A St. Petersburg schoolgirl who was sentenced to four years in prison for putting up leaflets praising Russian Volunteers Corps (RVC) fighters on a school noticeboard, has accused her investigators of threatening to torture her while she was in pretrial custody, independent outlet RusNews reported on Thursday.
Seventeen-year-old Yeva Bagrova, who was convicted of justifying terrorism and cooperating with a terrorist organisation, has also been added to the Russian government’s list of “terrorists and extremists” since her conviction.
Bagrova, who made the allegations during an unsuccessful appeal against her sentence in the Moscow region town of Vlasikha, also claimed that investigators had questioned her without a legal representative, made threats against her father and brother, and showed her images of what would happen to her if she did not confess.
The leaflets praising the RVC. Photo: Verstka
Bagrova’s lawyers told the court that another pupil had initially admitted to putting up the leaflets, which featured RVC founder Denis Kapustin and RVC fighter Alexey Levkin accompanied by the caption “Honoured Hero of Russia”, but that he had subsequently withdrawn his testimony in court, saying that it had been given under duress.
They also argued that investigators had found no evidence linking Bagrova to the leaflets, and that her fingerprints had not been on them. The appeal court ultimately upheld the original verdict, however, leaving Bagrova’s four-year prison sentence unchanged.
Banned in Russia as a terrorist organisation, the RVC, which fights alongside the Armed Forces of Ukraine against the Russian military in eastern Ukraine, describes its mission as the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its 1991 borders and the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.
