A nurse from Moscow has been sentenced to eight years in prison over two anti-war posts.

The nurse Olga Menshikh has had her eight-year sentence for the case concerning military “fakes” upheld on appeal. SOTAvision reports this.

“Such a harsh punishment given my client’s personal circumstances—no previous convictions, caring for her elderly mother, who is now in hospital—is disproportionate to what she did. […] The very figure of eight years speaks for itself. Justice must be restored somehow,” said lawyer Leonid Solovyov in court.

“In general, no one really cares whether these posts existed at all, whether the events described in them took place. No one is interested. Have these posts been edited or deleted? How many people saw these posts? Who even remembers these posts? And was there a boy, as the saying goes. We all understand perfectly well that a certain group of people living above the law decided this is what must be done. Who needs it? Why is it needed? […] So now we will just go through the motions, expecting neither a positive effect nor any substance of any kind,” Menshikh said in her final statement to the court, referring to the trial as “songs into the void.”

After this, she began to recite lines by Osip Mandelstam about the “wandering of labour.” The judge tried to interrupt her, but the political prisoner nonetheless finished her speech, in which she spoke about conformity and quoted from a book by neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky on brain plasticity.

“I believe that if a person can easily be conditioned to poverty, to illness, to injustice, to the kind of proceedings we are now conducting, then just as easily they can be conditioned to better things. The only thing is, as a healthcare worker I can tell you: the longer you put off correction, the harder it is to smooth out the painful effects. The human brain is very plastic, and the power of conformity, motivation, and our internal tendency to obey reveals the darkest, most vile corners of our soul. And there are far more people who comply than we’d like to think. But even so, not even a barrel filled to the brim with tar can spoil all the honey. Mine is not the last voice to insist: ‘This is not right, not right, not right,’” Menshikh declared.

“Let’s not forget the value of human life. The eight years I was given—that’s more than 10 per cent of the life I may have left. The same is true for my mother, who is in intensive care right now. We must respect human life; it’s the most valuable thing God has given us. To honour it and preserve it, despite our tendency towards conformity, which turns us into a grey, unthinking mass,” the convicted woman reminded the court. She concluded her speech with an address to the judge.

“This is not a ‘fake’ final word—all these quotes are real. Why did quoting a poem by Osip Emilievich Mandelstam trouble you so much? Because you know Osip Emilievich died. I am not a poet; I am not the kind of asset to the nation he was. But you have now ordained yourself with those who sent him to die forgotten and unburied. I hope that we all can be aware of our humanity and make use of the capacities of our plastic brains.”

Sixty-year-old nurse-anaesthetist Olga Menshikh, from Moscow, was sentenced last year to eight years in a penal colony under the military “fakes” law on the grounds of political hatred. The reason cited was two posts on social media where she wrote about the killings of civilians in Bucha and Vinnytsia. The nurse is convinced that the criminal case was initiated by her colleagues, as Olga had a serious conflict with one of the hospital’s doctors.