In the Kremlin's latest move to crackdown on dissent, the Russian women are accused of justifying terrorism and will be held in detention until March, 2024.
ADVERTISEMENTA Moscow court extended on Tuesday the pre-trial detention of a theatre director and a playwright, who has been held since May 2023 under charges of justifying terrorism.
The court ordered Russian theatre director Zhenya Berkovich and Russian playwright Svetlana Petriyuchik to remain behind bars until 10 March, 2024. Since their arrest, the women have made three appeals to be kept in pre-trial detention, all of which were denied by the court.
Their award-winning play, "Finist, the Brave Falcon," tells the true story of Russian women who were recruited online by radical Islamists to marry and live in Syria. Once there, they found themselves in the midst of war and experienced abuse. The women who were able to escape and return to their homes in Russia faced prosecution. The play premiered in Moscow in 2021 and won several theater awards.
Russian officials say the play justifies terrorism, which is an offense punishable by up to seven years in prison.
President Vladimir Putin has been cracking down on opponents for years, including activists and journalists. Most international news organizations have left the country while several foreign outlets have been labeled as "undesirable" and shut down under Russia's undesirable organizations law.
Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, repression has surged. Putin expanded the "fake news" law to criminalise anyone who spreads false information about the Russian military. Individuals voicing opposition to the war have been arrested under this legislation.
Case of Alexei Navalny
On Wednesday jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny appeared on TV during a court hearing from his new cell in an Arctic prison.
Navalny, a fierce critic of the Russian government, is sentenced to 30 years in prison for fraud charges and for creating an extremist community and financing extremist activities in the country. He was jailed in a prison in central Russia. Yet, last month, he was transferred to a penal colony above the Arctic Circle.
"The idea that Putin is satisfied with the fact that he put me in a hut in the far north and that I am no longer being tortured in SHIZO was not only cowardly but also naive," Navalny published on his X account on Tuesday.