A Russian court this Wednesday sentenced the member of the punk group Pussy Riot to six years in prison in absentia. Liudmila (Lucy) Stein and former municipal deputy in Moscow for having spread “false information” about the Russian Armed Forces.
According to the independent Telegram channel Mediazona, the Prosecutor’s Office requested a sentence of eight years of deprivation of liberty and a prohibition on the use of the Internet for four years.
Stein, who He is abroad and is on Russia’s wanted list. since May 2022, she was accused of “publicly disseminating, under the guise of reliable messages, deliberately false information about the Armed Forces”a crime that Russian laws punish with up to ten years in prison.
In particular, the Russian authorities based the criminal case on the publication of a message on Twitter published in March 2022, where she commented on a video in which Ukrainian soldiers shot at the legs of Russian prisoners of war.
In 2021, she was sentenced to one year of restriction of freedom for instigating a violation of sanitary and epidemiological regulations, due to a demonstration in support of the imprisoned opposition leader, Alexi Navalny.
After the start of the war, Stein cut off the electronic anklet he was wearing by court order and left Russia.
Later it was fined in absentia with 50,000 rubles (506 euros or 541 dollars) for discrediting the Armed Forces.
The Moscow court said Stein, 27, who was a Moscow municipal deputy until 2022, would begin her sentence once she could be extradited to Russia.
At least 19,855 people have been detained in Russia for expressing anti-war views since President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors crackdowns on dissent. collects Reuters.
Pussy Riot, a feminist opposition group, gained notoriety by donning a balaclava and entering Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012, shouting an anti-Putin song. Many of its members have been imprisoned in Russia.
Just weeks after the invasion of Ukraine began, Stein fled house arrest in Moscow with his girlfriend and Pussy Riot member, Maria Alyokhina.
The couple put on the omnipresent lime green uniforms of food delivery workers from Moscow to evade the police and left the city, eventually arriving in Lithuania, Alyokhina told New York Times.
They settled in Iceland, which granted them citizenship in May 2023according to local media there.
Prosecutors had asked for an eight-and-a-half-year sentence for Shtein, who joked in an X post on Wednesday that His mother had “bet” that they would ask for nine years.