A military court in Moscow today sentenced a 43-year-old Russian woman to eight years in a penal colony for posting anti-war online comments, several of which call for the assassination of President Vladimir Putin, were reported by Reuters and TASS.
Anastasia Berezhinska, a theater director from Moscow and mother of two young children, was found guilty under two wartime laws - discrediting the Russian military and spreading false information about it, and justifying terrorism.
More than 1,000 people have been prosecuted in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine, according to data from the human rights project OVD-info, and more than 20,000 people have been detained for protesting, Reuters notes. The agency recalls that on Tuesday a Moscow court sentenced a 68-year-old pediatrician to five and a half years in prison after the mother of one of her patients publicly reprimanded her for comments about Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
In the first months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Berezhinska published dozens of posts online against the conflict. The Russian army, the interior ministry and Putin himself, she said, were "committing genocide" against the Ukrainian people.
On May 14, 2022, she published more than three dozen posts on the VKontakte social network, insulting Putin and saying that he was personally responsible for the deaths of men, women and children whose bodies were exhumed. from under the ruins of destroyed apartment blocks in Ukraine.
Berezhinska continued to write and began to call for the death of the Russian president.
"Shoot that stupid bastard Putin, how many more civilian killings must we endure? "Wipe him off the face of the earth," Berezhinska urged.
The woman pleaded guilty to charges of spreading "fake news" and discrediting the army, the independent media "Mediazona" reported, but only partially pleaded guilty to the charges of justifying terrorism.
Berezhinska suffers from a mixed personality disorder, notes "Mediazona", referring to the materials in the case. She has two children, aged eight and ten, and a husband who suffers from epilepsy, the media reported.
The prosecutor's office demanded that Berezhinska receive ten years in prison.