More than 1,000 people in Russia have reportedly faced criminal prosecution for vocalizing their opposition to the war in Ukraine, and now an elderly pediatrician there is facing her own repercussions. Citing state news agency Tass, Reuters reports that 68-year-old Nadezhda Buyanova was sentenced by a Russian court on Tuesday to 5 1/2 years in a penal colony, after a 7-year-old patient's mother accused her of telling the boy that his soldier father's death in Ukraine was justified. Buyanova had been arrested and charged with spreading false information about the war and Russian troops, a violation of a law put in place to squash critics after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, per the AP.
The mother in question, 34-year-old Anastasia Akinshina, put up an emotional video online in January after bringing her son to an appointment at Buyanova's clinic, reports the New York Times. In that footage, Akinshina claimed the pediatrician had inquired why the boy was acting out, and that when she told Buyanova that he had anxiety after his father had been killed in Ukraine, Buyanova said the man was a "legitimate target" for Ukrainian fighters. The video was soon picked up by Kremlin-supporting media, and Buyanova was arrested in February. Buyanova has denied saying such things, and prosecutors at Buyanova's trial offered no strong evidence that she had—there was no audio from inside the room where Buyanova and Akinshina had met.
Akinshina, meanwhile, had originally said her son wasn't in the room to hear the comments, but a month later she changed her tune and allowed him to be interviewed for the case. Akinshina has insisted that "western Ukraine hates Russians"—Buyanova was born in Lviv, in Ukraine's west—but the doctor broke down in tears in court last week and insisted that wasn't the case. "I'm related to the three ethnicities: Russia, Ukrainian, and Belarusian," she said, per the Times. "I don't want to have to choose between the three of them." A petition for Buyanova's release has drawn more than 6,000 signatures, while a group of Russian doctors penned an open letter calling the denunciation of her a "disgrace," per Reuters. (More Russia stories.)
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