The defense of Evgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk filed an appeal against their verdict. Lawyer Sergei Badamshin reported this on his Telegram channel.
A week ago, on July 8, judge of the 2nd Western District Military Court Yuri Massin sentenced them to six years in a general regime colony in the case of justifying terrorism (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code). Prosecutor Ekaterina Denisova asked them to assign the same amount.
The case was opened in May last year because of the play “Finist Yasny Falcon” about Russian women who decided to marry Islamists and go to Syria. All this time, Berkovich and Petriychuk were in pre-trial detention.
At the hearings in the Finist case, it became clear that the accusation was based on contradictory testimony of anonymous witnesses. At the same time, almost all the witnesses — both from the prosecution and from the defense — testified in favor of Berkovich and Petriychuk.
Only three witnesses were truly on the side of the prosecution: an employee of the «E» center, who blamed ISIS for the Crocus attack, although Russian authorities claimed Ukraine was behind the attack; actor Vladimir Karpuk, who disrupted the performance of the play in 2022, who called the performance “Russophobic” and “destructive” for the “patriarchal” Russian state, as well as a secret witness under the pseudonym “Nikita”, who claimed that he secretly filmed the performance on his phone and took it to him on Petrovka, 38.
“Nikita” insisted that it was necessary to maintain his anonymity, since he works “in a theatrical environment” and fears not only for his career, but also for his health and safety. At the same time, answering questions from his lawyers, he was forced to admit that he had not received any threats.