Darya Kozyreva. Photo: Alexandra Astakhova / Mediazona
A court in St. Petersburg released Darya Kozyreva, a 19-year-old anti-war activist accused of “repeatedly discrediting the Russian military”, from pretrial detention on Friday, a group set up to support her has announced.
Under the terms of her release, Kozyreva is banned from leaving the house at night, giving comments to the press and using the internet, according to local media outlet Rotonda.
Kozyreva has spent nearly a year in a pretrial detention centre after she was detained by police on 24 February 2024, the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for laying flowers at a St. Petersburg monument to Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko alongside a handwritten excerpt from one of his poems.
Prior to that, in December 2022 Kozyreva was also briefly detained after she wrote the word “murderers” on an installation marking the “twinning” of St. Petersburg and the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which Russian forces occupied in spring 2022 after a months-long siege that left the city in ruins. However, as Kozyreva was a minor at the time, she was ultimately released without charge.
In 2023, Kozyreva was fined 30,000 rubles (€300) for a social media post she wrote criticising new laws that criminalised “discrediting” or spreading “false information” about the Russian military.
In a letter written from prison shortly after her arrest last year, Kozyreva said she considered it her “duty” to speak out, adding that she was convinced that the main enemies of the Russian people were “not Ukraine or America, but the authorities who dare to call themselves Russia and sit in the Kremlin”.
