A retired 72-year-old woman was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in Russia on charges of distributing two messages deemed to be hostile to the war waged by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine.
The press service of the court in the city of Shahty, in the Rostov region (southwest), announced on Monday that Evghenia Maiboroda was found guilty of disseminating “false information” about the Russian army and inciting “extremist acts”.The septuagenarian will have to serve her sentence in a penitentiary colony under “normal regime” because she “published content on her VKontakte page”, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, as reported by AFP, according to Agerpres.
According to the NGO Setevie Svobodi, which provides assistance to political prisoners, the accused shared “information about the number of Russian soldiers killed” and an “emotional video” about the war.Evghenia Maiboroda justified her decision to publish this information because her “brother woke up under the rubble of a building destroyed by shelling in Dnipro”, a city in central Ukraine.
