A married couple from Gatchina were sentenced to up to 3.5 years in a penal colony in the case of leaflets with the words “Putinyak to the gallows”

The 1st Western District Military Court of St. Petersburg sentenced artist Anastasia Dyudyaeva to 3.5 years in a penal colony, and her husband Alexander Dotsenko to 3 years in a penal colony in the case of leaflets with the words "Putinyak to the gallows." This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom.

The time spent in the pre-trial detention facility was counted as one day for one day.

After the debate, Alexander Dotsenko's lawyer, Sergei Podolsky , told the SOTA publication that the prosecution did not prove in any way who put the leaflets in the goods - for example, in packages of napkins or a box of candy - and how.

"The prosecution proposes to find the man guilty for coming into the store and touching the products there. The examination did not record or confirm any insertion of any postcards," Podolsky believes.

A case was opened against a married couple from Gatchina for distributing napkins with anti-war slogans and “calls for reprisals against Russian President Vladimir Putin” in the Lenta store in St. Petersburg.

The investigation believes that the couple placed the napkins among the goods in the store. The napkins had the words "Putinyak to the gallows" written on them. Dyudyaeva and Dotsenko deny that they were the authors of the "leaflets". At the same time, even the handwriting expert for the prosecution, Anzhela Vorobyeva, doubted the authorship of the inscriptions on the napkins in court.

The prosecutor's office proved the guilt of the spouses, including with the testimony of Lenta customers who found napkins with an inscription in the goods. For example, witness Oleg Kalenchuk said that he was outraged by the inscription on the napkins because he himself once lived in Ukraine.

"In 2014, I lived in Ukraine. When the coup happened, my friends were in the Right Sector, as it turned out, and they threw their hands from their hearts to the sun. One fine night, they called me because I said something good about Yanukovych, and they said, like, we're coming to you," Kalenchuk said in court.

Anastasia Dyudyaeva and her husband Alexander Dotsenko were sent to the pretrial detention center on January 25. The day before, their home was searched.

Anastasia Dyudyaeva is 46 years old, she is a drawing teacher by education, in recent years she has worked as an artist-designer. Alexander Dotsenko was born in Ukraine, he is 63 years old, he is a children's track and field coach.

SOTA wrote that Dyudyaeva participated in underground anti-war exhibitions. One of them took place on May 9, 2023 in Taytsy. The participants of the event, fearing a raid, left the apartment through the window where the exhibition was to take place, but the police were already waiting for them on the street. Then SotaVision reported the detention of 14 people.