Russian father jailed for his daughter’s antiwar drawing is released

By Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova / The Washington Post

Outside a Russian prison gate and stained concrete walls, a 14-year-old girl in a baggy beige sweater with her small dog on a leash hugged her father, moments after his release. Tears filled Masha Moskalyova’s eyes as she clutched him tightly.

The hug ended a family nightmare that began when, at age 12, just months after President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Masha drew an antiwar picture at School No. 9 in the town of Yefremov, near Tula, depicting a woman with the Ukrainian flag sheltering her child from Russian missiles.

The picture triggered a cascade of disasters for the family: The principal, Larisa Trofimova, called in the police. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) questioned Masha, interrogated her father and told him that he was raising her “incorrectly.”

Alexei Moskalyov, who had a business selling pet birds, was initially charged with antiwar posts and fined $425, but in December 2022, new charges were brought, accusing him of discrediting the military. Masha was placed incommunicado in an orphanage, since her father had been raising her alone and her estranged mother refused to accept her.

Facing two years in prison, he fled the country on the eve of his sentence, planning to escape to Europe, but was arrested in Belarus in April last year, returned to Russia and sent to a penal colony. That month, Masha was moved from the orphanage to her mother’s home after a government minister contacted the mother.

The case, which shocked many Russians, was a particularly stark example of Mr. Putin’s regime seeking to punish all opposition to the war.

Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin has presided over the harshest repression in Russia since Soviet times as he builds a severe, militarized society where schools disseminate government war propaganda and children and teachers who express antiwar views are punished or harassed.

Russia has increasingly hardened its approach, with at least 544 children detained for antiwar protests, according to legal rights group OVD-Info. More than 20 Russian schoolchildren have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms for political reasons, including opposition to the war, attacks on military conscription offices with molotov cocktails and railway sabotage designed to hamper Russian weapons deliveries, according to Russian outlet Mediazona.

Russia has designated 88 children on its official list of extremists and terrorists, including 13- to 15-year-olds, not all of whom are in jail, according to Russian outlet Lyudi Baikala, or People of Baikal.

The Kremlin has introduced compulsory propaganda classes and military training in schools as Mr. Putin strives to build a loyal, ultranationalist young generation to buttress his increasingly authoritarian regime.

“This case is part of a larger horrifying trend. As a part of a wider wartime crackdown the regime routinely persecutes anti-war minors and their families, while squeezing Russian youth into a heavily militarized culture,” OVD-Info wrote in a report on the Moskalyov case.

Moskalyov was still wearing his drab prison uniform and regulation cap when he left the prison on Tuesday. His daughter had grown almost as tall as him.

Moskalyov told journalists that prison authorities kept him there until the very last moment, “as if they had deliberately delayed me, to make me more nervous until the very end.”

Days before FSB agents came to arrest him on Dec. 30, 2022, he had an ominous call from a man saying, “We’ve got a New Year’s gift for Masha.” When FSB agents broke into his apartment at 6 a.m. that day, they took his savings and other valuables, OVD-Info reported. During interrogation, they hit his head against the wall and floor, the group reported.

This February, Moskalyov’s two-year term in a prison in Novomoskovsk, Tula region, about 150 miles south of Moscow, was reduced to a year and 10 months. Like many political prisoners, he was repeatedly sent into harsh solitary punishment cells over trivial matters, according to the family’s lawyer, Vladimir Biliyenko: failing to get up immediately after waking, failing to present himself “in the proper form,” failing to keep his hands behind his back when leaving the cell, resting his arm on a table when sitting.

After being released and hugging his daughter, Moskalyov told journalists from independent Russian outlet Sota Vision of his difficulty adapting to prison conditions, but added that the letters of support he received were “very important” to him. There were so many letters, two large sacks, that he could not carry them all with him when he left prison.

“I received letters from all over the world: America, England, France, Germany, Switzerland,” he said. “Words of support, wishing me health and a speedy release.

“I would like to once again address and thank everyone who supported me, all like-minded people, volunteers, activists, everyone. Thank you very much!”

But asked what kept him going while he was inside, he said simply, “My daughter.”

Moskalyov described appalling prison conditions, contending that no Russian who had not been incarcerated fully understood the nature of their country, in an interview with Daria Kornilova, a rights activist and journalist with For Human Rights and the First Department rights groups.

“The conditions were, well … it’s just a torture chamber,” he said. “Rotten floors, rats everywhere, from the sewers, crawling everywhere. Huge rats.”

“The only clothes we had were this top, and that’s it, a T-shirt on my bare body,” he said, describing the cold as beyond words.

Other political prisoners such as opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in February, have described similar conditions.

Moskalyov told OVD-Info that FSB agents had questioned other prisoners before he was freed about what he had talked about during his confinement. He told OVD-Info that he feared this was a sign that they might be planning new charges.

The lawyer, Biliyenko, speaking to journalists from Sota Vision outside the prison, said he was in touch with both father and daughter throughout their ordeal.

The hardest thing for Moskalyov was “separation from his daughter,” Biliyenko said. “He raised her from the age of 3. He was very worried about her. And she always worried about him. The two of them are a self-sufficient family.”