According to the AP agency, the prosecutor’s office also requested a prison sentence for the woman. The court eventually fined her a million rubles (over 266,000 crowns).
“I am ready to pay for the right to remain human. I realize that there will be no exoneration. Justice is not for people like me. I am asking the court for just one thing – not to impose a fine on me, but to immediately determine the length of my imprisonment, because I do not have even the smallest fine according to the given section, and even in the case of a five-year repayment schedule, I have nowhere to get the money,” said Novikova in front of the court, who is lawyer by original profession.
Authorities charged her with spreading deliberate lies about the military on March 16 last year, less than two weeks after the relevant section appeared in Russia’s criminal code. Russian lawmakers passed censorship laws shortly after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February, which authorities use to prosecute people who dissent from Moscow’s official line on Russia’s war in the neighboring country.
Another lie. Russian TV passes off the deadly attack in Umani as Ukrainian shelling somewhere else
Foreign
Novikova thus became one of the first defendants for allegedly spreading lies about the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine. Russian authorities and courts label as lies all information that contradicts the official interpretation of events.
The Russian authorities charged a woman from the Siberian city of Seversk because she shared anti-war posts on the Internet, as well as the testimony of her friends from the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar, which was occupied by Russian troops and the adjacent Zaporozhye nuclear power plant shortly after the outbreak of war against Ukraine.
“I did everything I could so that my fellow citizens would listen to me and make the right decision, standing on the side of good and light,” Novikova said before the sentencing.
The prosecution asked for three years behind bars for her. The minimum fine according to the relevant section was 700,000 rubles (about 183,000 CZK). According to official government statistics, the average salary in the Tomsk region, where Seversk is located, is 56,000 rubles (less than 15,000 crowns), AP noted.
The Russian editorial staff of the BBC has verified over 20,000 names of fallen Russian soldiers
The war in Ukraine
