A military court in St Petersburg has sentenced an artist and her husband to more than three years in a penal colony on charges of “public calls for terrorist activities”. The verdict was announced on 18 July.
Prosecutors allege that Anastasia Dyudyaeva and her husband, Aleksandr Dotsenko, placed napkins with anti-government slogans in a supermarket in the Leningrad region, where they live and where president Vladimir Putin was born. The slogans allegedly referenced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was launched in February 2022.
Dyudyaeva was sentenced to three-and-a-half years, while Dotsenko, who was born in Ukraine, was sentenced to three years.
Dyudyaeva is the second Russian artist to be convicted for an anti-war protest in a supermarket since the war began. Last November, Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for replacing store price tags with information about Russia’s destruction of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Appeal hearings related to Skochilenko’s case began in a St Petersburg city court on 17 July.
According to the human rights organisation Memorial, the couple had placed texts in Ukrainian on products, including a package of candy. The organisation quoted investigators as stating that the messages contained “public calls to carry out terrorist activities by inducing an indefinite circle of people to encroach on the life of the President of the Russian Federation in order to stop his state activities".
Dyudyaeva has previously participated in underground anti-war exhibitions, including one in an apartment in the St Petersburg region that was raided by police last year.
Speaking in court, where they were held together in a glassed-in cage, the couple denied the charges against them. Dyudyaeva said in her final statement, as reported by Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty’s Severa Realii service, that she feels she was targeted because she is an artist.
“I believe that I reflect reality with my works,” she said. “I believe that today I am being judged for being an artist, for my creativity.”
For their actions, the couple have been listed on the Russian government’s registry of “terrorists and extremists”.
On 13 July, a court in Tomsk in Siberia sentenced Tatiana Laletina, a 21-year-old anime artist, to nine years in prison for “state treason” over a $30 donation she made to a Ukrainian foundation on the first day of the invasion. Last month, a state treason case was opened against Irina Izamailova, an artist from Samara, over allegations that she has been co-operating with Ukrainian special services.
Izmailova’s boyfriend is serving with a pro-Ukrainian Russian volunteer unit in Ukraine, according to Mediazona, the human rights news site founded by Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina.