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Radmila Ryabtseva, a resident of Vuktyl (a small town in the Komi Republic), has been fined 150,000 rubles (approx. US$1,700) under charges of repeated “discrediting” of the Russian army (Part 1, Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by her OVD-Info lawyer, Vladislav Kosnyrev.
The court allowed her to pay the fine in instalments. Ryabtseva was also banned from administering websites for two years.
In her final statement to the court, the defendant said that throughout her life she had become accustomed to freely expressing her opinions and did not consider just laws those which prohibit this:
“We really came to believe that everyone has the right to their own opinion and to express it freely. For us, this was not a positive right flowing from a law or contract, it was natural—like the right to breathe air, soak up the sun, lie on grass or swim in the river. We thought our generation would be the best, the freest, the most advanced, that something good would start with us, something that had never happened before. Now I see that we were wrong.”
The prosecution had requested a two-year sentence in a penal colony-settlement for her.
The grounds for the prosecution were a comment Ryabtseva posted in the “Pro Gorod Vuktyl | News” group on VKontakte, replying to a user named Alexander who had fought in Ukraine.
“You are killing children and civilians in a neighbouring country and see yourselves as saviours, but you are just ordinary cleaners. And you will have to live with this for the rest of your lives. It doesn’t matter whether you kill with weapons or with words from your couch,” the comment read.
In July 2023, she was fined 30,000 rubles (approx. US$340) in an administrative case for “discrediting” the army (Part 1, Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Code) because of VKontakte comments in which she spoke out against the war in Ukraine.
Even earlier, in September 2022, a court ordered her to pay 10,000 rubles (approx. US$115) as compensation for moral damages to local Communist Party deputy Idris Taibov. He had filed a lawsuit against Ryabtseva for supposed defamation because she had criticised, on VKontakte, his initiative to replace the first letter on the town’s name monument with a Latin V.
Ryabtseva is raising an eight-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son, as well as a 21-year-old daughter.