A Russian journalist serving eight years for criticising Moscow’s offensive on Ukraine has attempted suicide three times and remains in hospital, her lawyer and the outlet she worked for said Friday.
Maria Ponomarenko, 46, was sentenced two years ago for a social media post on an attack on a theatre in Ukraine’s port city of Mariupol, which Russia captured after a long siege.
Kyiv and its Western allies blamed Moscow for the death of hundreds of civilians in the attack, which Russia denies.
“From July 30 to August 9, Maria attempted sui…de three times. She lost a significant amount of blood,” her lawyer Dmitry Shitov wrote on Telegram.
He did not fully mention the word “suicide” as Russian laws prohibit that in public posts in Russian.
After visiting Ponomarenko in the jail’s hospital ward in the Siberian city of Barnaul, Shitov said her condition was “satisfactory”.
Shitov said the suicide attempts were in protest against the dire conditions of the prison.
She said she had been put in the solitary confinement several times, where she said the guards had “bullied” her, he added.
Ponomarenko, who has two kids, worked for the independent online media RusNews.
She staged several hunger strikes in prison, said Shitov, adding that her mental health had deteriorated due to “torture-like” conditions in jail.
“I have never seen as much violence as I saw in the prison system,” Ponomarenko said in her last word in court in March.
On that occasion she received an additional sentence for having allegedly attacked prison guards, RusNews reported.
After the Kremlin ordered troops into Ukraine nearly a year ago, Russia introduced new legislation criminalising what authorities consider to be false or damaging information about the Russian army and the offensive.
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