A Russian court sentenced a St. Petersburg artist to seven years in prison, Aleksandra Skochilenko. And the trial, closely followed by international media, once again highlights the severe punishments imposed by the government of Vladimir Putin to Russian citizens, even for small acts of civil protest, in this case against the invasion of Ukraine.
“Sasha” Skochilenko, an artist, musician and activist, was found guilty of “knowingly spreading false information about the Russian military” in March 2022. The artist admitted to replacing price tags at a local supermarket with pieces of paper urging shoppers to stop the war and resist propaganda on television.
“Putin has been lying to us from television screens for 20 years: the result of these lies is our willingness to justify war and senseless deaths,” read one of the labels that prosecutors declared dangerous for society and the Russian state. Skochilenko is one of hundreds of Russians facing criminal charges over her opposition to the war and the government.
Many have been charged under the law on dissemination of “false” information on the military, which was hastily adopted after Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. And among those accused there are also opposition politicians, activists and journalists.
Censorship
The laws have had a chilling effect on protests in Russia, where public demonstrations by war opponents have virtually disappeared. “How fragile must the prosecutor’s confidence in our state and our society be, if he thinks that our status as State and our public safety can be torn down with five small pieces of paper“Skochilenko, 33, argued in a final statement to the court.
Dozens of followers shouted “Shame!” while the judge read the sentence in the case. Skochilenko, who has struggled with health problems for a period of preventive detention of 19 monthsmade the sign of a heart with her hands from inside a cage reserved for judicial defendants in Russia and has been declared a political prisoner by the Russian human rights group Memorial.
Skochilenko, who was arrested after a 76-year-old shopper alerted the police (an act compared to the Soviet-era practice where ordinary citizens spied for the security services), suffers from bipolar disorder and heart disease. Apparently, prosecutors, who had already asked for eight years in prison, were denying her essential medications to put additional pressure on her.
Other cases
Russian society normalized these cases. And the opposition press has long been silenced. Journalist Mikhail Afanasyev He was imprisoned last year in a Siberian prison for writing about a small group of National Guardsmen who had refused to fight in Ukraine. The sentence was five and a half years in prison. “It is the duty of each person to expand the horizon of freedom with his actions, so that the light pours in and overcomes the darkness,” Afanasyev wrote from preventive detention in a letter to his followers.
“I really ask you to write to me. It helps me a lot… I just want to be a journalist, faithful to my profession until the end and defend these values,” she added. The truth is that independent Russian journalism has given way and collapsed in the last year under the weight of new laws that criminalize “fake news” and references to war.
In March Traditional media such as Echo of Moscow were closed and even many international media groups had to suspend their publications in the Russian capital to avoid the risk of their reporters being imprisoned. Criminal cases became common. Another journalist, Maria Ponomarenko, was sentenced to six years in prison for an article about the bombing of the Mariupol drama theater. “No totalitarian regime seems as strong as before the collapse,” she said hopefully in her final speech to the court.
“Our families are scared”, noted a local journalist in dialogue with The New York Times. Others have chosen the safer option of exile. More than a thousand journalists left Russia during the first weeks of the war, part of a huge exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians who fled the country over the past year.
Among them were journalists from TV Rain, the last independent Russian television network, whose website and offices were raided in the first days of the invasion. The network relocated to Latvia, but its journalists were forced to move again. The Netherlands has since granted the channel a five-year broadcast permit and Its journalists now work from a studio located on an Amsterdam canal.
The exodus has been compared to the intellectual emigration after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, when hundreds of intellectuals left Russia. History repeats itself.
Image gallery
