February 7, 2023
“I regret this: I should have acted more actively.”
Prosecution asks 9 years in prison for Maria Ponomarenko.
The state prosecution requested nine years in prison for the activist and journalist, 44-year-old Maria Ponomarenko from Barnaul, in the case of fakes, which was initiated against her back in April 2022. Maria was detained in St. Petersburg, where she came from Siberia to cover anti-war protests. As an accusation, the investigation charged the journalist with posts on the Telegram channel, which said that Russian troops had bombed a drama theater in Ukrainian Mariupol.
Ponomarenko was arrested, she spent almost nine months in a pre-trial detention center in St. Petersburg and Barnaul, survived a suicide attempt and was able to escape under house arrest, only to return to prison later. The correspondent of Sever.Realii tells what happened to Maria Ponomarenko all this time, and why the prosecutor’s office is asking for a term that, by law, cannot be claimed.
The case of Maria Ponomarenko has been considered in the court of Barnaul since September 2022.
On February 7, the state prosecutor requested 9 years in prison for her, and also demanded that Ponomarenko be banned from administering Internet resources for five years.
As Maria’s lawyer Dmitry Shitov told Sever.Realiya, the state prosecution simply could not request such a term for Maria:
That goes beyond the sentencing rules. In the absence of aggravating circumstances, no punishment is imposed on the upper limit. Even putting aside whether proven or not proven, there are extenuating circumstances. The prosecutor said that the accusation is fully supported by the evidence, as well as the qualification of the case.
At the meeting, the defense demanded that the key evidence of the prosecution be excluded – the inspection of the page in the telegram, which was carried out by the operatives of the center “E”. The lawyer explained:
Based on the results of her examination, an act was drawn up, and the examination itself was recorded on video. But the fact is that what is recorded on the video does not strongly correspond to what is written in the act. In the act, the operatives describe how they follow the link to the telegram channel in the Mozilla Firefox browser. But we don’t see this in the video, we see how the desktop application opens and the page is already open. For example, the act does not indicate with what and how the computer is connected to the Internet, the equipment and provider are not indicated. We believe that if this is not indicated in the act, then it is impossible to make up for this with the testimony of witnesses. This is the position of the Constitutional Court. And if the equipment was not used, then we proceed from the fact that the computer was not connected to the Internet at all. We believe that this is a reason to say that the evidence is inadmissible.
The court has not yet commented on the demand of the defense and has postponed this issue for sentencing. According to the lawyer, Maria took the prosecution’s demand for nine years in prison “quite calmly.”:
She said everything would be fine. As far as I managed to communicate with her at the last two meetings, she feels fine now.
At the meeting, two witnesses for the defense were interrogated – a mother from Barnaul Elena Vorontsova, who has many children and who is the heroine of Maria Ponomarenko’s publications, as well as a journalist colleague Alexandra Brusser.
Brusser told Sever.Realii that she was asked at the trial to give a description of Mary. She said:
The prosecutor asked a question about journalistic ethics and how objective Masha was in her publications. I answered as is. Masha has the right to be subjective and bring in the personal, but she shares her work and her social networks. In any case, the prosecutor mentioned that Masha was positively characterized at work, she said.
Elena Vorontsova, who is the mother of five children and cares for an orphan, explained to the court that Maria Ponomarenko shared her story and problems in the media and social networks. Vorontsova, along with her children, lived in an emergency house in Barnaul, where in winter the washing machine froze because of the cold floor. She was supposed to be given a plot of land for the construction of a house, but for many years she did not see results – the regional queue hardly moved.
Vorontsova went out to pickets, demanded at least some action from officials, but she had no results again – she was taken away from one of the pickets in an ambulance, because the woman became ill.
Then Maria Ponomarenko came to Vorontsova’s emergency house and filmed a video of the situation there. She distributed it in social media and networks, and she personally addressed the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin. As a result, Elena Vorontsova received a small but comfortable apartment near Barnaul.
Novosibirsk activist Yana Drobnokhod , who specially came to the meeting, said that about ten people came to the court to support Maria.
Masha is doing well, she says hello to everyone. And she said very important words today: “The regime will collapse before I get out on parole.” Don’t break her. I gave her a package yesterday.
How Ponomarenko was accused of spreading disinformation
Petersburg. Detention. Arrest.
The case against Maria Ponomarenko was initiated due to the publication in the telegram channel “No Censorship” dated March 17. The post said that the Russian military had destroyed a drama theater in Mariupol, burying hundreds of people who had taken refuge there from the bombings under the rubble. The channel had only one and a half thousand subscribers, it was renamed a long time ago and there are no posts about Mariupol there either.
To detain Maria, a whole investigative group from the Altai Territory arrived in St. Petersburg. Her colleagues from RusNews then said that this could be the revenge of the regional authorities for her active position. Ponomarenko wrote a lot about the problems with the allocation of housing for orphans, went out with pickets, collected parcels for those arrested. When Maria herself appeared in court, she said from behind bars that she wanted to adequately accept the fact that she would most likely be deprived of her freedom for a long time.
“She was being followed.” Criminal case of journalist Ponomarenko for a post about Mariupol
“Since February 24, not a single day has passed without me crying. Now I won’t cry, because my tears will be perceived as if they were due to the fact that I was imprisoned. This is not so. “, she said in court.
Maria Ponomarenko was placed under arrest in the Arsenalka pre-trial detention center in St. Petersburg, where she spent almost three months. She said in an interview with Sever.Realii that after the start of the war, she felt deep despair “from the inability to stop this fratricidal madness,” and believed that she and all the inhabitants of Russia had the right to call the war a war. Maria said that she misses her two daughters very much and is very indignant that her older Katya was interrogated by the police without the permission of her parents, although she was not yet 18 years old.
“A second Nuremberg is inevitable.” Letter from Maria Ponomarenko from the pre-trial detention center
About the administration of the pre-trial detention center and the attitude towards prisoners, she said this: “There are people, but there are people.” Maria wrote that she did not give up and was making plans for the time when “the regime would collapse.” She wanted to help reform orphanages and nursing homes and adapt people released from prisons. Maria did not hope for a lenient punishment.
“I’m only afraid of one thing – that the regime will not disappear in the next two or three years. I regret this: that I had to act tougher and more actively while I was at large,” she wrote Sever.Realii.
How people sentence for fakes in RussiaCourts in Russia pass very harsh sentences in criminal cases about fakes – most often these are many years of real terms.
The first real term – seven years in a colony – was appointed in July 2022 to the Moscow municipal deputy
Alexei Gorinov.
At a meeting of the Council of Deputies, he called the war a war.
Vologda stoker Vladimir Rumyantsev was sentenced to three years in prison for running a tiny radio station, Radio Vovan, where he broadcast anti-war videos from YouTube.
Opposition politician Ilya Yashin was sentenced in the case of fakes to 8.5 years in prison.
Sentences are passed to those who are not in Russia.
A court in absentia sentenced journalist Veronika Belotserkovskaya to nine years in prison.
Petersburg journalist Alexander Nevzorov was given a year less, the sentence was also passed in absentia.
Both spoke out on social networks against Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine and reported on the deaths of civilians in Bucha, Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities.
Barnaul. Psychic expertise. suicide attempt
Two months later, Maria was transferred to the Barnaul pre-trial detention center, because the case was to be heard in the local court. She went through the stage hard.
“And yet, even the Arsenalka did not stand next to the hell of the stage. Stolypin (car), 10 people per three square meters … Heat, closeness, smoky, dirty to disgrace, sleeping places – 6 pieces. No mattresses and other things,” the activist said.
Maria Ponomarenko spent several more months in the Barnaul pre-trial detention center. In mid-July, Ponomarenko was taken to a psychiatric clinic, where, as she says, she was injected with unknown drugs.
Barnaul Psychiatric Hospital (Telegram Link)
I was forcibly stabbed with an unknown substance, which was supposed to calm me down, for demanding personal clothes, utensils, soap products and pads… I don’t remember at all for three days, the journalist said.
In early September 2022, Maria was placed in solitary confinement for a week in a pre-trial detention center because she broke a window in her cell. And then, as her colleagues from RusNews reported , due to the deterioration of her mental state, she tried to commit suicide:
She was diagnosed with a hysterical personality disorder. She did not receive the help necessary for such a disease in the pre-trial detention center. Due to the deterioration of her mental state, she opened her veins. She has claustrophobia, keeping in a room with sealed windows is very affecting. in a psychiatric clinic, no abnormalities were found there, but after two months without sunlight with sealed windows, negative consequences appeared.
Ponomarenko later explained to the court:
I consider the conditions of detention behind sealed windows to be torture. I pose no danger to society. The only person I can harm in a state of hysteria and depression is myself.
Maria’s lawyer, Dmitry Shitov, demanded that the prisoner be transferred to house arrest, because the investigation of the criminal case had moved to a different stage, and the psychological state of his client was deteriorating. But the court left Ponomarenko under arrest.
Barnaul. At Home. And then Jail again.
Maria managed to get out of custody only on November 14: the court replaced prison with house arrest. Ponomarenko was ordered to live in an apartment with her husband, his parents and their daughters. Maria’s relationship with her husband was tense, and before the initiation of a criminal case, they no longer lived together. In addition, her husband and his relatives support the policies of Vladimir Putin.
Already in 2023, at a court hearing, Maria Ponomarenko demanded that she be returned to the pre-trial detention center in order to express her protest against the mobilization. She wanted to show by her example that “it is better to be in prison than to stain your hands with the blood of innocents, become disabled or die.” The court did not change the measure of restraint.
At the end of January 2023, Maria Ponomarenko herself came to the police, thus violating the conditions of her house arrest. She stated that she could not live with her husband, and she was again sent to the pre-trial detention center.
Maria will remain under arrest for at least another month. The next meeting is scheduled for February 14, where the lawyer will speak in the debate. Then the next meeting will be scheduled, at which the judge will retire to pass judgment. How long it will take is unknown.
How many criminal cases about fakes in Russia
According to data as of the end of December 2022 (more recent data is not yet available), after the start of the war in Ukraine, 180 criminal cases about fakes about the Russian army were initiated in Russia. The Prosecutor General’s Office began to take into account the criminal cases of “fake” in its statistics in August. By September, 149 cases were initiated, in October their number increased to 161, in November – to 171. As of December 1 there are 180 such cases. Additionally 21 cases were initiated for publications posted outside of Russia.
Among the regions, the largest number of cases was initiated in Moscow – 41, followed by St. Petersburg – 10 cases, Altai Krai – 9 cases and Omsk region – 8 cases. Seven cases each were initiated in the Novosibirsk and Kirov regions, four each in the annexed Crimea, the Krasnodar Territory, the Rostov Region and Ingushetia.
An article about “fakes” appeared in the Criminal Code immediately after the start of the military invasion of Ukraine. According to human rights activists, with the help of it, military censorship was actually introduced in Russia.