It’s 9:39 p.m. on February 28, 2023, when Yegor Balazeikin lights a bottle of diesel on fire in front of the military recruitment office in Kirovsk and throws it against the building. The flames go out immediately, as images from a surveillance camera show. Yegor tries again, kneeling in the snow to light another bottle. The second effort produces some small flames, but they, too, quickly vanish.

Yegor Balazeikin is ultimately unable to set fire to this facility in northwestern Russia that sends young men into the war in Ukraine. The only things left from his attempt on this winter evening: diesel stains, broken glass and a scrap of cloth.

He doesn’t run away. Police find him at a bus stop just 100 meters away. "Did you do it?" the police ask him. Yegor responds: "Yes!"

Yegor is 16 years old and wants his desperate act of protest against the war in Ukraine to be heard. He wants to force the Russian authorities to face him. "I'm against the war. I don’t want any more people to die," he says during the interrogation that night at the police station in Kirovsk, located an hour’s drive from St. Petersburg.

The price for the form of protest he chose has been high. Beyond his arrest, he has also had to spend the past several months in pre-trial detention. And not just for "attempted property damage," as the original complaint stated, but for "terrorism."

The trial against Yegor Belazeikin, now 17, began this week in St. Petersburg. He stands accused of two "attempted terrorist attacks" and faces a possible prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Yegor is one of the youngest defendants to have chosen such a radical form of protest against the war. He would later tell his parents that it was too late to merely go out on the streets with a protest sign. "We missed that moment."

Since the beginning of the war, dozens of people in Russia have tried to set fire to military offices, security buildings or other administration structures. Through September, a group called Zone of Solidarity, which offers support to antiwar activists who are facing trouble with the authorities, recorded 145 such arson attacks. The perpetrators share the conviction that peaceful means of protest are no longer sufficient.

Even after 20 months of war, many Russians continue to support the campaign against Ukraine, even if impassively. They simply try to ignore the fighting, the rockets and the dying. Those who do dare to make their antiwar sentiments known in public are immediately taken away. Just holding up an anodyne sign like "No to War" or even a blank piece of paper is enough to be arrested and fined. Officials react far more harshly to the Molotov-cocktail attacks: More than 40 defendants have, like Yegor, been accused of terrorism and face the prospect of many years in prison.

Yegor’s story is one of profound transformation. The war turned him from a student with excellent grades in an apolitical family into an opponent of the state. And his parents have changed right along with him. Ever since the arrest of their son, mother Tatyana and father Daniel have a completely new view of the country they call home.

It has been a double shock for the parents.

Otradnoye, a small town near Kirovsk, lies about an hour’s drive southeast of St. Petersburg. Here, in a weathered wooden house, is where Yegor, an only child, lived with his parents. A photo on the bureau in the hallway shows him at age 10 wearing a karate uniform with a blue belt wrapped around his waist, his hands balled into fists and a determined look on his face.

Tatyana puts together a dinner of cheese, sausage and bread along with tomatoes and cucumbers, all of it set out on the small table in the kitchen. She says that ever since her son has been gone, she no longer enjoys cooking.

It is the end of August at the time of this interview, and Yegor has already been in pre-trial detention for almost six months. He is only able to write letters from prison, and they are first censored by prison officials. His mother tells his story for him.

She talks about the evening her son was arrested. She isn’t able to discuss all of the details of the investigation and had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, as is often the case for terrorism investigations in Russia.

Throwing a burning Molotov cocktail is a clear violation of the law, Tatyana allows. She says Yegor also earned some kind of punishment, but not like this. She says she was only called by Russian officials two hours after the arrest. And once they reached the police station, she and her husband had to wait for three hours before they were allowed to see their son.

Yegor had already been interrogated at the station, without either his parents or a lawyer present. That's illegal, but it gives investigators time to get the suspect to confirm the statements they need, says his lawyer Sergei Loktev. And at some point, Yegor attested that he had wanted to change the constitutional order of the Russian Federation through his actions. The minor was never informed that he did not have to say anything that might incriminate himself. Indeed, what Yegor actually did is no longer the primary focus, but what he said. A public defender brought in later did nothing to intervene – which, says Loktev, was a clear violation of the lawyer’s duty and would later result in a reprimand from the association of lawyers.

"He was so calm when I saw him that night at the police station, so determined," Tatyana recalls. Only later did she realize that Yegor had prepared himself for everything.

One of the first times she went to visit him in jail, he told her he believed that you "can’t just keep living normally when so many people are dying." She says her son didn’t want to bear any responsibility for the war – and that by doing what he did, he had freed himself from culpability.

From the very beginning, he wanted to be completely truthful about what he had done, even if he had to go to prison for it, he told his mother. He viewed not doing so as a sellout. In one of his letters to his mother from prison, he described that conviction as "staying human, even here."

Words that make Yegor sound far wiser than his years.

His room at home, though, is still that of a child. On one shelf are the trophies he won at karate competitions, with other medals hanging beneath it. Thick file folders are full of certificates and awards.

In September 2022, he began attending the respected High School Nr. 166 in St. Petersburg. Back in November, his parents had rented him a room near the school so he didn’t have to make the hours-long commute by bus and train during the week.

In an assessment for the investigation, the school’s director praised Yegor’s irreproachable behavior and wrote that he was "hard-working and attentive." His primary interests lay with history, the assessment noted, but he also took an active role in political discussions.

In his parents’ bedroom, seven empty wooden frames are hanging on the wall. They used to contain Yegor’s certificates for karate tournaments he won, but only gray cardboard is left. The certificates themselves are now part of the investigation files.

Yegor always read a lot, his parents say. His books are organized neatly in his room, with biographies of czars lined up next to volumes by Erich Maria Remarque and Leo Tolstoy along with military histories and books about the Third Reich. Yegor spent years reading about wars and went to museums with his father – the kinds of interests that not many of his friends shared. On his phone, Daniel shows the last photos of the two of them together – a slender, fragile looking boy smiling into the camera.

It's late September as Tatyana Balazeikina hangs her leather jacket on the back of her chair and sits down next to her lawyer in Room 6 of the First Western Military Court in St. Petersburg. She straightens up her papers and looks up at the screen on the wall. Her son is taking part in the court proceedings via video link from his pre-trial detention facility. Prosecutors have applied to extend his imprisonment.

The young man looking through the blue bars into the camera looks very little like the child from his father’s photos. Yegor’s previously round face has grown narrower and his shoulders broader. His hair, as is normal in Russian prisons, has been shaved off. When he stands, he balls his hands into fists.

Yegor’s mother and the family’s lawyer are requesting house arrest so that he can gather strength for the prison sentence that is sure to come. Tatyana stands erect in the courtroom, her hands shaking slightly. She speaks loudly and slowly so that her son can hear her in his detention facility. But the connection is so poor that many of her words are lost.

Yegor is suffering from autoimmune hepatitis, his mother tells the court. The illness first appeared when he was eight years old, she says, and it produces itchy rashes, inflamed joints and inconsistent digestion. He needs to go to a hospital and receive hormones to calm his immune system, she insists. But the disease can flare up at any time. Tatyana says that his liver function tests have shown deterioration since he has been in detention.

Neither the prosecutor nor the judge, though, show much interest in her arguments. Yegor, they claim, could again engage in "his criminal acts" if he were allowed to leave the detention facility. His pre-trial detention is extended.

"We love you, my son," Tatyana calls into the camera. Yegor smiles briefly from the video monitor before disappearing behind a creaky iron door. Tatyana wipes tears from her face.

She sounds more tired than she did in August, more frustrated. "Everything was already decided. Why do I even make the effort to prepare myself and read through all the laws?" She bought herself copies of Russia’s penal code and the Russian constitution and worked her way through both of them. Even though the family has lawyers to help them out, Tatyana wants to understand everything that is going on. But what difference does it make when it no longer matters in today’s Russia what the constitution says?

Tatyana works as a private English teacher, but cancels all her lessons for this afternoon. She’s too worn out.

"How stupid we were for so long," she says during one of the drives back to Otradnoye. She says that she and her husband Daniel, an electrician, had been unaware of the repression faced by dissidents in their country.

Since the birth of their son, she says, the two have primarily focused on ensuring that he received a good education, and they saved money to send him to karate camps. But they were never political and never voted – not even for Putin. Tatyana and Daniel knew very little about Putin’s annexation of the Crimea and the fighting in Ukraine's Donbas region. They don’t have a television and they say they were largely spared the increasingly aggressive anti-Ukraine propaganda coming from the Kremlin.

On the morning of February 24, 2022, they say, it was Yegor who informed his parents about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He was agitated. "Mom, Putin started the 'special operation.'" The three of them figured, she said, that if the Russian president had decided to take that step, then he likely had good reasons for doing so.

Yegor, though, started reading about it and subscribed to a number of Telegram channels. His parents say that some of them were from critical, independent media outlets like the BBC and Meduza, but he also subscribed to the channel run by the propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. Yegor, they say, wanted to understand exactly what was going on. He started sending them links and engaging in discussions with them.

At home in Yegor’s room, his father Daniel says that his son had been a patriot. That he was initially shocked by the early losses suffered by the Russian army, which he had always thought was invincible. Later, he says, Yegor was bothered by the reports from Bucha, where Russian soldiers apparently murdered hundreds of residents. Yegor began having his doubts about the war.

Then, on June 27, 2022, Daniel’s phone rang. His older brother had been killed in Ukraine. The brother had volunteered for frontline duty in April but never told anybody in the family about his decision. Suddenly, the war was quite close – and it hit Yegor and his family hard, they say.

A family video shows Yegor’s uncle giving him books by Tolstoy and Friedrich Nietzsche on his 15th birthday. There is also a photo from that day showing Yegor in the yard with his uncle and father. Daniel says that he sent the picture to his son in prison, along with a second photo. He pulls up the second one on his mobile phone. It shows him standing alone in the yard. Beneath it, he wrote: "I’ve been robbed."

Yegor turned 16 in early August, 2022, but he didn’t want to celebrate because of his uncle’s death. Everything just keeps getting worse, he told his parents. He was reading a lot about Russia’s mobilization, about the protests and about arson attacks on military offices.

And for the first time, there was also no New Year’s celebration in Otradnoye. The three of them ate together on December 31, but there were no decorations, no Christmas tree and no presents.

In the days that followed, despite school being out for the holidays, Yegor didn't go to St. Petersburg for a museum visit as he had planned, and instead slept a lot. Tatyana worried he might be having problems with his liver again.

But it was apparently the developments on the front lines that were bothering him the most. On New Year’s night, the Ukrainian army had fired a rocket into a temporary Russian base in Makiivka, killing dozens of soldiers.

When he spoke about the incident with his mother on New Year’s morning, they both cried. She felt so helpless, says Tatyana. She says she told Yegor: "Let’s stop torturing ourselves with these discussions. Let’s take a little break." She hoped that the pain would fade.

After that, says Tatyana, Yegor stopped talking with her about the war at all. She tried, but he no longer wanted to.

It has grown dark outside and Tatyana gazes out the kitchen window, her eyes filling with tears. "It’s my fault that he’s in jail. I didn’t understand the state he was in."

Only after he was arrested did she remember the day she found Yegor quietly mumbling to himself in the kitchen. He already had his jacket on and was about to leave for St. Petersburg for school. When she asked what he was saying, he said: "I’m saying goodbye to the house."

Tatyana and Daniel say they are 43 and 45 years old, though their passports indicate that they are each one year older than that. They decided to freeze their ages until their son is released.

A few relatives and friends have turned their backs on the family, while Tatyana and Daniel have cut ties with others. People, for example, who have told Tatyana that she should beg her son to disavow what he did. "They don’t know my son. He would turn his back on me."

The parents received an official warning from the authorities that they had not fulfilled their supervisory duties with their son. Daniel lost his job as an electrician, though Tatyana still has her students.

But the family also has support. A group has been established on Telegram where news about Yegor’s legal proceedings is shared along with excerpts from his letters and telephone conversations. People from across Russia are writing him supportive notes in prison and donating money. His parents were able to collect around 2,000 euros within just a few days for his lawyers, examinations and food.

Yegor’s grandmother is also providing financial assistance – from her share of the money paid out by the state for the death of her son, Yegor’s uncle, in Ukraine.

Standing out front of Pretrial Detention Facility Nr. 5 in St. Petersburg, Tatyana points to a red, somewhat dilapidated brick building behind the wall. Her son is on the first floor of the building, locked away with three other youths accused of rape and other violent crimes. Yegor’s parents are allowed to see their son twice a month for two hours. Divided by a pane of glass, they speak through a telephone. Now, it is up to Tatyana to keep her son up to date about the war in Ukraine and developments in Russia, both during her visits and in letters.

She wrote seven pages about the Wagner Group revolt under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin, and she was surprised when the censors allowed her letter through.

Yegor has to get up at 6 a.m., and he only has classes three days a week in prison. His grades have fallen off, which has created some tension with his parents. Tatyana is worried that her son is going to forget everything he has learned over the years. Yegor, though, told her, she relates, that other things are more important in the prison world he now occupies.

He is doing a lot of strength training, things like sit-ups, pushups and chin-ups. He wants to be able to defend himself should the situation arise. Thus far, he says, he has been able to peacefully resolve those conflicts that have arisen – such as when he asked his cellmates to regularly wash themselves and keep their cell clean.

On this day in September, Tatyana and Daniel are bringing their son food. They carry 15 bags from the trunk of their old Mitsubishi to the prison entrance, where they hand them through a hatch to a prison employee: Several kilos of bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions, along with cheese, sausage and canned food. And several rolls of toilet paper. Yegor’s parents are now supplying food for the entire cell.

His lawyer Sergei Loktev doesn’t think the trial will take too long. The judge has scheduled five days. It is very likely that Yegor will be transferred to a penal camp in Archangelsk, 1,100 kilometers to the northeast.