A Russian artist and musician who swapped price tags in a St Petersburg supermarket 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 last year after the incident at the branch of supermarket chain Perekrestok.
Ukraine war latest updates
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 will be reduced by more than two years.
The prosecution claimed she was acting out of political hatred.
However, Skochilenko says she was neither a political activist nor an extremist, but was acting from pacifist conviction.
She told the judge in her final statement that the case was “bizarre and ludicrous”, and that even employees at her detention centre were astonished at the charges.
She also pointed out that the prosecution of her case and the substantial media coverage it had received had spread the message far wider than might otherwise have been achieved by placing five pieces of paper in a supermarket.
“Had I not been arrested,” she told the court, “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 facing charges under Article 207.3 (of the Russian Criminal Code, which penalises public dissemination of deliberate false information about the use of Russian Armed Forces), only me?”
Skochilenko made heart signs from inside the cage in court