Journalist, who wrote poem about political prisoner, is fined for ‘discreditation of Russian army’
Denis Pogrebnoy from Karelia posted poems about 'foreign agents' and political prisoners on his social media page.
The judge of the Petrozavodsk City Court, Olga Kaigorodova, has fined Karelian journalist Denis Pogrebnoy 30,000 rubles for 'discrediting the Russian army.' The alleged reason for the punishment was Pogrebnoy's posting on social media VKontakte in the period between October 2022 and May 2024. The court protocol (available to Barents Observer) lists publications in which a policeman named Golovanov found so-called law violations. Among the “violations” was Pogrebnoy's poems dedicated to Aleksandra Skochilenko, the artist that was sentenced to seven years of prison colony for making supermarket anti-war price tags: “Seven years. Could have killed a person. Raised a daughter, dressed her for school.
Seven years. For the papers near the buckwheat, becoming worse than a protocol…” Another post included in the protocol is a poem published on May 5, when Orthodox Christians celebrated Easter: “800 days of war and tears “Bright holiday” at the bottom of graves If Christ truly resurrected, He definitely would not forgive us.” In a post from March 8, 2023, Pogrebnoy comments on the tour of the Donetsk Theater from occupied Ukraine to Karelia with the play “I Know the Truth”: “I wonder how soon the Karelian National Theater will wash the stage from all these scribbles…”. And on April 21, 2023, he posted a post in support of journalist and art manager Natalia Ermolina, recognized as a foreign agent: “More and more of my friends are foreign agents. Proud of Yermolina! After all (it should be explained immediately) this is not the status of a traitor, as the brainwashed patriots think, but of a sensible and free person.” In total, the protocol lists ten publications that, according to the police, discredit the Russian armed forces.
The document does not explain how the poems about Skochilenko or the post in support of Yermolina are related to the Russian army, and it denies the fact that there is an ongoing war. “…the goals of the ongoing operation do not include overthrowing the government, political regime, seizing territory, resources, there is no armed conflict between states as such, or imposing power by force. There is no war between Russia and Ukraine, a military operation is being conducted with the aim of protection, not capture,” — the protocol states. Denis Pogrebnoy left Russia in December 2022, and he today works with Russian-speaking media in exile. In a conversation with the Barents Observer, he underlines that he does not take the administrative prosecution to heart.
“Over the three years of the war, I have been overly anxious, scared, worried, and have become a bit hardened. So I am not worried. There is a slight concern because previously fines were only from the traffic police for minor unintentional violations, and here — for intentionally written words. “The set of posts [at the core of the administrative case] raises many questions. There are stand-up comedians who are pressured for jokes; on the other hand, there are poets — for example, Slava Malakhov, whom I read and who is in detention: he got in trouble for poems.
And I am neither a poet nor a stand-up comedian… But I wrote what I couldn't not write. With the start of the war, I did not limit myself in words. I am a propagandist of common sense and believe in the best.” Earlier, two journalists from Karelia became subjects of criminal cases. Natalia Sevets-Yermolina and Sergey Markelov were accused of failing to fulfill the duties of a “foreign agent.” Both have fled abroad.
