Darya Trepova repeatedly punished in prison for comments made to media, husband says

Darya Trepova, the Russian woman who was sentenced to 27 years in prison last year for the murder of a prominent pro-war blogger, has been repeatedly placed in a punishment cell over comments she made to Russian state media, her husband Dmitry Rylov claimed on Monday.

Rylov said that, though neither interview had ultimately been broadcast, Trepova had been given permission by the prison authorities to speak to state-owned news agency RIA Novosti and Russian state TV, and suggested that what she said in the interviews may be behind the decision to place her in a punishment cell.

“She hasn’t broken any rules. They started coming up with reasons to put Dasha in a punishment cell, and started torturing her with the cold with the onset of winter weather,” he said, adding that she had been sent to a punishment cell, where conditions are markedly harder than they are in normal prison cells, four times in a row.

Rylov said staff at the IK-2 Yavas facility in the central Russian republic of Mordovia where his wife is imprisoned “deliberately leave the door ... open so that the cells freeze. Dasha is not even allowed to take warm clothes with her! With temperatures as low as 1C, and the only clothes she has are underwear, trousers and a T-shirt”.

In January 2024, Trepova was sentenced to 27 years in prison — the longest custodial sentence given to a woman in modern Russian history — for the murder of ultranationalist pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky.

On 2 April 2023, Trepova attended an event at a café in St. Petersburg where Tatarsky was due to speak and presented him with a statuette of himself as a gift. Shortly afterwards, the statuette exploded, killing Tatarsky and injuring 52 others. Trepova maintained that she had been unaware that there were explosives inside the object, and appears to have been an unwitting participant in an assassination planned by the Ukrainian intelligence services.