The Leninsky District Court of the Omsk Region sentenced in absentia the 50-year-old former head of the Omsk branch of the Doctors' Alliance, Olga Belova, to six years in prison because of anti-war posts on VKontakte. This was reported by the press service of the regional courts.
Belova was found guilty in the case of distributing military “fakes” based on political hatred (clause “e” of Part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). The decision was made on May 4. Belova was also banned from administering pages on social networks for four years.
Belova worked as a psychologist at the Omsk Clinical Cardiology Dispensary. As the Omsk Civil Association wrote, in April 2022 the woman was fired from her job. This happened after the Kuibyshevsky District Court of Omsk fined her 25 thousand rubles under the protocol on “discrediting” the army (Part 1 of Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Code).
The decision on the complaint against this fine, which the Omsk Regional Court upheld, stated that Belova called on “an unlimited circle of people to take part on March 13, 2022 in an uncoordinated public mass event in the main squares and streets of cities around the world, including on Cathedral Square Omsk.»
According to the court, she wrote on VKontakte: “Putin unleashed a war of aggression… Putin made Russia an aggressor. Putin is committing war crimes… Putin is now on a par with Hitler and the Russian people will forever be associated by the whole world with aggression equated to fascist… I call on the country’s leadership and the army leadership to stop this war.”
In May 2022, Belova was fined 30 thousand rubles under the same protocol due to posts that she published on the “Olga Maksimenko” page on VKontakte even before the law on “discrediting” the military came into force . As stated in the court ruling, at the meeting Belova said that “in three months from the beginning of the operation, I came to the conclusion that this is war, as the hosts of various programs also talk about on television channels.”
In January 2023, Belova informed the Omsk Civil Association that she had left Russia. The Ministry of Internal Affairs has put her on the wanted list.