The Supreme Court reduced the fine for “discrediting” the Russian army to a pensioner from Buryatia, Irina Folts, from 40,000 to 15,000 rubles. It is reported by Siberia.Realii.
Foltz's pension is 14 thousand rubles. Thus, the fine was not equal to almost three of her pensions, but almost one.
The pensioner was found guilty for speaking in a closed group of the Garden non-profit partnership for 59 people in Viber. The administrator of the group wrote: “How will we meet our heroes?” However, the pensioner did not understand what was at stake and answered: “What heroes?” When she realized that they meant Russian servicemen in Ukraine, she wrote in a chat that the military were not heroes. Foltz later explained: “Maybe someone went to the competition, took something. Well, I asked what heroes. She also didn’t like the fact that the topic about the military was brought up in the gardening chat: “There you have to report when the garbage will be taken out or the meeting will take place.” The deputy chairman of the SNT denounced the pensioner to the police.
Journalist Evgenia Baltatarova, who emigrated from Buryatia, announced a fundraiser for a pensioner when she learned that she had been fined on a denunciation in a gardening group. During the day, 40 thousand rubles were collected for Foltz.
Earlier in June, a court in Buryatia found Natalya Filonova, a pensioner from Ulan-Ude, guilty under the article on “discrediting” the Russian army for her request to the bus driver to remove the sticker with the letter Z. She was fined 35,000 rubles. Before that, Nizhny Novgorod activist Alexei Podnebesny was fined 30,000 rubles for “discrediting” the Russian army because he wrote the word “special operation” in quotation marks. More than 2,100 Russians have already been accused of “discrediting” the Russian army (20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses) during the war in Ukraine. They were issued fines totaling more than 25 million rubles. 52 criminal cases were opened for spreading "fake news" about the army.
The Insider wrote that many of the cases were initiated after denunciations by the Russians. So, in Penza, schoolchildren denounced a teacher who spoke out against the war. Petersburg artist Sasha Skochilenko, who replaced price tags at Perekrestok with anti-war propaganda, faces up to 10 years in prison after being denounced by a pensioner. The Russians, who were denounced for their anti-war position by relatives, colleagues and classmates, told how they reacted to this. The material also contains documents from the time of the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s, with which they compare what is happening.
