Daria Kozyreva used 19th-century poetry and graffiti to protest Russia’s war on Ukraine.
A Russian court has handed down a prison sentence of nearly three years to Daria Kozyreva, a young activist who used 19th-century poetry and graffiti to protest the war in Ukraine.
A Reuters news agency witness in the court on Friday said Kozyreva, 19, was found guilty of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army after she put up a poster with lines of Ukrainian verse on a public square and gave an interview to Sever.Realii, a Russian-language service of Radio Free Europe.
She has been sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.
On Friday, Kozyreva pleaded not guilty, calling the case against her “one big fabrication”, according to a trial transcript compiled by Mediazona, an independent news outlet.
“I have no guilt. My conscience is clear,” she said, according to Mediazona’s transcript.
“Because the truth is never guilty.”
In December 2022, aged just 17, Kozyreva sprayed the words, “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases,” in black paint on a sculpture of two intertwined hearts, erected outside Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum that represents the city’s links with Mariupol, a Ukrainian city largely razed to the ground during a siege earlier that year.
In early 2024, after being fined 30,000 roubles ($370) for posting about Ukraine online, Kozyreva was expelled from the medical faculty of Saint Petersburg State University.
A month later, on the war’s second anniversary, she taped a piece of paper containing a fragment of verse by Taras Shevchenko, the father of modern Ukrainian literature, onto a statue of him in a Saint Petersburg park:
“Oh bury me, then rise ye up / And break your heavy chains / And water with the tyrants’ blood / The freedom you have gained.”
Kozyreva was swiftly arrested and held in pre-trial detention for nearly a year, until she was released this February to house arrest.
‘Punished for quoting poetry’
Natalia Zviagina, Amnesty International’s Russia director, said Friday’s verdict “is another chilling reminder of how far the Russian authorities will go to silence peaceful opposition to their war in Ukraine”.
“Daria Kozyreva is being punished for quoting a classic of 19th-century Ukrainian poetry, for speaking out against an unjust war and for refusing to stay silent,” she said in a statement.
“We demand the immediate and unconditional release of Daria Kozyreva and everyone imprisoned under ‘war censorship laws’.”
Kozyreva is currently one of an estimated 234 people imprisoned in Russia for their antiwar position, according to a tally by Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian human rights group.
Arrests on charges of spying and collecting sensitive data have also become increasingly frequent in Russia since it began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Evan Gershkovich, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, was arrested last year on suspicion of trying to obtain military secrets and charged with espionage, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years, and is currently in custody awaiting trial. The United States has designated him “wrongfully detained” and is seeking his release.
Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was arrested last October and is awaiting trial on charges including failing to register as a “foreign agent”. She too is being held in custody pending trial.
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