Two years and eight months in prison for protesting in Ukraine

“Ukraine is, I repeat, a free nation. It alone will decide which path it will take. It alone will decide who it will call a friend or a foe. It alone will determine how it will deal with its history. And even more so – in which language it will speak. … Ukraine is a free country, a free nation,” Daria Kozyreva said courageously in her closing remarks before her sentencing.

On 18 April 2025, the Petrogradski District Court ruled Daria Kosyreva, 19 years old, guilty of repeatedly discrediting the Russian army under Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

Daria was arrested on February 14, 2024, and held in pre-trial detention for eleven months. She had attempted to pin a verse by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko on his monument in St. Petersburg. She was provisionally released in February of this year and sentenced on April 18. Because both her defence and the prosecution, which is demanding a harsher sentence, appealed the verdict, she was detained in Pre-trial Detention Centre No. 5 in St. Petersburg.

Daria recited in Ukrainian and was asked by the judge to speak Russian. But Daria was not intimidated and continued:

“Putin doesn’t understand that Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Many things have no place in his mind anyway: human rights, democratic principles. … I hope that this attitude will change over time, with the return of democracy. I want to believe in a future in which Russia renounces all imperialism, both the bloodthirsty and the insidious kind that lurks in people’s minds. God grant it.”

An increasing number of Russian teenagers are being sentenced to long prison terms in Russia with relentless severity for their criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is to be expected that Daria will receive a significantly longer sentence on appeal due to her persistent advocacy for Ukraine’s right to self-determination. Daria deserves our support, just like Arsenij Turbin, Egor Balasejkin and others about whom the German section of the ISHR has reported. The German section of the ISHR is looking for political sponsors. We support the families so that they can find and pay experienced defence lawyers and give their children, who are imprisoned far away from their families, strength through visits so that they can endure and survive their time in prison. For this help, for campaigns and press, and public relations work, so that the fate of prisoners of conscience remains permanently present and they are released early or set free as a peace pledge in international prisoner exchanges, we need the financial and moral support of our global ISHR network.

Daria Kozyreva © SOTAvision

At the trial, Daria quoted the 19th-century poem:

Just laugh, cruel enemy!
But not too much, because everything passes —
Only fame does not fade;
He will not pass away, but will tell,
What happened in the world.

—Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian poet, died in 1861