During the debate in the Kirovsky District Court of St. Petersburg, the prosecutor requested seven years in prison for the activist of the «Peaceful Resistance» Olga Smirnova. This was reported in the telegram channel in support of the defendant.
The audience came to the meeting to support Smirnova. According to MR7, several people were taken away to draw up protocols — earlier it was reported that they were going to be expelled from the courthouse «because of loud discussions about the future sentence of Smirnova.» The next court hearing is scheduled for August 14, 11:30 am.
The activist is accused of spreading «fake news» about the army motivated by political hatred (paragraph «e» of part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). The reason for the criminal prosecution was seven anti-war posts in the group «Democratic Petersburg — Peaceful Resistance», posted in March 2022 on VKontakte.
Since May 2022, the activist has been in a pre-trial detention center, before that she had four other members of the «Peaceful Resistance» in St. Petersburg were searched. The interests of the girl were represented in court by local human rights activist Dinar Idrisov, but in February 2023 he was removed from the case — the court called a conflict of interest as a formal reason, since two witnesses in the case — Asan Mumdzhi and Vlad Shipitsyn — have powers of attorney for Idrisov. As the human rights activist himself emphasized, these powers of attorney do not give him the opportunity to represent Mumji and Shipitsyn in the Smirnova case.