Anastasia Gordienko. Photo: OVD-Info
A court in Russia’s Omsk region in western Siberia has handed a one-and-a-half-year suspended sentence to a pensioner for “discrediting” the Russian army in comments she made online, human rights organisation OVD-Info reported on Tuesday.
Anastasia Gordienko, 70, was prosecuted for comments she made on the Odnoklassniki social media platform, including: “Yes, I want Ukraine to win over fascism”, which a Russian Interior Ministry expert ruled had conflated the words “Russia” and “fascism”.
However, it was Gordienko’s comment about Putin that formed the basis for the case. “We’ve all known what Pukin and his embarrassment of an army have been doing in Ukraine for a long time now”, she wrote, deliberately misspelling Putin’s name to sound like the Russian word for fart.
“The reference point for the lexeme ‘Pukin’ is Russian President V. V. Putin,” the ministry’s expert commented.
The authorities have been exerting pressure on Gordienko since October 2022, when she held a solo picket in the regional capital Omsk where she held up a sign that read, “Mothers, stop the war”, according to OVD-Info.
The NGO also said it believed, though had yet to confirm, that a criminal case had been opened into Gordienko’s husband, Sergey, for “discrediting” the Russian army, after security forces came to search the family home in June.
