Russian prosecutors want a woman imprisoned for 18 months because of her private photos on Vkontakte

Prosecutors are asking a court to sentence an activist from a banned protest movement to 18 months in prison on charges of hate speech. The evidence against Oksana Pokhodun is a private photo album she maintained on a Vkontakte account she registered under a pseudonym, where she says she collected “different marginal Internet memes” from July 2015 to May 2016. The album, Pokhodun says, was visible only to her account. The police say the images in the album qualify as illegal hate speech.

What’s this “banned protest movement”?

The founder of ”Artpodgotovka,” Vyacheslav Maltsev, was arrested in absentia after fleeing Russia in July 2017. He is charged with inciting extremism. In October 2017, Russia banned his political movement as an extremist organization. Since 2013, Maltsev repeated many times that Russia would experience a revolution on November 5, 2017, calling on his supporters to occupy city centers across the country and refused to disperse, until Vladimir Putin resigned the presidency.