Who is Alexandra Skochilenko, Russian artist sentenced to 7 years for protesting the war in Ukraine

Artist and activist Aleksandra Skochilenko sentenced to seven years in prison for replacing supermarket price tags with anti-war messages in Russia.

A court in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, convicted the man Aleksandra Skochilenkoa 33-year-old Russian artist, sentenced to seven years in prison for using city store price tags to spread information about Moscow’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

According to the court’s press service, Skochilenko was found guilty on Thursday of “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the deployment of the armed forces of the Russian Federation.” The 33-year-old staged the protest on March 31, 2022, replacing the price tags at a supermarket in St. Petersburg, Russia, with five small pieces of paper urging an end to what Moscow calls a “special military operation.”

Alexander Gladyshec, the prosecutor, asked a judge in St. Petersburg to give her a seven-year prison sentence with a three-year ban on activities related to the use of “electronic or information and telecommunications networks.” Skochilenko wore a colorful T-shirt with a large red heart printed on it. She made a heart shape with her hands and smiled at supporters during the hearing. She is the latest of thousands of Russians to be arrested, jailed or fined for speaking out against Moscow’s military intervention.

Alexandra Skochilenko gets seven years in prison for using price tags in anti-war protests

Russian artist Aleksandra Skochilenko was sentenced to 7 years in prison for her protest art.

Artists and writers are being targeted by authoritarian governments because of “the ability they have to promote independent thinking,” he says @PSadovskaya2020

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— PEN America (@PENamerica) November 16, 2023

Skochilenko had said at an earlier hearing that she only wanted to stop the war. “Everyone in this room wants one thing: peace. Why fight?” she said in a closing statement. She has been in pre-trial detention since April 2022, a period during which her health has deteriorated, CNN reported, citing the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

“How weak is our prosecutor’s confidence in our state and society if he thinks that our state and public safety can be ruined by five little pieces of paper?” Skochilenko said this in court. She admitted to switching the tags, but denied that the text on them was fake. “Everyone sees and knows that you do not condemn a terrorist. You’re not trying to be an extremist. You’re not even trying to be a political activist. You’re condemning a pacifist,” she said.