Aleksandra, “Sasja” Skotjilenko, was sentenced on Thursday to seven years in prison by a court in St. Petersburg after having been in custody since April 2022, writes Jellyfish.
After the judge handed down the sentence, a group of supporters in the courtroom shouted “shame” and “we are with you Sasja”, reports AFP.
Skotjilenko was arrested some time after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine after replacing price tags in one of the Russian retail chain Perekrestok’s stores in St. Petersburg with tags with anti-war messages.
On the notes she had written, among other things: “Russian forces have destroyed 80 percent of Mariupol. Why?” and “Inflation has reached its highest level since 1998 due to the military operation in Ukraine. Stop the war.”
Aleksandra Skotjilenko was arrested after one of the customers in the store, who saw her changing the price tags, reported her to the police.
“Standing for my opinion”
Skotjilenko, who admitted during the trial that she changed the price tags, but denied having spread false information, struck a defiant tone in her closing statement, writes BBC.
– How little faith does our prosecutor have in our state and our society if he believes that they can be destroyed by five small pieces of paper? she said as she turned to the court.
– You can say what you want – that I was wrong or that I was brainwashed. I stand for my opinion and for my truth.
The Russian artist and activist faced a 10-year prison sentence, according to the law against “deliberate dissemination of false information about Russia’s armed forces” passed in March 2022 by the Russian lower house.
Skotjilenko’s action in March 2022 was part of a wave of protests, where placards criticizing the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine were put up in shops or in public places around Russia.
The action was started through an initiative on the Telegram platform, where subscribers are asked to spread information about the ongoing war.
Hardening climate
The sentence against Aleksandra Skotjilenko is just the latest example in a long line of the Russian regime’s increasingly hard-line crackdown on the opposition.
Among others, the British-Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced in April to 25 in a penal colony after criticizing the war.
In October, television journalist Marina Ovsiannikova, who is in exile in Paris, was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. Ovsiannikova attracted international attention after appearing with the sign “No war” during a news broadcast on Russian television.
According to the independent organization OVD Info 19,840 Russians have so far been arrested for protesting since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.