Russian artist Alexandra Skochilenko, who replaced price tags with anti-war messages in a St. Petersburg grocery store as an act of protest, was sentenced to seven years in jail by a court in the Russian city on Thursday.
The court's press service stated that Skochilenko was found guilty of "public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation."
The prosecution claimed that in March last year, Skochilenko "placed paper fragments containing deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in places for attaching commodity price tags" in a chain supermarket in St. Petersburg.
Despite Skochilenko pleading not guilty and the defense seeking acquittal, the court imposed a seven-year sentence with a three-year ban on activities related to using "electronic or information and telecommunication networks," according to the press service's Telegram post.
Skochilenko,
held in pretrial detention since April 2022, saw her health deteriorate during
this time, according to the independent investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
In her last court statement, Skochilenko questioned the perceived threat posed by her actions, stating, "How little faith does our prosecutor have in our state and society if he believes that our statehood and public safety can be destroyed by five small pieces of paper?"
Describing herself as a pacifist, Skochilenko expressed her lack of understanding of Russia's aggression against Ukraine. "Today, scientists and doctors around the world are fighting to increase human life expectancy and find cures for deadly diseases. Therefore, I don’t understand: what is (this) war for? War shortens lives. War is death," she added, according to a courtroom correspondent for the independent news outlet Mediazona.
Amnesty International's Eastern Europe and Central Asia Director, Marie Struthers, condemned the conviction, calling it a "manifestly unjust verdict" and highlighting Skochilenko's arbitrary deprivation of freedom and 19 months in torturous conditions. Struthers emphasized that Skochilenko was merely trying to expose Russian aggression against Ukraine, making her persecution synonymous with the cruel oppression faced by Russians openly opposing their country's criminal war.
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