A Russian court imprisons a young activist for writing anti-war poetry

Daria Kozyreva, a 19-year-old activist, was given a sentence of almost three years by a Russian court for her anti-war poetry and graffiti.

Human rights organizations have strongly condemned a Russian court’s decision to sentence 19-year-old activist Daria Kozyreva to two years and eight months in prison for using poetry and graffiti to protest the war in Ukraine.

Following an interview with Sever.Realii, a Russian-language station of Radio Free Europe, and the posting of a billboard including Ukrainian verse in a public area, Kozyreva was found guilty on Friday of persistently “discrediting” the Russian military. The sentencing was confirmed by a Reuters witness present at the court.

Kozyreva entered a not guilty plea throughout the trial, calling the accusations “one big fabrication.”

“I’m not guilty. In a courtroom statement that was released by independent publication Mediazona, she declared, “My conscience is clear.” “Because the truth is always innocent.”

When Kozyreva was just seventeen years old, she started her activism by spray-painting the words, “Murderers, you bombed it.” Judases,” on a sculpture outside the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, December 2022. The piece of art represented the city’s ties to Mariupol, a Ukrainian city that was destroyed by Russian artillery.

In early 2024, she was removed from Saint Petersburg State University’s medical faculty after being fined 30,000 rubles ($370) for posting on Ukraine online. She attached a piece of paper with a poem by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko to a statue of him in a city park one month later, on the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion. The lines say:

“Okay, bury me, then get up / Break your heavy chains / And water with the blood of the tyrants / The freedom you have gained.”

Shortly after, she was taken into custody and held in pre-trial custody for almost a year before being placed under home arrest in February.

Natalia Zviagina, director of Amnesty International’s Russia office, called Friday’s decision “a chilling reminder of how far the Russian authorities will go to silence peaceful opposition.”

“Daria Kozyreva is being punished for speaking out against an unfair war, for refusing to remain silent, and for quoting a classic of 19th-century Ukrainian poetry,” Zviagina said in a statement. “We demand Daria Kozyreva and all those detained under ‘war censorship laws’ be released immediately and unconditionally.”

Kozyreva is one of at least 234 individuals incarcerated in Russia at the moment for their antiwar beliefs, according to Memorial, a Russian human rights organization that won a Nobel Prize.

The Kremlin has stepped up its assault on dissent after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as seen by an increase in arrests related to antiwar activism, information sharing, and espionage.

Kozyreva’s case, which was characterized by defiance and the use of art as a form of protest, has come to represent the growing harassment that young activists and war critics must endure.