Woman Starved, Frozen and Tortured for Displaying Anti-War Sticker

When Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, beginning a war that continues to this day, Aleksandra ‘Sasha’ Skochilenko felt compelled to act.

Taking inspiration from fellow activists, she digitally altered five supermarket price tags, replacing product names with anti-war messages before printing and placing them over genuine labels.

What appeared to be a simple sticker protest would ultimately leave the activist fearing rape, starvation, freezing conditions and psychological torture during her detention in St Petersburg, Russia.

Her protest also resulted in a seven-year prison sentence for ‘spreading false information’ about Russian forces, after a trial lasting more than a year.

Now released from prison, Sasha has described the ordeal in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail.

In April 2022, she replaced five price tags in a local supermarket with messages calling on shoppers to oppose the war and resist state propaganda.

One message read: ‘Putin has been lying to us from television screens for 20 years: the result of these lies is our readiness to justify the war and the senseless deaths.’ Prosecutors argued that the statement posed a threat to Russian society.

An elderly shopper noticed what Sasha was doing and reported her to the authorities in an act reminiscent of the Soviet era.

The woman later stood by her decision, saying: ‘I am proud of what I’ve done.’

Using supermarket CCTV footage, Russian authorities traced Sasha to a friend’s home but arrived just minutes too late. They then pressured her friend into calling her and asking her to return to the property.

‘They ambushed my friend and made him invite me over,’ Sasha told the Daily Mail. ‘They didn’t introduce themselves, they just grabbed me. I screamed “help, save me”, and fought them because I thought they were going to rape me.’

The artist and musician, now 36, endured hours of questioning as police sought to establish whether she had acted alone or belonged to what they suspected was an organised activist network.

Authorities deemed her a threat to society and held her in custody during the investigation, which eventually resulted in charges of spreading ‘fake’ information.

During the years she spent in the ‘inhumane’ conditions of St Petersburg’s Detention Centre No. 5, before, during and after her trial, Sasha’s physical and mental health deteriorated sharply.

Prosecutors refused to provide essential medicines and other necessities needed to manage her coeliac disease, bipolar disorder and heart condition, leaving Sasha to suffer in detention.

Coeliac disease is a severe autoimmune condition where the body attacks itself when a sufferer eats gluten. It can cause life-threatening complications. 

Prisoners were forced to drink contaminated tap water that ‘made hair fall out’ and caused ‘severe skin problems’, while Sasha became deathly ill after she was given the option to either eat gluten or starve.

‘I could only eat dinner, which was either cabbage or potato,’ Sasha said. ‘I couldn’t eat the breakfast of porridge with water, nor the lunch of a 300ml measure of soup.’

The Russian-national was crammed into a small cell with 17 other prisoners, which was kept under constant surveillance by a camera inside, where she was psychologically tortured by those convicts who were cooperating with prison authorities. 

‘They would gaslight me by repeatedly saying “Sasha stinks” and make me go and wash my clothes by hand,’ she described. ‘I would then dry the clothes in the freezing cold and put them on. They would then say I smelt again and I would have to do it all over again.’

Sasha described how she was also yelled at by the women if she didn’t put certain products in the ‘exact spot’ they should be in. ‘It was collective bullying,’ she said. 

The women would also force Sasha to watch shows about the Russian-Ukrainian war on TV, which were left rolling on repeat.  ‘They watched them from dawn to night,’ she described. 

‘I had friends in Ukraine. I also worked in a kids camp as a counsellor in the country. That is the reason I protested, I couldn’t keep silent as these children were hiding from shrapnel caused by my country.’

‘I actually found out they never watched shows about the war on TV before. This was just invented for me,’ Sasha added. 

Sasha later discovered that officials had intentionally recruited her prison mates to inflict psychological abuse due to the growing media campaigns around Sasha’s arrest on the outside. 

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This turmoil was heightened as Sasha was prohibited from speaking or seeing her then-girlfriend Sofya Subbotina for a year, as authorities called her now-wife as a witness. Her family had to flee to France over fear of being pressured by the State.

The couple – who were not legally recognised under the anti-LGBTQ country’s legislation – were later granted permission by the judge to speak for two hours a month.

Russia’s prisons are regarded as among the harshest in the world, due to overcrowding, psychological control, torture and severe living conditions – made worse by the unforgiving climate, which drops to minus nine degrees celsius. 

A former Ukrainian prisoner Khuan Alberto Leyva Garsiya described how he suffered ‘every imaginable form of torture’, including daily beatings, electric shocks and sexual abuse. 

It is understood 5,050 people are currently being persecuted by Russia in politically-motivated criminal cases. Meanwhile, 2,399 political prisoners are currently behind bars, according to human rights group OVD-Info. 

Sasha recalled how prisoners were handed a thin, ‘scratchy’ blanket and a mattress so useless her ‘spine would touch the metal frame’ upon entry, while she was left ‘shivering’ from the cold during the winter.

‘Those were the coldest days of my life. It was super cold,’ she said. ‘I naturally have low blood pressure and was anaemic by the end of my detention, which made the cold unbearable.’ 

This reached new heights when prison guards would forget prisoners during their allocated one hour of exercise outside, which took place in a small 10ft by 16ft (3m by 5m) courtyard with ‘bars as a ceiling’.

‘There were around 800 prisoners but only around eight members of staff on during a shift,’ she recalled. ‘Sometimes we would be out there for hours in a cramped long line in the freezing cold. 

‘We could also be forgotten in the shower room for half the day, which we were only able to go to twice a week. One prisoner started taking a book with her, just in case.’ 

However, as her health worsened, Sasha said she was determined to ‘not die in the prison’. With the determined help of her Sofya, alongside human rights groups, she was eventually moved to a room shared by only one other and get medical attention. 

Alongside the help and campaigns, the activist credits staying active as the reason behind her survival. 

‘I would lap the courtyard when I went out. My legs were aching when I was released, I could barely walk because my joints were so sore,’ Sasha said. ‘I would be dead because of my depression if I wasn’t able to exercise.’ 

Sasha was kept behind bars night and day during her year-long trial as she spent eight to nine hours in a cage in court, unable to drink water or go to the bathroom. 

She was subsequently convicted in November 2023 of ‘discrediting the Russian army’ under repressive laws adopted in the wake of the invasion – and sentenced to seven years. 

It was one of the first trials to be brought under the legislation, which effectively criminalises all anti-war activism, and sparked international uproar. 

In an interview with the Russian website Bumaga, the ‘informer’ defended her decision to call the authorities after spotting the stickers.  

‘I am the “informer”,’ she said in the interview. ‘I’m proud of what I’ve done. Is it not a disgrace to see a crime and then just walk by? Did I send her to lay out these price tags? What do you want me to say, that she’s a good girl? Should she be forgiven?’

Instead of fearing the years ahead behind bars, Sasha described feeling a level of acceptance as the sentence was given in court. 

‘I knew I would get some sort of sentence,’ she said. ‘I had hoped it would be four or five years, but I was then able to count down the days. I decided then I wasn’t sitting in jail but I was very slowly moving towards getting out at a molecular pace.’ 

However, her fear intensified a year later when, without warning, she was taken her prison cell by authorities and kept in the dark about what was going to happen to her. 

Sasha was moved to another prison where she spent four days. She was then told to pack her things the next day as a ‘free’ woman.

‘I grabbed all my stuff and then this squad of men wearing balaclavas dragged me to a bus filled with others,’ she described. 

‘We were told that if we spoke, they would put a bag over our heads and handcuff us. One man then said that we were part of a political exchange. 

‘But I didn’t believe him, I thought he was telling us this because he didn’t want us to panic and we were rather being taken to a forest to be shot.’ 

The group were then put on a plane and flown to Ankara in Turkey. 

They were then moved onto a separate aircraft to Cologne, Germany, where the historic 16-person multi-national prisoner exchange took place.

This included Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, deep-cover Russian spies, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and US Marine Paul Whelan.

Sasha now lives in Berlin, Germany, with her wife and continues to protest against Russia and its ongoing conflict with Ukraine through her artwork and music. This includes the release of an upcoming comic book, documenting her years behind bars. 

When asked whether she regrets her act of defiance, she simply says: ‘Nope. This was a journey of my life. But it is years of turmoil all over a sticker.’

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