Saint Petersburg (Reuters) – A Russian court pronounced a prison sentence of almost three years in Darya Kozyreva, a young activist who used poetry and graffiti of the 19th century to protest against the conflict in Ukraine.
On Friday, a witness from Reuters said that Kozyreva, 19, was found guilty of “discrediting the Russian army several times after having presented a poster with lines of Ukrainian worms in a public square and gave an interview to Sever.relii, a Russian free radio service.
She pleaded not guilty, qualifying the case against her “a large manufacture”, according to a test transcript compiled by Medizona, an independent media.
She was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.
Kozyreva is one of the 234 people imprisoned in Russia for their anti-war position, according to a Tally of Memorial, a group for the defense of Russian human rights winner of the Nobel Prize.
In December 2022, only 17 years old, Kozyreva pulverized “Murderers, you bombed him. Judases” in black paint on a sculpture of two intertwined hearts, erected outside the Museum of the Hermitage of St Petersburg and representing the city’s ties with Mariupol, a Ukrainian city largely off on the ground.
At the beginning of 2024, after being sentenced to a fine of 30,000 rubles ($ 370) for having published on online Ukraine, Kozyreva was expelled from the medical faculty of St Petersburg State University.
A month later, on the occasion of two years of the conflict, she recorded a piece of paper containing a fragment of verses of Taras Shevchenko, a father of modern Ukrainian literature, on a statue of him in a park in Saint Petersburg:
“Oh bury me, then lift yourself / and break your heavy chains / and water with the blood of tyrants / freedom you have won.”
Kozyreva was quickly arrested and held in prior detention for almost a year, until she was released in February for residential assignment.
Addressing the court on Friday, Kozyreva said that she thought she had not committed any crime.
“I have no guilt, my conscience is clear,” she said, according to the transcription of Mediazona.
“Because the truth is never guilty.”
(1 $ = 80.9000 rubles)
(Report by Reuters in Saint Petersburg and Mark Trevelyan and Lucy Papachristou in London; writing by Lucy Papachristou; edition by Emelia Sithole-Mataris)
