A court in St. Petersburg sentenced 55-year-old activist Olga Smirnova from the informal organisation Peaceful Resistance to six years imprisonment for spreading “false” information about the Russian army, the Net Freedoms Project reported on Wednesday.
Photo: Olga Smirnova's support group
The court also banned her from managing websites for three years.
The grounds for the case was a post in a public group in the social network VK, which the prosecution claims Smirnova personally published and which allegedly “contained knowingly false information about the operations of Russian armed forces”. The post called the Ukraine war a “crime against humanity” and compared the “war crimes of the Russian aggressors” to the “Nazi atrocities during WWII”.
On 5 May, the police searched the residences of Smirnova and four other members of the group. A few days later, a St. Petersburg court arrested Smirnova, who has been in pre-trial jail ever since.
