A Russian military court has sentenced a theater director and a playwright to six years in prison each. They are deemed to have justified terrorism in a prize-winning play that was staged in 2021 about women who were lured into marrying jihadists in Syria.
39-year-old Jevgenija Berkovitj and 44-year-old Svetlana Petrijtjuk have been detained since they were arrested in May.
Berkovitj has written poetry criticizing Russia's war in Ukraine. Amnesty International states that the two cultural workers are being convicted "solely for exercising their freedom of expression" and urges Russian authorities to release them immediately.
Russia's cultural life has been subjected to increasingly harsh control and repression from the Kremlin since the full-scale invasion began in 2022. Many of the country's prominent artists have left the country.
