In the meantime, McDowell said she had been working with Little on editing and drafting an opinion piece for publication to bring Okhotin’s plight to a wider audience. Sonnenberg said he collaborated with Little in the writing of that piece.

In Limbo

Okhotin said that despite such continued efforts to fight the charges, by mid-August his had become a game of endurance.

“It’s sort of endless waiting,” he said Tuesday night. “It’s very draining.”

After the trial, he recalled the humdrum means he had used to cope with an approaching court date: Okhotin, who once undertook a 27-day hunger strike in defiance of his detention without formal charges, said he spent much of July buried in books, including a Victor Hugo novel and texts on the study of German, Hebrew and Latin.

“I went through one of the Berlitz dictionaries from cover to cover,” he said. “It’s just a waiting game. You have to keep your mind preoccupied.”

On the eve of his trial, Okhotin said this anxious sense of marking time until his trial date came from a deep uncertainty about what awaited him on Wednesday morning.

As late as Tuesday night, Okhotin said he suspected that prosecutors “probably haven’t made up their mind yet” about how to handle the case.

Perhaps the most desirable possibility he mentioned was that all charges would be dropped and no trial in fact take place on Wednesday or any later date—and he had thought this was an entirely possible result which could have come at any time between June and August.

“We’ve been told that the judge or prosecutor’s office can put an end to this the day before the trial,” he said. “I think there’s plenty of grounds to drop the case.”

But that did not come to pass when he arrived at Golovi Courthouse on Wednesday morning.

In any case, the thought of dismissed charges had brought him little comfort this summer, Okhotin said.

“All these days that you’re waiting, you wonder—can this be the day?” he said.

Alternately, Okhotin worried on the night before his trial that even Aug. 13 would not bring an end to his lengthy battle. He said that though his trial “might be over by lunch” if all went according to plan, the judge could just as easily put it on indefinite hold in the absence of any scheduled witnesses.

He said then that he feared some witnesses might fail to show up the next morning as part of an intentional prosecutorial plan to delay his day in court “for weeks or months,” virtually ad infinitum.