A Moscow court sentenced 27-year-old Ksenia Belousova to 3 years and 25 days in a general regime penal colony for “offending the feelings of believers.” This sentence was an aggregation of her current conviction and a prior suspended sentence for drug possession. Despite her claims of being a believer and her family’s support for the war in Ukraine, the court deemed her motives “demonstratively mocking” and ordered her immediate detention, also confiscating the iPhone used to upload the offending video.
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A 19-year-old woman, Darya Kozyreva, has been sentenced to nearly three years in a penal colony by a St. Petersburg court for repeatedly discrediting the Russian army. The charges stemmed from gluing a quote by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko onto his monument and an interview where she criticized the war in Ukraine. This is not Kozyreva’s first run-in with the law, as she was previously fined and expelled from university for anti-war statements. Human rights organizations have condemned the verdict as politically motivated, highlighting Russia’s crackdown on dissent and its efforts to silence opposition to the war.
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