Russian jeweler Aleksandr Doțenko, sentenced for distributing anti-war messages in stores in Saint Petersburg, died after suffering a heart attack in a penal colony. The information was confirmed for RBC by his lawyer, Serghei Podolski.
According to his defense, on February 12, Doțenko, 65, was hospitalized with a heart attack at the Mariinsky Hospital. The colony representatives did not inform either the lawyer or the relatives. The family and the defender found out about the incident only two days later, from an anonymous person. Later, the doctors informed his daughter about his death.
Before his detention, Doțenko worked as a jeweler. In 2024, he and his wife, artist Anastasia Diudeaeva, were sentenced for “calls to terrorism”. Their arrest was triggered after customers of a “Lenta” supermarket in Saint Petersburg found napkins with verses that, according to investigators, “glorified Stepan Bandera” and contained “calls for actions against Vladimir Putin”. The slogan “Putiniaku na ghiliaku” was also inscribed on the sheets.
Doțenko was sentenced to three years in an open-type penal colony, and his wife — to three and a half years. Both were included in the official list of “terrorists and extremists”. The lawyer previously stated that the prosecution did not demonstrate that the two were the authors of the messages, nor how these were introduced into the products. The spouses denied their guilt, claiming that they were in the store only for shopping.
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