On October 28, the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan was due to hear the appeal in the case of Ufa activist and journalist Olga Komleva, but the hearing was first closed and then postponed. No official reason was given. According to her relatives, the delay may have been linked to her condition: since September 8, 2025, she has been unable to speak.
Komleva told her husband, Vyacheslav, that she lost her speech after another search at the pretrial detention center in Dyurtyuli, where she was transferred on August 21, 2025. She said similar episodes had happened before under severe stress: during the Covid period, after a detention in 2021, and after repeated cell transfers in December 2024.
“Since September 8, I have not been able to speak. I hope that one day my speech will return,” Komleva wrote from detention.
Her husband told the outlet Vetër that she has a neurological condition under which sudden intense emotions can trigger fainting-like episodes. In his account, the search in Dyurtyuli overlapped with the trauma of an earlier incident in a Ufa detention center, where Komleva complained that a staff member had acted beyond acceptable boundaries during a search. She also has type 2 diabetes, though, according to her husband, her blood sugar is being managed with medication and special food.
Komleva had been active in public life in Ufa for years: she volunteered for Alexei Navalny’s local штаб, monitored elections, reported for RusNews on prosecutions tied to the “Baymak case,” and took part in environmental campaigns. After Navalny’s organizations were declared extremist, she was charged with participating in an extremist community, and later with spreading “false information” about the army. On July 29, 2025, the Kirovsky District Court in Ufa sentenced her to 12 years in prison. The human rights group Memorial considers Komleva a political prisoner.