Russian pensioner given suspended sentence for demanding end to war

A pensioner from the Omsk region in Siberia has been given a two-year suspended sentence for leaving anti-war comments on social media, human rights group OVD-Info reported on Thursday.

Anastasia Gordienko, 70, was found guilty of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army after leaving a comment saying “I demand that the war ends. Thou shalt not kill, no to war!” on popular Russian social media platform Odnoklassniki in July 2023.

This is Gordienko’s second suspended sentence in a year. In August 2024, she was handed a one-and-a-half-year suspended sentence for other comments she had posted on Odnoklassniki, including: “Yes, I want Ukraine to win over fascism”, which a Russian Interior Ministry expert ruled had conflated the words “Russia” and “fascism”.

Another comment that formed the basis of Gordienko’s first case was a pun she made about Vladimir Putin, deliberately misspelling his name as “Pukin” to sound like the Russian word for fart.

Gordienko has been under pressure from the Russian authorities since October 2022, when she held a solo picket in the regional capital Omsk protesting the ongoing mobilisation, where she held up a sign that read, “Mothers, stop the war”.

She was fined 30,000 rubles (around €320) following the picket, and had law enforcement officers come to her home demanding that her son present himself at the local draft office. Gordienko recalled telling the officers: “I’ll set you on fire, but my children will not go to this war!”, after which they threatened to charge her with “extremism”, but the case never went ahead.