US deal freed a Russian prisoner whose crime was writing anti-war messages on supermarket price tags

Grace Eliza Goodwin
Thu, August 1, 2024

Thursday's historic prisoner swap freed journalists, political dissidents, and one small-time activist.

Alexandra Skochilenko was arrested in 2022 after she posted anti-war messages in a supermarket.

Skochilenko is headed to Germany, where she will reunite with her mother.

The historic prisoner swap on Thursday between the US, Russia, and a handful of other countries freed a number of well-known journalists, activists, and political dissidents.

Among the better known American names, like Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US marine Paul Whelan, was one relatively unknown Russian woman: Alexandra Skochilenko.

Skochilenko, a 33-year-old artist and musician, was arrested in April 2022 after she was caught replacing price tags in a St. Petersburg grocery store with anti-war messages. She is a pacifist who had no history of political activism before the supermarket incident, The Washington Post reported.

One of Skochilenko's messages provided information about the March 20, 2022 bombing of an art school in Mariupol, Ukraine where 400 civilians had been sheltering, NPR reported. Ukrainian officials at the time said Russia was behind the attack, while Russia in turn blamed Ukraine.

Another of the messages read, "Weekly inflation reached a new high not seen since 1998 because of our military actions in Ukraine. Stop the war," according to The Washington Post.

After a fellow shopper reported Skochilenko to the police, Russia accused her of disseminating false information about the war in Ukraine, charging her under a new Russian law that bans citizens from spreading "fake news" about Russia's so-called "special military operation," NPR reported.

In 2023, she was handed down a particularly harsh sentence relative to her crime: seven years behind bars, human rights charity Amnesty International said, calling it a "sham trial" that culminated in a "manifestly unjust verdict."

In a final statement at her trial, Skochilenko said to the court, according to CNN, "How little faith does our prosecutor have in our state and society if he believes that our statehood and public safety can be destroyed by five small pieces of paper?"

Now that Skochilenko has been freed, she is heading to Germany, the Post reported. Her mother, who is based in Paris, told Agence France-Presse that she plans to meet her there.

"This is just an incredible event," her mother Nadezhda Skochilenko told AFP. "I've been waiting for this for such a long time. I just want to hug her first."