A Russian artist and musician who swapped worth tags in a St Petersburg grocery store with anti-war messages criticising Russia’s actions in Ukraine has been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony.
Sasha Skochilenko, 33, was arrested and jailed in April final 12 months after the incident on the department of grocery store chain Perekrestok.
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She was sentenced on Thursday for supposedly discrediting Russia‘s armed forces.
Given the 19 months she has already spent in pre-trial detention, the sentence might be decreased by greater than two years.
The prosecution claimed she was appearing out of political hatred.
However, Skochilenko says she was neither a political activist nor an extremist, however was appearing from pacifist conviction.
She instructed the choose in her ultimate assertion that the case was “bizarre and ludicrous”, and that even staff at her detention centre had been astonished on the prices.
She additionally identified that the prosecution of her case and the substantial media protection it had acquired had unfold the message far wider than may in any other case have been achieved by inserting 5 items of paper in a grocery store.
“Had I not been arrested,” she instructed the courtroom, “it would have been known only to one granny, a cashier and a security guard at the Perekrestok store.
“So why aren’t my investigators and prosecutors going through prices beneath Article 207.3 (of the Russian Criminal Code, which penalises public dissemination of deliberate false details about using Russian Armed Forces), solely me?”
Dressed in a tie-dye T-shirt with an enormous purple coronary heart on the entrance, Skochilenko made coronary heart indicators from contained in the glass cage as her supporters chanted “disgrace” and “freedom” after the decision was learn out.
She reduce a fragile determine surrounded by burly, balaclava-clad police guards, a few of whom had ‘Z’ on their helmets, the image of Russia’s marketing campaign in Ukraine.
Her supporters are involved that her jail time period might develop into a dying sentence, given her a number of extreme well being situations.
Skochilenko has written prior to now about her struggles with psychological well being together with bipolar dysfunction. She additionally has a congenital coronary heart defect and is coeliac.
Her legal professionals and supporters are involved she won’t be supplied with the meals or medical assist she wants when she is transferred to a jail colony.
Since the Kremlin launched the laws final March criminalising any supposed discrediting of the armed forces, almost 750 individuals have confronted felony prices, in line with the human rights group OVD-info, which paperwork political persecution.
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Skochilenko’s case is without doubt one of the most excessive profile, alongside distinguished political activists like Ilya Yashin, who acquired an eight-and-a-half-year time period final December beneath comparable prices.
The artist was initially reported to the police by one of many grocery store’s clients.
According to native St Petersburg media outlet, Bumaga, which managed to trace that buyer down, they themselves had been shocked on the verdict, telling journalists “for bits of paper, it should of course have been less”.
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Source: information.sky.com”