Activist sentenced to seven years after anti-war supermarket stickers, recounts prison abuse

Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko placed anti-war stickers on supermarket price tags in St Petersburg in April 2022, prompting prosecutors to label the act as spreading false information about Russian forces. She was tried for over a year and, in November 2023, sentenced to seven years in prison. While held in Detention Centre No 5, Sasha suffered extreme conditions: she was forced to choose between gluten-containing meals and starvation, denied essential medicines for her coeliac disease, bipolar disorder and heart condition, and was confined in a cramped cell with 17 others under constant surveillance.

Prison officials allegedly recruited other inmates to subject her to repeated verbal abuse, forced her to wash and dry clothes in freezing weather, and made her watch war propaganda on repeat. Her partner Sofya Subbotina was prohibited from seeing her for a year, with visitation later limited to two hours per month. After enduring the ordeal, Sasha was moved in a 16-person multinational prisoner exchange that transferred her to Cologne, Germany, alongside other high-profile detainees.