A woman from Stavropol Krai has been given a 2.5-year suspended sentence for a comment about Russian military personnel.

On 6 May, the Zheleznovodsk City Court handed a suspended sentence of two years and six months to Oksana Kazantseva, a resident of Stavropol Krai in southern Russia, for an anti-war comment in the chat of journalist Aleksandr Nevzorov’s channel. OVD-Info discovered the case file.

The woman was found guilty of public actions aimed at discrediting the use of the Russian Armed Forces (part 1, article 280.3 of the Criminal Code).

According to the court, Kazantseva published the following comment from an anonymous profile in the chat of Aleksandr Nevzorov’s channel: “Even just your cotton-wool face is already a major threat. It’s the same as the Russian troops who went out to kill the brotherly people of Ukraine for a piece of meat. They are not just killers, but child-killers and rapists. I know this firsthand.” OVD-Info was unable to locate the comment in the chat.

The court regarded the publication as “a negative assessment of the actions of representatives of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

In court, Oksana Kazantseva stated that she fully admitted her guilt and requested that the sentence be delivered without a trial.

In addition to the suspended sentence, the court imposed a ban on publishing on the internet for two years and six months. As a mitigating factor, it considered that Kazantseva had “actively assisted the investigation and the disclosure of the offence.”