Olesya Krivtsova is 20 years old and is, or perhaps it would be better to say was, considering that she can no longer go to class, a university student. She has some sort of electronic bracelet and is under house arrest in Arkhangelsk, northern Russia, where she lives with her mother. She can neither talk on the phone nor surf online. Lei olesya lei faces up to ten years in prison because she is accused of having “justified terrorism” and “discredited the Russian armed forces”. But how? Her fault is having published on her Instagram profile a story about the explosion of the Kerch bridge last October, the link between Russia and Crimea, saying that the Ukrainians could be said to be happy with what had happened. And then she also shared a friend’s post, also against the war. Olesya has a tattoo on her leg, with Putin depicted as a spider and Orwell’s phrase: “Big Brother is watching you”.
On December 26, the police entered her home, threw her to the ground and confiscated her phone. Her classmates reported it. «A classmate of mine shared my post on the Crimean bridge in a student chat, saying that I was against the military operation – she told the BBC-. So they started discussing the possibility of reporting me to the authorities.” In her chat they accuse her of having written “provocative posts of a defeatist and extremist nature”. And they accuse her. “This is out of place in wartime. It should be nipped in the bud.” “First let’s try to discredit her. If you don’t understand it, you let the security services deal with it.’ “Denunciation is the duty of a patriot,” writes someone else.
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When the list of prosecution witnesses was read out in court, Olesya recognized the names of her fellow students from the students’ chat. A few weeks after the assault on Ukraine, which began on February 20, President Putin has called on Russian public opinion to separate “true patriots from scum and traitors”. And they listened to it.
“The state does not have enough courage for debate, democracy or freedom – Olesya told the BBC during the last interview, when he was able to leave the house to go to court, with a T-shirt with the image of a police van and the words “Schoolbus”. “But they can’t put everyone in jail. At some point the cells will run out.