Varvara Volkov at her trial. Photo: Courts' Press Service
A Russian woman has been sentenced to seven years in prison after a Moscow court found her guilty of spreading false information about the Russian military in a series of social media posts, Russian state-owned news agency TASS reported on Sunday.
Varvara Volkov, 23, was found to have posted information about the Russian military “committing violent acts aimed at destroying the civilian population” in a Telegram channel for residents of Sapronovo, a small village in the Moscow region, the court’s press service said.
Volkova’s posts, in which she said, among other things, that she would treat the Ukrainian military to tea if they managed to capture the Moscow region, were first brought to the attention of the authorities earlier this year when pro-Kremlin Telegram channels shared an audio recording of her calling a Russian tank crew serviceman to insult him for taking part in the war in Ukraine. The serviceman subsequently died fighting in Ukraine in March.
Several pro-Russian bloggers, including Alexander Talipov, who has been accused of informing against pro-Ukrainian residents of Russian-annexed Crimea, wrote about Volkova’s posts and demanded that she be fired from her job as a stewardess at Ural Airlines and face criminal charges.
Soon after the bloggers began posting about her, Volkova had two separate administrative cases opened against her, including one for “discrediting” the Russian army, for which she was fined 31,000 rubles (€340), according to Russian independent news outlet Mediazona.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, dozens of journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens in Russia have been sentenced to custodial sentences after being convicted of spreading false information about the Russian military under the country’s wartime censorship laws.
Prominent cases include that of journalist Maria Ponomarenko, sentenced to six years in prison for a Telegram post about the bombing of a Mariupol theatre, and artist Sasha Skochilenko, who replaced supermarket price tags with anti-war messages and received seven years in prison, before she was released in an August 2024 prisoner exchange.
In June, Russia’s Constitutional Court upheld the legality of the country’s wartime censorship laws, following a legal challenge filed by the defence team of jailed opposition deputy Alexey Gorinov, 63, who was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2022 for calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a war and mourning the deaths of Ukrainian children at a council meeting.
