Aleksandra Yurevna Skochilenko (Russian: Александра Юрьевна Скочиленко; born 13 September 1990), also known as Sasha Skochilenko, is a Russian artist, musician and social activist.
Her being arrested for protesting the war on Ukraine on supermarket price tags made her famous.
The one on the photo below says:
“Weekly inflation reached the maximum since 1998, due to our military activies in Ukraine. Stop the war”
Skochilenko was born in Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia). She is an alumna of the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Saint Petersburg State University. She is an author of the Book About Depression (2014), which helped destigmatize mental health issues in Russia. She is an open lesbian and her partner has been involved in publicizing the course of her criminal case and the conditions of her detention.
After taking part in a protest against the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Skochilenko was fined 10,000 rubles.
Raising Awareness by Putting Price Tag Anti-War Messages in a Grocery Store
On 31 March, Skochilenko was arrested for “putting fragments of paper in place of price tags, containing information about the use of the Russian armed forces” in a Perekrestok supermarket. The messages attributed to her included information about Mariupol theatre airstrike on 16 March: “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol where about 400 people were hiding from the shelling.” Skochilenko was jailed for eight weeks pending trial, accused of being motivated by “political hatred for Russia”. Under the recently introduced Russian fake news laws, she faces a sentence of up to 10 years imprisonment if found guilty.
In a letter from her jail in April 2022, Skochilenko wrote: “It just so happened that I represent everything that the Putin regime is so intolerant of: creativity, pacifism, LGBT, psycho-enlightenment, feminism, humanism, and love for everything bright, ambiguous, unusual.” On 30 May, the St. Petersburg District Court extended her pre-trial detention until July in a closed hearing.
In early June, she was temporarily transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where staff refused to treat her for abdomen pain she was experiencing and refused to share information about her condition with her lawyer and partner. On 30 June, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs’s Centre for Combating Extremism issued a report alleging that Skochilenko was a member of the Eighth Initiative Group, which it deemed a “radical protest feminist group”. Skochilenko denied knowledge of the group. Following those claims, the court extended her pre-trial detention until September.
Human rights groups raised concerns about the conditions of her detention, as she suffers from congenital heart disease, PTSD, and celiac disease, the last of which requires a gluten-free diet that she has not consistently been allowed access to, and which has caused her significant weight loss and health concerns during her detention.
Read an interview with Sonya about their situation.
As well, her partner has been denied permission to visit her while she had been under detention.
In a July interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Skochilenko further raised concerns about possible mistreatment, saying that she and the other prisoners in her cell had been forced to completely clean the cell three times a day by hand and the television in the cell was restricted to war films and pro-government news about the invasion.
She was honored as one of the BBC’s 100 Women in 2022.
Despite numerous arguments about the critical state of her health made by Skochilenko’s defense at the previous hearing, on July 7, 2023 the judge ordered that she remain in pretrial detention until October 10, 2023.
Read more on her heath condition on Meduza
On November 8, 2023 the Reuters reported that the prosecution asked for 8 years in prison for Sasha Skochilenko. (Trial transcript from Mediazona)
Novaya Gazeta . Petersburg samisdat – How actions could cost artist 10 years in jail
Not a job for linguists
6:39 am, November 3, 2022 – Source: Bumaga
Why prosecutors’ case against Sasha Skochilenko, who used supermarket price tags to protest the war, doesn’t hold water
Sasha Skochilenko is sentenced to 7 years in prison on November 16, 2023.
Awful.
Thes are excerpts from her final statement before her verdict was announced.
I feel very sad to experience such injustice and coldness.