A 60-year-old Russian woman named Irina Tsybaneva was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence by a court on May 11 for leaving a note on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s parents’ grave. The note referred to Putin’s mother and father as “the parents of a maniac” and urged them to “take him with you,” stating that they had raised “a freak and a murderer.” Tsybaneva was charged with desecrating the grave in St Petersburg, and prosecutors had sought a three-year suspended sentence for her.
While Tsybaneva will not appeal the verdict, she said that she wrote the note after watching news about the war in Ukraine and “understood that everything is very scary, everything is very sad, and there are many dead,” according to Mediazona. Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, and the Russian government has been hawkish about any opinions in the country against the war, cracking down on dissent in an unprecedented way since the Soviet era.
In a separate case, a former consultant who advised the Ukrainian president’s office, Artur Smolyaninov, was added to a list of “extremists and terrorists” by a Russian government agency. Additionally, a Russian military court sentenced a history teacher named Nikita Tushkanov from Komi to five and a half years in prison for comments he made about the explosion of the Kerch bridge, which links Ukraine’s Russia-annexed Crimean peninsula to mainland Russia, and occurred last year.
Alexei Navalny, one of Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critics, is already in jail and recently reported on Twitter that he had again been kept in a solitary confinement punishment cell. He was released from one just days ago.
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