Stories like this make it hard to tell whether Russian children are in prison already when they’re described as going to school.
When Maria Moskaleva drew a picture of missiles next to a Russian flag heading towards a woman and child with a Ukrainian flag at school last year, her teacher called the police, who later discovered comments critical of the war on her father’s social media.
Moskalev has been under house arrest since March 1, while his daughter has been taken to a juvenile rehabilitation center. The charges against him carry a sentence of up to three years in prison. A single father, Moskalev may also lose custody of his daughter in a separate trial set to begin in April.
Her teacher called police.
Without context you’d think a picture of Russian missiles falling on Ukraine is exactly the kind of message Russian police would want to see. In fact, her picture could be described as an illustration of typical Russian leader propaganda.
…Dmitry Medvedev, for his part, wrote, also on Telegram, that ICC judges should start “peering into the sky” because “the use of a hypersonic carrier from a Russian ship in the North Sea against the court building is quite imaginable.”
Unfortunately you can tell from the story about a teen girl’s life in Russia that any representations of enlightenment-like truth — any hint of effeminacy within toxic masculinity — are treated as a direct affront to Putin’s state apparatus.
Her “teacher” played the role of both state spy and punisher, set to destroy a girl’s life on the smallest inkling of any independent thoughts.
Her father will lose his daughter, a family torn apart, because he had dared to speak about a war filling his small town with fresh graves? Seems like police should have arrested Medvedev first for his social media posts about missile strikes raining on civilians.
In somewhat related news, the criminal Wagner group was just criticized so heavily by Putin for throwing away Russian lives in thoughtless suicide attacks on Ukraine, it’s been promoted to destabilize Africa instead.
Wagner apparently is getting a fail-upward transfer after stupidly murdering hundreds of thousands of Russians. Meanwhile an innocent father and daughter in a small town hurting nobody are being ruthlessly punished for simply having coherent thoughts.
If doing the wrong thing is the only thing left to do, and the usually barking Wagner has been thrown a bone to disappear, perhaps Maria’s story will spark new resistance.
