Larisa Kitaiska is safely back in Kyiv, after a trip to her native Yalta in July 2016 resulted in her arrest by the Russian occupation authorities for supposedly ‘anti-Russian’ material on Facebook. She was put on ‘trial’ and given a two-year suspended sentence, during which she had to remain in occupied Crimea. Her husband died, without her present, in Kyiv just days before Russia quashed the conviction in January 2019, due to a minor change in Russian legislation. This was not, however, before she had been effectively detained in Yalta for two and a half years and placed on Russia’s so-called ‘List of Terrorists and Extremists’, a list that already contains a significant number of Ukrainian political prisoners.
Russia's War Against Ukraine
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Halya Coynash: Ukrainian sentenced for an ‘anti-Russian’ Facebook post
(FILES) In this file photo taken on May 10, 2012 shows an iPhone displaying the Facebook app's screen in Washington, DC.
