Darya Kozyreva gets real prison term for Taras Shevchenko poem and opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine

A court in St. Petersburg has sentenced 19-year-old Darya Kozyreva to two years and eight months’ imprisonment for posting a placard with an excerpt from the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko’s poem Testament and for an interview expressing opposition to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. 

Darya was arrested over the placard, which she posted on a (pre-invasion)  monument to Shevchenko, on the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (24 February 2024).  She was remanded in custody on 27 February and remained in a SIZO [pre-trial prison] until 7 February 2025, accused of having repeatedly discrediting the Russian armed forces’ under one of four draconian charges rushed into legislation ten days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  Supposed justification for bringing the criminal charge, under Article 280.3 § 1 of Russia’s criminal code, was because Darya had already been convicted in 2023 of the analogous administrative charge of ‘discrediting the Russian armed forces’ under Article 20.3.3 of the code of administrative offences.  This was over anti-war posts in social media, however she had been detained over other protests against Russia’s war while still underage. In December 2022, for example, she was seized while writing on an extraordinarily cynical installation, with two hearts, which was purportedly about Mariupol and its supposed ‘Russian sister city’, St Petersburg.  The young student was, understandably, outraged at such hypocrisy about a Ukrainian city that Russia had mercilessly bombed and shelled for several months in 2022.  She wrote on the installation: “Murderers, you bombed it, Judases”.  In January 2023, criminal charges were laid under Article 167 3 1, with the young woman accused of causing ‘deliberate damage to property leading to significant losses’.

Darya was expelled from the medical faculty of the St. Petersburg state university over the administrative prosecution. She mentions this in the interview to Northern Realities, saying that the university justified her expulsion on the grounds that she had “violated legislation”.  They were not bothered, she notes, by the fact that the legislation in question violates Russia’s constitution

She was arrested on 24 February 2024 after she posted a placard with the following  four lines of Shevchenko’s Zapovit [Testament]  at the monument:

«Поховайте та вставайте,           Oh bury me, then rise ye up

Кайдани порвіте                          And break your heavy chains

І вражою злою кровʼю                 And water with the tyrants' blood

Волю окропіте!».                          The freedom you have gained.

                                                                 (translation  John Weir)

While not difficult to understand what the current regime under Russian leader Vladimir Putin would object to in the poem, the charge of ‘repeatedly discrediting the Russian army’ is evidently absurd.  This is not least, as Darya herself pointed out to the court. because the poem had been written when there was no Russian Federation whose army it was supposed to discredit.

Worth noting that the young woman had been imprisoned for around six months before the prosecution came up with another ‘episode’ of discrediting the Russian army over the interview to Northern Realities.   In it, she explains that she took the firm decision earlier that it people were being told to be silent, to not stick their necks out, then it was the sacred duty of any honest citizen to speak the truth, and only the truth.  When the war began, and they brought in those repressive, totally cannibalistic laws about discrediting and about ‘fakes’,  she was outraged and wrote in a post about the laws and about “this monstrous, criminal war.”  It was over that post that a denunciation against her was written.    The war is needed only by those who make money on it, money out of land, etc. taken from Ukraine.

The interview shows Darya Kozyreva to be a courageous, articulate and thinking young woman.  She is, in short, just the sort of young person whom a free society would be proud of and support.  Instead, she was thrown out of university and is now imprisoned. 

This was the second attempt at a ‘trial’, with the first being abandoned after it became clear that the prosecution’s claims about the interview, available on YouTube, were false.  ON 18 April 2025, ‘judge’  Dmitry Serakh from the Petrogradsky district court found Darya guilty of both ‘episodes/ of ‘discrediting Russia’s armed forces’ and sentenced her to two years and eight months in a prison colony.  Since each day of the year in a SIZO, where the conditions are particularly bad, is calculated as one and a half days, the remaining part of the sentence would be just over a year.  That, however, is if the prosecutor does not lodge an appeal to get the sentence increased.  Before Serakh announced the sentence, prosecutor Mikhail Russkikh demanded a six-year sentence. 

Russikh treated Darya’s refusal to ‘admit guilt’ as an aggravating circumstance.  In her address to the court, Darya stated that “in my opinion, from the moment of the full-scale invasion, the self-discrediting of this army has reached its culmination.  Therefore, any opinion directed against it [the army] will not do anything.”

She was also scathing about the formulation in the criminal code which claims that such ‘discrediting’ was of the Russian army in its supposed role of “supporting international peace and security.”   There are, undoubtedly, such cases where an army carries out such peacekeeping tasks.  This is categorically not the case here, she says. 

“No guilt hangs over me. My conscience is clear, because the truth is never guilty, never.”