Russian reporter Maria Ponomarenko was sentenced to six years in prison for reporting on social media about a deadly Russian airstrike on a Ukrainian theatre.
A court in Barnaul, Siberia, convicted her guilty of distributing “false news” under new regulations passed to silence criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For the next five years, she couldn’t work as a journalist either.
Many innocent people were killed in March of this year when a bomb went off at the Mariupol theatre.
Even though the Russian defense department claimed that Russian airplanes were responsible for the attack, Ponomarenko was imprisoned in April for blogging about it online.
She joins a rising number of Russian dissidents who have been imprisoned for speaking out against Russia’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.
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When Russian fighter planes destroyed the theatre, about 1,200 civilians were taking refuge inside. While the Ukrainian government puts the death toll at 300, an Associated Press investigation puts it closer to 600. The basement was where most of the bodies were discovered.
The international monitoring body OSCE stated it had not received any indication to support Russian assertions that a Ukrainian battalion had blown up the theatre, and Amnesty International called it a war crime committed by Russian soldiers.
Maria Ponomarenko, the prosecutor claimed, circulated “knowingly misleading info” about the Russian armed forces, which was a crime instituted in the days following the invasion.
When she spoke to the court before her sentencing, she emphasized that she had done nothing wrong under Russia’s constitution, saying, “Had I committed a real crime then it would be conceivable to plead for mercy but again, due to my moral and ethical traits, I would not do this.”
Summing up her speech, she said, “No totalitarian system has ever been as powerful as before its collapse.”
The journalist and activist, who is a mother of two, has reportedly experienced mental health problems while awaiting trial and likened her treatment in detention to torture last year when she made those comments through her lawyer.
Moscow city council member Alexei Gorinov was sentenced to seven years in prison last summer for criticizing Russia’s intervention in Ukraine on camera. This week, a UN working group concluded that his arrest was arbitrary and in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they issued a request for his release.
One of Russia’s most visible critics, Ilya Yashin, was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for distributing “false news” about the military in December after he used YouTube to denounce the slaughter of hundreds of Ukrainian citizens by Russian occupying forces in Bucha, a city close to Kyiv.