Russia sentenced artist Alexandra Skochilenko to seven years in prison on Thursday, November 16, for spreading disinformation about the army after she swapped supermarket price tags with slogans criticizing Russia's offensive in Ukraine.
The 33-year-old, who goes by Sasha, is just the latest among thousands of Russians who have been detained, jailed or fined for speaking out against Moscow's large-scale military intervention.
Her supporters in the courtroom shouted "shame" and "we're with you Sasha" after the judge Oksana Demiasheva read out the verdict, an Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalist at the sentencing reported.
Skochilenko wore a colorful T-shirt with a large red heart printed on it, and she made a heart shape with her hands and smiled to supporters during the hearing. "Every person in this room wants only one thing: Peace. Why fight?" she said in a closing statement.
Skochilenko was detained in April last year around the same time as Russia's brutal siege of Ukraine's port city of Mariupol. Skochilenko, who is openly gay, has also said that "hatred towards minorities" in deeply conservative Russia could help explain the trial against her.
Boris Vishnevsky, a politician linked to the opposition Yabloko party described the ruling to AFP as a "reprisal". "Hopefully someday the pendulum will turn the other way," he added.
On March 31 last year, Skochilenko replaced five price tags in a branch of one of Russia's largest supermarket chains in Saint Petersburg. One of the messages included claims about a Russian strike on a theatre in Mariupol that was reported to have left hundreds dead. "The cost of this war is the life of our children" and "Putin has been lying to us from television screens for 20 years" were written on other tags. An elderly shopper reported the swapped tags to the police.
Skochilenko had said in an earlier hearing that she "just wanted to stop the war. That was my motivation".