Anastasia Dyudyayeva and Alexander Dotsenko. Photo: Mediazona
A court in Russia’s Leningrad region sentenced a St. Petersburg couple to over three years in prison on Thursday for “inciting terrorism” after finding that they had left notes with anti-war messages on them in a local supermarket, Russian independent media outlet SOTAvision reported.
Artist Anastasia Dyudyayeva was sentenced to three-and-a-half years behind bars, while her husband Alexander Dotsenko was sentenced to three years, SOTAvision said. The couple had pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
Dyudyaeva and Dotsenko were arrested in January on suspicion of leaving Ukrainian-language notes in a shop on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, including one calling for Putin to be sent “to the gallows”. They have been in pretrial detention since then, and were added to the Russian government’s list of “extremists and terrorists” in February.
Dotsenko’s lawyer Sergey Podolsky told the court on Thursday that the prosecution was arguing that his client was guilty for “coming to a shop and touching the items on sale” and stressed that a long sentence could effectively become a “death sentence” for the 64-year-old.
Dyudyaeva’s lawyer Olesya Vasilchenko criticised the “linguistic examination” of the messages carried out by the court on the grounds that Russian translations rather than the Ukrainian originals had been analysed, adding that prosecutors appeared to equate “speaking poorly of Russia” with “terrorism”.
In their final statements to the court, Dotsenko accused the prosecutor of “wiping his feet on Russia’s judicial system” by making accusations based on “fabrications, speculation, conjecture and inventions”, while Dyudyaeva said she was being persecuted for her “creative activities”.
Both artists intend to appeal their verdicts, Vasilchenko told independent news outlet RusNews.
Dyudyayeva, whose artworks have been displayed at several clandestine anti-war exhibitions in Russia, including one held at the couple’s apartment last year which was raided by police, described herself in a 2022 interview with Novaya Europe as “the darkest artist in the Northwest,” adding that Putin had made her that way.
