After surviving two years and five months in a Russian penal colony, spirited former Bard student 33-year-old Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko was one of the political prisoners released as part of the dramatic prisoner swap which freed at least 24, between the United States and Russia and other Western Allies announced Thursday, August 1. She was flown from Ankara, Turkey to Cologne, Germany to meet with her mother.
After running afoul of one of a series of laws enacted specifically for the purpose of criminalizing anti-war pickets and actions, posts, reposts, and other comments on social media in the run-up to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Skochilenko had received a sentence of seven years for placing anti-war leaflets disguised as price tags on goods in a grocery store in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The Leningrad-born activist was prosecuted in a Russian court for “knowingly spreading false information about the Russian army.” The maximum possible sentence for the act of spreading “fake news” about the Russian military is 15 years.
Skochilenko, now 33 years old, was fervently involved in political anti-war activism and participated in the election campaign of a member of Putin opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Also serving as an independent observer in Russian elections, she had joined in the “Feminist Anti-War Resistance”, a group founded in 2022 to protest against the invasion of Ukraine.
In her closing statement before sentencing in 2022, Skochilenko said, “If these five pieces of paper are really as dangerous as the state prosecutor claims, then why was this trial initiated at all? So that we could discuss and re-discuss these five theses dozens of times? Even the state prosecutor uttered them — and didn’t blush …. [W]hat weak faith our prosecutor has in our state and society if he believes that our statehood and public safety can collapse from five small pieces of paper?”
At last count, 315 criminal cases have been initiated under the “fake news” article, and 191 criminal cases under the discrediting article.
A petition on Change.org calling for Skochilenko’s immediate release from custody has been signed by nearly 170,000 people, and Amnesty International has recognized her as a political prisoner.
Bard College was banned from Russia in 2021 after its activities were declared “undesirable,” posing “a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order and security of the Russian Federation.”
Jonathan Becker, the college’s executive vice-president, was quoted as saying on Friday that he was “profoundly thankful” for Skochilenko’s release, “She spoke her mind, she demonstrated independent thinking and was very poorly treated for it,” he told the Albany Times-Union. The case is part of the college’s course on human-rights advocacy.
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