A Russian court has sentenced former Moscow municipal deputy and current Pussy Riot member Lucy Shtein to six years in prison in absentia for anti-war social media posts.
Moscow’s Basmanny District Court found Shtein guilty of spreading “war fakes” and said her prison sentence would begin once she is extradited to Russia, the court’s press service announced on Wednesday.
Shtein, 27, fled from house arrest in Russia for Lithuania with her girlfriend and Pussy Riot bandmate Maria Alyokhina in the spring of 2022, weeks after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
In May, media in Iceland reported that Shtein and Alyokhina both received fast-tracked Icelandic citizenship.
Shtein was tried for a March 2022 post on X (formerly Twitter) in which she accused Russian troops captured by Ukrainian soldiers of “bombing foreign cities and killing people,” the independent news website Mediazona reported.
Prosecutors had requested an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence against her.
Shtein joked on X that her mother had “bet” on prosecutors requesting a nine-year prison sentence.
Russian law enforcement first placed the Pussy Riot member on its wanted list in May 2022 on unspecified charges, though state-run media had reported that she was charged with making “false” allegations about the Russian military in Ukraine.
Spreading “false information” about Russia’s armed forces is punishable by up to 10 years in prison under the country’s wartime censorship laws.
Shtein had until 2022 served as a Moscow municipal deputy after being elected as a member of the liberal opposition party Yabloko in 2017.
