A Russian has chosen with 5 years in prison, after a neighbor's denunciation on the army mobilization.
The Leningrad Region Court, from St. Petersburg, Russia, September 25, 2024. Photo: Viktor Karasev / Alamy / Profimedia
A Russian court sentenced a woman from St. Petersburg on Tuesday to more than five years in prison for criticizing the Russian army on social networks, after an alleged denunciation from her neighbor, AFP reports.
Anna Aleksandrova, a 47-year-old hairdresser, was arrested in November 2023 for the posts she made, under the pseudonym, on Vkontakte, the largest social network in Russia.
Prosecutors accused her of providing information on how to avoid mobilization in the Russian army and posted critical information to the Moscow offensive in Ukraine.
Russia has opened hundreds of criminal files against its citizens for the spread of “false news” about the army, after the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The Pushkinsky District Court in St. Petersburg applied a five-year and two-month prison sentence and forbade it to use social media for three years afterwards, the court's press service announced, in a statement published on the Telegram Messessry application.
Aleksandrova pleaded innocent in the process, saying that he is the victim of a staging and a denunciation from a neighbor with whom he had a land dispute, according to the Russian Independent Mediazona.
She has two children – a son and a daughter – and was in preventive arrest for over a year.
She said, for the Current Time news publication, that the investigators broke the front door of the apartment during her arrest and that one of them threatened to “destroy” her and her son.
Her state of health has been damaged since she was behind bars, Mediazone said.
After the launch of his widespread offensive from Ukraine, Moscow led an unprecedented repression against dissent, which the organizations that advocate for the defense of human rights compared with the mass repression of the Soviet era.
