Yevgenia BERKOVICH & Svetlana PETRIYCHUK
Theatre director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk are each serving lengthy prison sentences handed down by a military court in Moscow in July 2024, on fabricated ‘terrorism’ grounds.
On 8 July 2024, the Second Western District Military Court in Moscow found Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk guilty of ‘justifying terrorism’ under Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and sentenced them to six years in prison. Their trial took place behind closed doors, with members of the public and journalists without cameras permitted to be present for only the sentencing. Berkovich and Petriychuk will also be banned from ‘administering websites’ for three years after their release. In December 2024, a Moscow military court of appeals upheld the verdict but reduced Berkovich’s sentence to five years and seven months in a medium-security penal colony, and Petriychuk’s to five years and ten months.
The case against Berkovich and Petriychuk stems from their award-winning play Finist Yasny Sokol (Finist, The Brave Falcon), about Russian women who travelled to Syria and married members of armed groups. Berkovic and Petriychuk were detained in May 2023 and kept in pre-trial detention despite asking to be placed under house arrest. Both women denied the charges brought against them, arguing that their aim was to prevent terrorism. Supporters of Berkovich believe her prosecution may be linked to a series of poems she wrote criticising the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to human rights groups, no one accused of terrorism or related crimes has been acquitted in the Russian Federation since statistics first became available in 2015.
Yevgenia Berkovich, born on 29 April 1985, is a Russian theatre director, playwright and poet. Svetlana Petriychuk, born on 22 April 1980, is a Russian playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. First staged in 2020 by Berkovich’s independent theatre project based on Petriychuk’s eponymous play, Finist Yasny Sokol won the Russian Federation’s most prestigious theatre award, the Golden Mask, in two categories in 2022: Best Playwright (Petriychuk) and Best Costume Design.