Everything You Need to Know about Sasha Skochilenko’s Case

Sasha Skochilenko is a musician and artist from St Petersburg, Russia, who is facing up to 10 years in prison for peacefully spreading a bunch of anti-war leaflets. Sasha has spent the last six months in jail. She has celiac disease, and in confinement, she has not been receiving the food that is safe for her to eat or the necessary medical help. In all this time, she has not been allowed a meeting with any of her family members or friends, and not even a single phone call with them. Here, we are telling her story from the very start.

Note: The original version of this article (in Russian) was written on October 20, the day of the first court hearing since the investigation was officially over. That day, the court decided to keep Sasha in jail till April 10, 2023. By then, she will have spent a whole year in confinement.

The Day Sasha Was Detained

On April 11, Sasha’s childhood friend called her and said there was a police search happening at his apartment. Soon afterwards, he texted her saying that the police were gone and asked Sasha to come and comfort him. She went to his place, only to find out that the police were still there. In fact, this whole time they had been looking for her.

The police and investigation officers—a team of five men—were behaving aggressively, trying to humiliate and threaten Sasha:

“There were plenty of sexist remarks and openly homophobic statements (such as, ‘when will you finally get yourself together, find a husband and have children?’). It didn’t go without physical abuse and hints at possible [sexual] violence. For instance, Mr. Sinitsyn said that he would not rape me because he has eyes.”

Sasha was detained around noon, and the interrogation lasted till 3 a.m. After being detained, she went two whole days without food or water, and on the following day the Vasileostrovsky District Court sent her to jail, where she has remained for six months already. The strictest sentence she may face according to the article she’s been charged with is 10 years of prison.

Sasha’s “Crime”

All of this happened to Sasha because on March 31, she left five anti-war leaflets designed to look like price tags, at a supermarket. Prior to that, Sasha had been detained at a street protest against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After being detained and receiving a fine, she started to look for other ways to voice her opinion. The idea of anti-war “price tags” was going around the Russian Internet at the time—the thought behind it was to spread information about the war in numbers (“this many civilians were killed during this shelling”; “this many medical facilities in Ukraines have been destroyed by Russian bombs”, etc.), targeting those who would already be worried about the rising prices. To Sasha, this idea seemed safe enough.

In fact, it could very well have led to no such consequences for Sasha, had it not been for a 72-year-old retired woman who saw the “price tags” and reported this to the police. In the woman’s own words, her hands were shaking as she read “such libel” about the Russian armed forces. She tried talking about the “price tags” to the store employees but did not feel any interest or understanding from them—so she went to the police.

The State of Sasha’s Health

All this time in jail (six months at the time of writing) has been extremely detrimental to Sasha’s physical health. Sasha lives with celiac disease—an untreatable genetic autoimmune condition that affects the small intestine. The symptoms are triggered by consuming gluten, avoiding which is so crucial for people who have celiac disease that their food has to be cooked with a separate set of utensils. Otherwise, they run a risk of developing symptoms of intoxication, and if the diet is broken systematically, effects as grave as cancer and osteoporosis may appear. Sasha’s grandmother died of a type of cancer that is usually linked to celiac disease.

Even after numerous letters to the Human Rights Ombudswoman in St Petersburg and the personal request from the President of the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights of the Russian Federation, Sasha still isn’t getting the food she needs. She was not provided with the safe products during the psychiatric examination that took three weeks, or during the week-long illegal transfer to the temporary detention facility. (It was a more convenient location for the investigator to visit as he needed to get Sasha acquainted with the case files.) On court days, Sasha stays hungry from early morning till late night, because the dry ration she is given does not contain any gluten-free products. The jail kitchen itself also breaks the necessary diet frequently enough—and the same goes for the basic sanitary requirements. On multiple occasions, Sasha was given undercooked and rotten food and even found cockroaches in her meals. Cooking Sasha’s food separately is out of the question.

Because Sasha has been forced to frequently break her diet in order not to starve, she is constantly experiencing intoxication symptoms, such as nausea, diarrhea, stomachache. The aches has grown so bad over the time she has spent in jail so far that they often make it impossible for her to sleep.

In addition to that, Sasha’s old heart problems, which she had not experienced since her teenage years, have reappeared. She has severe arrhythmia, and her heart stops once in a while. She has started to suffer from shortness of breath and severe heartaches; doctors have registered a loud heart murmur. An independent cardiologist suggested two preliminary diagnoses: infective endocarditis and/ or rupture of a mitral valve leaflet. Both diagnoses are extremely dangerous and may lead to death. They can be confirmed or ruled out only through special examination procedures unavailable at the jail where Sasha is kept.

Sasha may have contracted infective endocarditis because of lack of medical care at the jail. In early May, a local dentist removed Sasha’s wisdom tooth that was bothering her—but did not close the incision as there were no sutures available at the jail; also, Sasha wasn’t provided with enough painkillers and anti-inflammatory medicine. This might have triggered the infection.

Sasha’s Mental Health and Experiences of Abuse in Jail

Sasha also lives with bipolar disorder. She experienced her first depressive episode at the age of 17—and because she turned to a state clinic for free help, she ended up in a city psychiatric hospital. Since then, Sasha learned to cope with depression and mania herself. Thanks to her own great efforts, she managed to achieve remission, and she shared her experience in A Book about Depression—a comic book where she explained in plain and simple terms what happens to someone in this state (something that,  back in 2014, many people in Russia were not yet aware of). The book was widely successful and was published and later translated into English, Spanish, and Ukrainian.

Since then, Sasha continued to raise awareness about mental health, created new comic books, and collaborated with other mental health activists. Even after incarceration, she wrote an article about the horrific experiences her cellmate went through as she ended up in jail in a state of psychosis, and asked her readers to help this person. [The article is available in Russian here.]

Sasha is having symptoms of PTSD and depression at the moment. Her sleep is constantly interrupted by her stomach- and heartaches, and the right to the everyday hour-long walk is not observed all the time—even that, let alone the unavailability of psychotherapy, communication with loved ones, and the confinement itself, would be enough of a test to anyone’s mental health. What is more, Sasha has experienced various types of abuse multiple times: from sexual harassment by a jail guard to bullying by her ex-cellmates. For instance, the cellmates humiliated her by telling her she smelled bad and by making her wash all of her clothes, including large woolen items, every day, by hand. It was only thanks to the media attention that Sasha was transferred to a different cell.

In all this time, Sasha was not allowed a single meeting or a phone call with her loved ones—not even with her partner Sonya. Six years ago, Sasha and Sonya met online. “Sasha had long red hair, a flower crown, and a quote from Timothy Leary on her profile. I instantly knew we’d end up together,” says Sonya in an interview for Wonderzine. She was right: they were together ever since, but according to Russian anti-LGBTQ+ laws, they are not considered a family. This also allowed the investigator to call Sonya in for questioning and make her a case witness (“legally” married spouses have a right not to testify against each other). “Most of all, I am thinking of my love Sonya,” wrote Sasha in an interview for Sever.Real. “However much I love my art or the truth, I still love Sonya more.”

Sasha’s Art 

Throughout these six months, Sasha has continued to create artworks, and her drawings—along with her texts—have been published by such independent media as Paperpaper and Meduza. Her works were also shown at the Autonomous Zone exhibition that showcased the art created by political prisoners, at the Open Space (Moscow) in June, 2022. The exhibition was raided by the police who confiscated all the artworks, including those by Sasha.

One of the jail’s many rules and restrictions that turned out to be particularly hard for Sasha is a strict prohibition of any musical instruments. Before her arrest, Sasha was very active as a musician: she recorded her own songs, performed at festivals and concerts, and coordinated musical events herself. She organized “free jams”—special events where any people, regardless of their level, age, gender, physical or mental ability, could gather and play different musical instruments. But for the past six months, the only practice Sasha has been able to have is sing during her walks.

“The reverberation in the concrete courtyard is good, and vocals sound great there. I know songs from different Disney, and not only Disney, musicals by heart; sometimes I read aloud my own lyrics to other incarcerated women—those charged with drug-related offenses are especially delighted to hear my song The Graduate,” Sasha wrote in her story about a typical day in jail.

Allegations of “Extremism” and Prospects for Sasha’s Case

It’s crucial to highlight that Sasha is a musician and an artist. She has never been an activist, despite all the efforts by the investigation to label her as such—in particular, with the help of a report by the Center for Combating Extremism. According to the report, Sasha is “the most active participant” of a feminist organization called The Eighth Initiative Group, which the Center E believes to be a movement “of a radical nature.” Sasha has never been a part of this group, which has been confirmed by its real members, and never even knew about its existence. Nevertheless,  the report is now part of the case against Sasha, and could harm her gravely.

Sasha has not plead guilty and has no intention of doing so. She is charged with “public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” committed with the “motivation of political, ideological, racial, national, or religious hatred or enmity, or motivation of hatred or enmity towards a particular social group.” Sasha does not deny having placed the leaflets in the store, but states that she believed the information on them to be true—so did not disseminate “knowingly false information”. To plead guilty would mean to admit that what the leaflets said was a fake.

“Every day of my life for the past six months has been a choice: to plead guilty and get a ‘special procedure,’ getting home as soon as possible, or not to make a deal with my conscience and remain in jail—and, possibly, to even serve prison time for my integrity and stubbornness.”

Over a hundred people in Russia have been charged with the same article. Out of them, there are only two who have both pleaded not guilty and already received their sentence at the time of writing: the first of them, Moscow municipal councilor Aleksei Gorinov, was sentenced to seven years of prison. In the second case, Elista city court gave three years of prison to activist Altan Ochirov.

“It so happens that I represent everything that Putin’s regime is so intolerant to: creativity, pacifism, LGBT, mental health education, feminism, humanism, and love for everything bright, ambivalent, unusual. I was surviving and growing in opposition and in spite of everything that was forced upon us here. I lived in Putin’s Russia as if I lived at Woodstock. Sooner or later, what happened to me now must have happened,” wrote Sasha in one of her open letters back in April. But even though she disagreed with the state politics in many things, Sasha never planned to leave Russia—even when this topic was brought up after the war started.

Now she has to reiterate this at every court hearing that decides whether to extend her pre-trial measure: in spite of her grave health problems, which are impossible to be resolved in jail, and the non-violent nature of her “crime,” the court has consistently chosen to keep her in jail. The investigator’s petition to extend the pre-trial measure was based on arguments so inconsistent that by the end of the investigation, only the hypothetical possibility of Sasha’s leaving the country remained. Since then, due to the “partial” draft, leaving Russia has become quite a challenge for all its citizens—but especially for those liable to conscription. Sasha’s partner Sonya, who is a pharmacist, is one of those people; meanwhile, Sasha herself does not even have a foreign passport.

The next pre-trial measure hearing will be held on October 20. There, the court will decide Sasha’s fate for the following six months. Judge Oksana Demyasheva will preside; she has already extended Sasha’s confinement twice.

You can find the latest updates on Sasha’s case on our Twitter page (in English), or on our Telegram channel (in Russian).

Please sign the petition in support of Sasha.