A district courtroom in St. Petersburg, Russia, sentenced Olga B. Smirnova, a peace activist and an outspoken critic of the nation’s invasion of Ukraine, to 6 years in a penal colony on Wednesday for spreading so-called false details about the nation’s armed forces on social media.
Ms. Smirnova, a 55-year-old architect, was arrested in May 2022, after posting data on VKontakte, the Russian equal of Facebook, that described the demise of Ukraine’s civilians and the shelling of its cities after Russia invaded. The prosecutors who received her conviction cited her “extremely negative attitude toward the political regime of the Russian Federation.”
The prosecution’s case was primarily based on seven of her posts to a bunch she belonged to, known as “Democratic Petersburg — Peaceful Resistance.” In one, on March 6, 2022, she wrote that “Russian aggressors” had dedicated battle crimes “comparable in scale only to the atrocities of the German Nazis during World War II.”
In courtroom, the prosecution labeled the knowledge as “fake,” not least as a result of it was not included in official accounts from Russia’s ministries of protection or overseas affairs, native news studies famous. The proof in opposition to her additionally included books written in Ukrainian discovered when her house was searched, the prosecutors mentioned.
The protection had argued that Russia’s Constitution assured freedom of speech.
In remarks earlier than her sentencing, Ms. Smirnova denied spreading any pretend news, however mentioned opposition to the Russian authorities was one thing of a household custom. Ms. Smirnova can be credited with 16 months already served for her time in pretrial detention. In addition to the jail sentence, she was banned from administering any on-line websites for 3 years.
According to the group OVD-Info, a Russian rights teams, the state had introduced legal fees in opposition to greater than 600 defendants for antiwar exercise and initiated greater than 7,100 administrative circumstances within the interval between the beginning of the battle, on Feb. 24, 2022, and the tip of June of this 12 months.
Asked by the exiled news web site Mediazona to jot down about her experiences in courtroom and in jail, Ms. Smirnova, in a letter printed on Wednesday, supplied this recommendation: “Now it is better to turn to the dissidents of the Soviet period for advice, until their generation has left this mortal world. They will better explain how to practically realize their inalienable rights when they remained only on paper.”
Source: www.nytimes.com