A Moscow student has been sent to prison for changing the name of his WiFi network to “Slava Ukraini,” meaning “Glory to Ukraine.”
The court found Moscow State University student Oleg Tarasov, 22, guilty of “public demonstration of Nazi symbols… or symbols of extremist organizations” and sentenced him to 10 days in prison. did.
According to a Russian-language report on the social messaging network Telegram, Tarasov bought a router for a student dormitory in October last year and changed the name to “Slava Ukraine” when it was installed.
Security guards at the university discovered on Wednesday that the router’s name had been changed to what the Kremlin considers criminal propaganda and began searching for its owner.
Tarasov was eventually tracked down by Russia’s Center E, an anti-extremism unit within the Interior Ministry.
According to reports, Tarasov was not only imprisoned for changing the name of a WiFi router, but the router was also confiscated because it was used in a crime.
Anti-Kremlin protests and pro-Ukrainian slogans are banned in Russia. Since the Kremlin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russian courts have handed down fines and prison sentences to thousands of people for even holding a blank piece of paper.
Russian human rights activists also said that dozens of people were detained in Russia after attending the funeral of opposition leader Alexi Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison in February, and that they had “discredited the Russian military.” It was reported that he was charged with “.
OVD-Info, Russia’s human rights monitoring and legal aid agency, said nearly 20,000 people have been detained for anti-war protests in Russia over the past two years. Arrests of anti-war activists are often violent. Men are raped with batons and women are threatened with beatings and strip searches.
But Kremlin propagandists say Tarasov’s arrest and jailing for changing the name of a WiFi router meant he was repairing TVs in Latvia this week after coordinating connections for people who wanted to watch banned Russian television. He said it was no different than if a person had been arrested.
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