Teenager Darya Kozyreva jailed by Russia for condemning war in Ukraine

On April 18, a Russian court sentenced 19-year-old activist Darya Kozyreva, who protested the war in Ukraine through poems and graffiti, to two years and eight months in prison, Reuters reported.

Kozyreva was convicted of allegedly “discrediting” the Russian military after she spoke to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian-language program and displayed a poster with quotes from Ukrainian poetry in a public area. She insisted that she was innocent, referring to the case as “a complete fabrication.”

Kozyreva spray-painted “Murderers, you’re the ones doing the bombing” on a sculpture of two linked hearts outside St. Petersburg in December 2022, when she was just 17 years old. The monument represents the city’s connections to Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine.

In early 2024, she was expelled from St. Petersburg State University’s medical college after being fined RUB30,000 ($370) for a social media post on Ukraine.

Memorial, a Russian human rights organization that won a Nobel Prize, estimates that Kozyreva is one of 234 persons who have been imprisoned in Russia because of their anti-war stance.

When Kozyreva was just 17 years old in December 2022, she sprayed, “Murderers, you bombed it.” A monument of two entwined hearts outside St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum depicting the city’s ties to Mariupol, a Ukrainian city that was partly destroyed during a siege by Russian troops that spring, was painted with the words “Judases” in black.

Speaking to the court on Friday, Kozyreva stated that she didn’t think she had done anything wrong.