Her fellow students alerted authorities. She faces up to 10 years if convicted. And if this sounds crazy, even for Russia, it was deemed a repeat offence. "In the spring, Krivtsova put up antiwar posters on the town square and was fined $450 for publicly “discrediting the Russian armed forces.”'
Source: Washington Post
RIGA, Latvia — Soon after the explosion on the Crimean Bridge in October, a 19-year-old Russian student, Olesya Krivtsova, posted an Instagram story criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Her fellow students at Northern Federal University, in the northern city of Arkhangelsk, took a screenshot of the Instagram story as well as of Krivtsova’s antiwar comments shared in a small chatroom on the Telegram messaging app and reported her to the authorities.
Three months later, Russian officials deemed that sufficient to add Krivtsova to a list of terrorists and extremists, on par with the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and to charge her with discrediting the Russian army under laws adopted last March to stifle public criticism of the war.
When she was arrested, one of the officers showed up at her door with a sledgehammer.
One of the officers held a massive sledgehammer, and Olesya was scared that he would hit her husband with it, her mother said. Later, on the way to the station, an officer told Olesya that the hammer was a “hello from Wagner,” the murky mercenary group led by Kremlin-connected business executive Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who sent the private army to fight in Ukraine alongside the Russian military.
The sledgehammer has become an eerie symbol of Wagner after a Telegram channel affiliated with the group released a video that appeared to show the execution of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a 55-year-old murder convict who was released from prison to fight in Ukraine. Nuzhin was killed with a sledgehammer after abandoning the mercenary group.
And remember folks, it's the Russians who called the Ukrainians "Nazis".
The U.S. congressman Jamie Raskin was just as disgusted as the rest of us when he saw the story in Stars & Stripes.
