On Thursday, a Russian court sentenced a St. Petersburg resident to two years’ probation for leaving a note on the grave of President Vladimir Putin’s parents saying they “raised a freak and a murderer.”

The court found 60-year-old Irina Tsybaneva guilty of desecrating burial places motivated by political hatred. Her lawyer said she pleaded not guilty because she did not physically desecrate the grave or seek publicity for her actions.

The note, which Tsybaneva placed on the guarded grave on the eve of Putin’s birthday in October, read: “Parents of a maniac, take him with you. It causes so much pain and trouble. The whole world is praying for his death. Death to Putin. You raised a freak and a killer.”

Ever since Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, the government has bet on suppression of dissent unseen since Soviet times.

In another case, a Russian government agency added actor Artur Smolyaninov and a former consultant who advised the office of the President of Ukraine to the list of “extremists and terrorists”.

In a January interview with the European edition of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Smolyaninov said that hypothetically he would only take part in the fighting on the side of Ukraine.

Aleksey Arestovich, an adviser to the President of Ukraine, resigned after he stated online that a Russian missile was the cause of the explosion. 45 people died in the Dnieper as a result of the defeat of the Ukrainian air defense residential building.

Other Thursday events:

— A Russian military court has sentenced Nikita Tushkanov, a history teacher from Komi, to five and a half years in prison for his comments about last year’s bombing of the Kerch bridge connecting Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula with the Russian mainland. Tushkanov was found guilty of justifying terrorism and “discrediting” the Russian army. In October, a teacher posted on social media calling the bridge explosion a “birthday present” for Putin.

— Convicted Leader of the Opposition Alexey Navalny said on Twitter that he was returned to the solitary confinement cell only a day after leaving it. He didn’t guess why. Navalny, 46, who exposed official corruption and organized massive anti-Kremlin protests, was arrested in Moscow in January 2021 after recovering in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was originally sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for violating parole. Last year, he was sentenced to nine years in prison for fraud and contempt of court. He is serving time in a maximum security prison 250 kilometers east of Moscow.

The Kremlin’s massive campaign of repression has made criticism of the war a criminal offence. In addition to fines and prison terms, the defendants were fired, blacklisted, branded as “foreign agents” or fled Russia.

MARCIA BIGGS:

Former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, recently listed 81 locations where bombs had been dropped but had not yet exploded.

Facilities used to manufacture weapons were often on the list of important targets for the coalition. So now these places are twice as likely to contain dangerous items.

So, once it was a workshop for electrical engineering students. You can still see the lab tables here. In 2015, it was hit by an airstrike. After that, university staff found instructions for making a bomb among the wreckage. It was most likely an ISIS bomb factory and, judging by the crater, a very valuable target.

Despite the damage, Dean Alubaidi says he will be holding classes in other buildings this fall until the campus is ready. He expects enrollment to be in the thousands of students who lost three years of schooling during the fighting and don’t want to lose another.