Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has announced a hunger strike to protest charges pressed against him by British prosecutors.
Bukovsky, 73, was charged nearly a year ago of making and holding indecent images of children.
He wrote on his blog on the Moscow-based Ekho Moskvy radio station's website on April 20 that he will continue his hunger strike until all charges against him are dropped.
He also called on the High Court of Justice in London to look into "the premeditated blackmailing campaign" launched against him by Russia's Federal Security Service.
Bukovsky, who spent 12 years in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals for anti-Soviet propaganda, has lived in Britain since 1976.
He has been a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin and accused the Kremlin of involvement in the radiation-poisoning death of former Russian intelligence officer Aleksandr Litvinenko in London in 2006.