Photo: Verstka

A court in the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula has fined a local woman after finding her guilty of spreading “LGBT propaganda” for two posts on popular Russian social media platform VK, investigative media outlet Verstka reported on Wednesday.

According to the court decision, an employee at Russia’s Centre for Combating Extremism, a unit known for persecuting opposition activists, found a post in February featuring photographs of men wearing wedding dresses on Irina Khokhlatkina’s page on VK. The pictures were captioned: “Why do I have to ask you out on a date?”, “I was waiting for you to make the first move”, “Let’s go halves” and “Show me that you need me”.

The court ruled that the photos “depicted men in a way that does not culturally correspond to the image of a man of traditional sexual orientation in Russia” and demonstrated “traditional female features and characteristics” and fined Khokhlatkina 100,000 rubles (€1,100).

Khokhlatkina appealed the ruling, saying she had merely reposted photographs from an online forum, meaning that the pictures were already available to the public at large.

The second post for which Khokhlatkina was fined featured a video of two naked women kissing on a bed, though the court decision did not go into further detail, according to Verstka.