Ten years ago today, Platon Lebedev, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s friend, business partner and fellow Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience, was arrested. On July 2, 2003, Lebedev was being treated in a Moscow hospital when he was seized by law enforcement officers. He has remained imprisoned ever since, being convicted alongside Khodorkovsky during the two Kafkaesque trials both men have endured.

Lebedev played an integral role making Yukos a world-class company defined by international standards of transparency and corporate governance. His arrest can be seen as the start of the systematic campaign against Yukos which saw Khodorkovsky arrested on October 25.

Many perceived Lebedev’s arrest as a warning to Khodorkovsky that he should flee the country. Khodorkovsky, however, refused to go into exile, one of the main reasons being that he was unwilling to leave his friend and business partner behind in detention.

The two men were subsequently convicted alongside each other in two show trials, receiving identical sentences. Like Khodorkovsky, Lebedev’s release date is currently scheduled for 2014, having been brought forward in December 2012 due to changes in Russian sentencing guidelines, but it remains to be seen whether the authorities will indeed release him then. Since June 2011 he has been held in a penal colony in Velsk, in the Arkhangelsk region.

The Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Russian press centre has marked the occasion with 120 quotations, one for each month of Lebedev’s unjust detention. The quotations include a letter from Lebedev’s then 9-year-old daughter, Masha, which was read aloud in court in which she pleaded with the judge: “I cry almost every day. I don’t sleep at night, thinking about papa. After all, time keeps moving on, and I am growing up…I hope papa will come back to us soon, after all he isn’t guilty of anything.”

All 120 quotations can be read in Russian here.