Russian teacher handed suspended sentence for spreading ‘fake news’ about Russian army. Her students reported her to police

A court in Russia’s Penza has handed a five-year suspended sentence to Irina Gen, an English teacher, for spreading “fake news” about the Russian army, the court’s website reports.

She has been banned from teaching for three years.

Gen was charged in March after her own students had reported her to the police. Two eighth-grade students asked their teacher why they were not allowed to go to a sports competition in Europe. Gen told them about the war in Ukraine and the “totalitarian regime where any dissent is considered a thoughtcrime”. Another student recorded the teacher’s speech and sent the audio to the police.

Judge Lyudmila Zhuravleva ruled that the teacher “spread deliberately false information under the guise of credible reports” motivated by “political hatred and enmity” and “persistent animosity towards the Russian president and commander-in-chief”.

The court has determined that Gen told her students the following: the Russian army is seizing the territories of other states, the Russian military started the war in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” in 2014 and took down the MH17 flight, attacked a maternity hospital in Mariupol and planned to overthrow the Ukrainian president.

Gen did not admit guilt during her police interrogation.