was no routine traffic stop.
“They took me to a police station,” Litreev recalls, “and magically some drugs appear,” Litreev said he was arrested by around 10 armed policemen, beaten into confessing to ecstasy possession, and then detained for a month. He managed to flee to Estonia after being released into house arrest.
“If I go back to Russia now, I will get something like lifetime imprisonment,” Litreev said. “Not gonna happen.”
