Daria Kozyreva used Nineteenth-century poetry and graffiti to protest Russia’s struggle on Ukraine.
A Russian court docket has handed down a jail sentence of almost three years to Daria Kozyreva, a younger activist who used Nineteenth-century poetry and graffiti to protest the struggle in Ukraine.
A Reuters information company witness within the court docket on Friday mentioned Kozyreva, 19, was discovered responsible of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian military after she put up a poster with strains of Ukrainian verse on a public sq. and gave an interview to Sever.Realii, a Russian-language service of Radio Free Europe.
She has been sentenced to 2 years and eight months in jail.
On Friday, Kozyreva pleaded not responsible, calling the case in opposition to her “one massive fabrication”, in keeping with a trial transcript compiled by Mediazona, an unbiased information outlet.
“I’ve no guilt. My conscience is obvious,” she mentioned, in keeping with Mediazona’s transcript.
“As a result of the reality is rarely responsible.”
In December 2022, aged simply 17, Kozyreva sprayed the phrases, “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases,” in black paint on a sculpture of two intertwined hearts, erected outdoors Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum that represents town’s hyperlinks with Mariupol, a Ukrainian metropolis largely razed to the bottom throughout a siege earlier that 12 months.
In early 2024, after being fined 30,000 roubles ($370) for posting about Ukraine on-line, Kozyreva was expelled from the medical college of Saint Petersburg State College.
A month later, on the struggle’s second anniversary, she taped a bit of paper containing a fraction of verse by Taras Shevchenko, the daddy of contemporary Ukrainian literature, onto a statue of him in a Saint Petersburg park:
“Oh bury me, then rise ye up / And break your heavy chains / And water with the tyrants’ blood / The liberty you could have gained.”
Kozyreva was swiftly arrested and held in pre-trial detention for almost a 12 months, till she was launched this February to deal with arrest.
‘Punished for quoting poetry’
Natalia Zviagina, Amnesty Worldwide’s Russia director, mentioned Friday’s verdict “is one other chilling reminder of how far the Russian authorities will go to silence peaceable opposition to their struggle in Ukraine”.
“Daria Kozyreva is being punished for quoting a traditional of Nineteenth-century Ukrainian poetry, for talking out in opposition to an unjust struggle and for refusing to remain silent,” she mentioned in a press release.
“We demand the instant and unconditional launch of Daria Kozyreva and everybody imprisoned underneath ‘struggle censorship legal guidelines’.”
Kozyreva is at present certainly one of an estimated 234 individuals imprisoned in Russia for his or her antiwar place, in keeping with a tally by Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian human rights group.
Arrests on expenses of spying and amassing delicate knowledge have additionally develop into more and more frequent in Russia because it started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Evan Gershkovich, a reporter with the Wall Road Journal, was arrested final 12 months on suspicion of attempting to acquire army secrets and techniques and charged with espionage, which carries a sentence of as much as 20 years, and is at present in custody awaiting trial. The USA has designated him “wrongfully detained” and is in search of his launch.
Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was arrested final October and is awaiting trial on expenses together with failing to register as a “international agent”. She too is being held in custody pending trial.
