Woman who said ‘shoot that stupid bastard Putin’ is sentenced to eight years in penal colony
A woman who made anti-war comments online – including several calling for the assassination of Vladimir Putin – has been sentenced to eight years in a penal colony.
A military court in Moscow found Anastasia Berezhinskaya, guilty of two wartime censorship laws – discrediting the Russian army and spreading false information about it, along with justifying terrorism.
The 43-year-old is a theatre director and mother of two young children.
More than 1,000 people have been criminally prosecuted in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine, according to rights project OVD-Info, and over 20,000 have been detained for protesting.
It comes after a Moscow court sentenced a 68-year-old paediatrician to five-and-a-half years in prison on Tuesday after the mother of one of her patients publicly denounced her over comments about Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
In the first months following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Berezhinskaya published dozens of posts online against the conflict. The Russian army, the Interior Ministry and Putin himself, she said, were waging a “genocide” against the Ukrainian people.
On May 14, 2022, she posted over three dozen times on VKontakte, a social network, hurling insults at Putin and saying he bore personal responsibility for the deaths of men, women and children whose bodies were being pulled from under the rubble of Ukrainian apartment blocks.
As Berezhinskaya continued to post that day in May, she began to call for the death of Putin, who at 72 years old is on course to become Russia’s longest-serving leader since Empress Catherine the Great in the 18th century.
“Shoot that stupid bastard Putin, how many more murders of civilians do we have to bear?” she wrote. “Wipe him off the face of the earth.”
Berezhinskaya admitted guilt under the charges of spreading “fakes” and discrediting the army, independent news outlet Mediazona reported, but only partially admitted guilt under the justifying terrorism charge.