Very disturbing news is coming out of Russia. And although in this case it did not ultimately end with a 20-year sentence, as now so often happens over a single phrase or word posted online, 27-year-old Polina Yevtushenko was sentenced to 14 years in a general-regime penal colony on charges of high treason, terrorism, extremism, and spreading so-called “fake news” about the Russian army.
The sentence was handed down by the Central District Military Court in Samara. In addition to 14 years in prison, Polina was sentenced to 1 year of restricted freedom and banned from administering websites for 4 years. Her time in pre-trial detention will be credited on a day-for-day basis.
On January 14, the prosecutor requested an 18-year prison sentence for Yevtushenko. The prosecution cited the fact that she has a young child as a mitigating circumstance.
On February 24, Polina delivered her final statement:
“I love my homeland, Russia, and I would never do anything that could harm it.”
She asked the judge to “become a guide to happiness for two loving hearts — a mother and her child” and to allow her to return to her daughter Alisa, who turned 8 on March 1.
Yet neither Polina’s age nor the fact that she has an eight-year-old daughter prevented the court from sentencing her to 14 years.
What is particularly frightening here is not only the length of the sentence, but the way this case was constructed.
The criminal case was based on Polina’s social media posts and her conversations with previously convicted Nikolai Komarov. According to the defense, Komarov gained her trust by pretending to be romantically interested in her, steered their conversations toward specific topics, and secretly recorded them in advance.
Judging by the circumstances of the case, what could be found on Polina’s VKontakte page was not sufficient to provide the material needed for the desired charges. Then someone appeared who could obtain the necessary words through a private conversation.
According to the defense, edited fragments of those recordings were later handed over to the FSB: Komarov’s own provocative questions were removed, while Polina’s answers were left detached from their original context.
And here it is particularly important to stress that this was no longer even about public speech. It was a private conversation with a person who had first gained her trust and had switched on a recording device in advance.
This represents a fundamentally different model of repression: if public statements are not enough, a person can be provoked into saying the required words in a private conversation, recorded, stripped of inconvenient context, and the result can then be turned into evidence.
In other words, the objective is no longer merely to prevent the spread of information that is inconvenient for the authorities, but to identify a supposedly “malicious person,” extract the required words from them, and imprison them for many years.
The figure of the provocateur himself is particularly revealing: Nikolai Vadimovich Komarov, a man with a repeated criminal record.
In 2009, he was convicted of stealing a mobile phone. In 2011, he was convicted of 17 episodes involving the theft of cables and internet equipment and sentenced to 2 years and 1 month in prison. In 2024, Komarov received his third criminal conviction, in a case involving 37 episodes of illegally creating legal entities through front persons.
Back in 2017, Komarov appeared as a volunteer at Alexei Navalny’s Samara campaign headquarters, gained the trust of its staff, and several months later released an “exposé” attacking the headquarters. After that, activists began to suspect that he had ties to the police. It later emerged that the person with whom Komarov had become particularly close inside the headquarters was an undercover police lieutenant colonel. Komarov’s own cooperation with the police at that time was never proven, but in light of the present case, the episode is especially striking.
And in this sense, nothing has changed since 2017. For this system, a person with a criminal past who is willing to provoke and inform on others can be more useful at liberty than an educated person with an independent opinion. Much is effectively forgiven — just as criminal behavior is now forgiven to so-called “heroes of the Special Military Operation.” The authorities are demonstrating ever more openly how close this milieu is to them in spirit, even if its representatives have long since changed into expensive suits.
In Polina Yevtushenko’s case, this takes an especially repellent form: a man with a genuine criminal record pretends to be in love, gains the trust of a young woman, records her private conversations, and that material then becomes part of a case in which the prosecutor requests 18 years and the court imposes 14 years in prison.
And all of this happens despite the fact that Polina has an eight-year-old daughter.
The existence of her child was officially recognized as a mitigating circumstance. The state knows about the child. The prosecution knows. The court knows.
And nevertheless, the mother receives 14 years.
Polina Yevtushenko’s mother and her eight-year-old daughter Alisa are waiting for her outside prison.
And this raises the question: how far can the authorities go in their immorality?
If, for the sake of obtaining the desired criminal case, it is acceptable to use a person with a criminal past, have him pretend to have feelings, provoke a private conversation, record it, remove inconvenient context, and then use it to deprive a mother of her freedom for 14 years — where is the limit?
Use children as kamikazes?
Those of us Russians who were forced to leave the country and who are watching the last moral restraints of the state machinery disappear one after another have almost no doubt anymore:
even that would not be the limit for them.
Source: Telegram channel “PolitZek”
https://t.me/politzekinfo/9157
https://t.me/politzekinfo/8954