A court in Moscow sentenced a Russian nurse to eight years in prison for disseminating what it deemed to have been “fake news” about the army, Russian independent media outlet Mediazona reported on Thursday.
Olga Menshikh, 59, was on trial for posts she published on Russian social media giant VK about the Bucha massacre and the Russian shelling of the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia.
Menshikh was detained for nine days after taking part in an anti-war protest on 24 February 2022, the day the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Novaya Gazeta reported. A supporter of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Menshikh reportedly visited his grave at Moscow’s Borisovsky cemetery several times.
After her home was searched by police in April, Menshikh was charged and placed under house arrest. However, she was later transferred to a pretrial detention centre after going to a dental appointment that she said was urgent, but which was deemed a violation of her bail conditions.
“You will imprison me anyway,” she said during her court appearance in September, “At least I’ll have a healthy tooth.”
Leonid Solovyov, Menshikh’s attorney, said during her trial that all the evidence presented had been inadmissible and unreliable, calling her punishment “inhumane”, Novaya Gazeta reported. Her defence plans to appeal the verdict.
In her final statement to court, Menshikh, who worked at the Pirogov Surgical Centre in Moscow, alleged that the charges against her stemmed from a conflict with her colleagues, saying she had accused an unnamed doctor of medical negligence. “The law makes it very easy to make such a case against an unwanted employee who is going against a high-ranking doctor,” Menshikh said.
Menshikh’s work file, cited by Novaya Gazeta, says she had been “repeatedly reprimanded by management for making negative comments about the current government”, while a fellow nurse who was called as a witness said Menshikh had called her colleagues “fascists and Putinists”, a claim Menshikh denied.