ST PETERSBURG (Reuters) – A Russian courtroom passed down a jail sentence of just about 3 years to Darya Kozyreva, a tender activist who used Nineteenth-century poetry and graffiti to protest the war in Ukraine.A Reuters witness within the courtroom on Friday stated Kozyreva, 19, was once discovered accountable of again and again “discrediting” the Russian military after she submit a poster with strains of Ukrainian verse on a public sq. and gave an interview to Sever.Realii, a Russian-language provider of Radio Loose Europe.She pleaded now not accountable, calling the case in opposition to her “one giant fabrication,” in step with an ordeal transcript compiled by way of Mediazona, an unbiased information outlet.She was once sentenced to 2 years and 8 months in jail.Kozyreva is one in all an estimated 234 folks imprisoned in Russia for his or her anti-war place, in step with a tally by way of Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian human rights crew.In December 2022, elderly simply 17, Kozyreva sprayed “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases” in black paint on a sculpture of 2 intertwined hearts, erected outdoor St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum and representing the town’s hyperlinks with Mariupol, a Ukrainian town in large part razed to the bottom right through a siege that spring.In early 2024, after being fined 30,000 roubles ($370) for posting about Ukraine on-line, Kozyreva was once expelled from the clinical school of St Petersburg State College.A month later, at the war’s two-year anniversary, she taped a work of paper containing a fraction of verse by way of Taras Shevchenko, a father of contemporary Ukrainian literature, onto a statue of him in a St Petersburg park:”Oh bury me, then upward thrust ye up / And wreck your heavy chains / And water with the tyrants’ blood / The liberty you will have won.”Kozyreva was once hastily arrested and held in pre-trial detention for just about a yr, till she was once launched this February to accommodate arrest.Addressing the courtroom on Friday, Kozyreva stated she believed she had dedicated no crime.”I haven’t any guilt, my judgment of right and wrong is obvious,” she stated, in step with Mediazona’s transcript.”As a result of in truth by no means accountable.”($1 = 80.9000 roubles)(Reporting by way of Reuters in St Petersburg and Mark Trevelyan and Lucy Papachristou in London; Writing by way of Lucy Papachristou; Enhancing by way of Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
