A court in Russia’s southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don has replaced a suspended sentence with a three-year prison term for the former coordinator of the now-defunct Open Russia group, Anastasia Shevchenko.
Shevchenko's lawyer, Sergei Kovalevich, told RFE/RL on December 21 that the Lenin district court's decision in absentia was made at the Federal Penitentiary Service's request. She was handed a four-year suspended sentence in February last year for having links with the opposition group Open Russia. The sentence was later cut by one year.
Shevchenko, who currently resides in Lithuania, told RFE/RL that she "hoped right to the end that the judge will make the right decision."
"I sincerely believe that I will be exonerated some day and be able to return to Russia," Shevchenko added.
Shevchenko was the first person in Russia charged with "repeatedly participating in the activities of an undesirable organization." Previously, violations of this law were punished as a noncriminal offense.
Shevchenko's supporters have said the case was a politically motivated attempt to stop her activism and punish her for showing dissent publicly.
The "undesirable organization" law, adopted in May 2015, was part of a series of regulations pushed by the Kremlin that squeezed many nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that received funding from foreign sources.
The Russian Prosecutor-General's Office declared Open Russia "undesirable" in 2017.
During her pretrial house arrest in January 2019, Shevchenko was granted a furlough at the last minute to see her eldest daughter in hospital shortly before she died of an unspecified illness.