Teen Activist Sentenced in Russia for Anti-War Graffiti and Quoting Ukrainian Poetry
A Russian court has sentenced 19-year-old activist Daria Kozyreva to two years and eight months in prison for protesting the war in Ukraine using graffiti and poetry.
Kozyreva, who was 17 at the time of her first protest, sprayed the words “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases” onto a sculpture near the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg in December 2022. The sculpture symbolized ties between the city and Mariupol, the Ukrainian city devastated by Russian forces earlier that year.
In another act of protest on the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion, she taped a piece of paper with a verse from Taras Shevchenko—the 19th-century Ukrainian poet—onto his statue in a Saint Petersburg park. The excerpt read:
“Oh bury me, then rise ye up
And break your heavy chains
And water with the tyrants’ blood
The freedom you have gained.”
This action led to her arrest and nearly a year in pre-trial detention. She was later placed under house arrest until her trial.
On Friday, the court found her guilty of “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian military, citing her graffiti, her interview with the Russian-language service of Radio Free Europe, and her poetry protest. Kozyreva denied the charges and called the case “one big fabrication.”
“My conscience is clear,” she told the court. “Because the truth is never guilty.”
Kozyreva had already faced consequences for her activism. In early 2024, she was fined 30,000 rubles (about $370) for posting about Ukraine online and was expelled from the medical faculty at Saint Petersburg State University.
Human rights groups have condemned the sentence. Amnesty International’s Russia director Natalia Zviagina called the ruling “a chilling reminder of how far the authorities will go to silence peaceful opposition.”
“Daria Kozyreva is being punished for quoting a classic of 19th-century Ukrainian poetry, for speaking out against an unjust war, and for refusing to stay silent,” Zviagina said, demanding her release.
Kozyreva is among at least 234 people imprisoned in Russia for opposing the war, according to Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning rights group. Political repression has sharply increased since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. OVD-Info, another human rights group, reports that more than 20,000 people have been detained for anti-war actions since then. Over 1,500 are currently jailed for political reasons.
Russia has also cracked down on journalists. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich remains in custody on espionage charges, while Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva is awaiting trial for allegedly failing to register as a “foreign agent.”
Russia has targeted young dissenters as well. According to OVD-Info, at least 35 minors have faced politically motivated criminal charges since 2009—23 of those since the war began.
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