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. Advertisement
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 anniversar …
