Russia on Tuesday sentenced a 68-year-old paediatrician to five and a half years in prison for allegedly criticising the Ukraine campaign during an appointment, after she was denounced by the ex-wife of a soldier killed in combat.
The case against Nadezhda Buyanova has exemplified the level of repression in Russia and how common denunciations have become while the country’s troops fight in Ukraine.
Arrested in February, the Moscow doctor was accused by Anastasia Akinshina, the ex-partner of a soldier, of calling the man a “legal target” of Ukraine, in comments allegedly made during a medical appointment for her son.
Buyanova has said she is innocent and “just a doctor”.
Judge Olga Felina sentenced her despite no public evidence that the conversation took place and after Akinshina’s seven-year-old son testified against the doctor, in a practice reminiscent of Soviet show trials.
“I believe this is absurd,” grey-haired Buyanova said moments before she was handed the prison term.
Several supporters, mostly medics, shouted “Shame on you!” in court as the sentence was read out.
“I am a paediatrician… I do not regret a single day,” Buyanova said.
Many have pointed to Buyanova’s birthplace — Ukraine’s western city of Lviv — as the real reason for her harsh treatment.
Handcuffed in the defendant’s glass cage and wearing a black jumper, she thanked supporters for coming to the court.
“We must empathise with one another and love others,” she said in court. “But there is no paradise on earth, there is no peace on earth. And I would like that.”
– Child testimony –
The medic cried in court last week as prosecutors demanded a six-year sentence for her, saying she was from a “simple family” and did “not have an easy life”.
“The evidence has not been presented,” her lawyer Leonid Solovyev said after the verdict.
Her defence insists there is no audio recording of the alleged comments and decried that prosecutors brought Akinshina’s child into the trial, saying he had been pressured by the FSB security service.
Despite his mother saying earlier in the trial that he was not present during the conversation, the boy told the court that Buyanova had called his father a “legal target for Ukraine”.
Buyanova and her lawyers have said that he used language that was unusual for a child his age.
Lawyer Solovyev said he was “surprised” to see that people came to support Buyanova “on the third year of no rule of law”.
– ‘Witch hunt’ –
Moscow has unleashed a massive crackdown on dissent since launching its campaign in Ukraine in 2022.
“It is a sign to everyone to sit quietly,” Yuri Samodurov, who used to head Moscow’s Sakharov Centre, an NGO, told AFP as he came to the court to support Buyanova.
He said the verdict was “completely unfounded” and reminiscent of a “witch hunt”.
The parents of exiled opposition leader Ilya Yashin, who have been coming to various political trials in Russia, also came to the hearing.
“It is the denunciation of a woman against the word of a doctor,” Tatiana Yashina, told AFP.
She despaired over the number of prison sentences handed out in Russia in cases deemed political.
“With each verdict, it seems that the system would loosen its jaws… But the sentences are so large that even for murder they give less.”
Buyanova, who has lived in Russia for more than three decades, has been accused of having a “personal hatred” of the Russian leadership due to where she was born.
“She is from Lviv! This is why she hates Russia,” Akinshina said in court earlier in the trial.
bur/rlp
