Jelena Osipova shakily holds up two self-painted placards. She uses it to protest against the Russian tanks and the bombs and grenades that bombarded Ukraine. Her small stature is dwarfed by the two officers who take her away. The two helmeted men, in full riot gear, treat her carefully, Osipova is old and there are many people filming and taking pictures.
Within an hour, the images of the arrest in St. Petersburg will go around the world. Osipova is an instant celebrity and, as the images spread further, only gets more famous, and older. When someone reports that she is “one of the last survivors of the Leningrad blockade”, it circulated on Twitter. It is no longer noticeable that her age is included – she is 76 or 77 and therefore from after the Second World War in which the blockade took place. Twitter is not for historians, truth is often sacrificed for entertainment value and speed.
Jelena Osipova is well known. As an artist she once made a graffiti painting for the 75th anniversary of the German blockade of Leningrad (as today’s Saint Petersburg was called before 1991). That was in 2014. She became even more famous as the ‘grandmother of the opposition’. She has been taking part in protests against Putin since 2002. She is there at every demonstration, including last week, when Russians take to the streets every day in Saint Petersburg because of the invasion of Ukraine. Until her arrest.
Jailed more than five times in 20 years
Osipova is without a doubt a brave woman. In twenty years she has been arrested and imprisoned more than five times. She has been the target of threats and intimidation, but has not been deterred. She continued to demonstrate this week as the protest grew smaller by the day due to police brutality.
Since the start of the invasion, a week ago, 7,632 protesters have been arrested, according to the Russian human rights project Ovd-Info. The authorities do not look at age. In addition to photos and videos of the arrest of the elderly Osipova, there are also photos of a group of children, aged 7 to 11, who had left a drawing and flowers at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow. The police had their mothers locked up, and the children had to go to the station as well. In front of the children, screaming officers threatened to remove the mothers from parental authority, according to the creator of the photos, Alexandra Arkhipova.
The intimidation works. The protests in Russia have virtually bled to death. Renowned dissident Aleksei Navalny on Wednesday called on his Russian supporters from his cell via Twitter to continue to take to the streets daily “and fight for peace” in order to bring the protests back to life.