When Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko felt compelled to act as the devastating war continued.
Taking inspiration from fellow activists, the artist altered five supermarket price labels. She replaced the product descriptions with anti-war statements, printed the messages and discreetly placed them over genuine tags.
What appeared to be a small act of protest would ultimately see her detained in St Petersburg, where she feared rape, starvation, freezing conditions and psychological abuse.
After a trial lasting more than a year, Sasha was sentenced to seven years in prison for “spreading false information” about Russia’s armed forces.
Now free, the former prisoner has described the ordeal in an exclusive interview with Our News Outlet.
In April 2022, Sasha placed five handwritten-style messages over price labels at a local supermarket. The notes called on shoppers to oppose the war and resist state propaganda.
“Putin has been lying to us from television screens for 20 years: the result of these lies is our readiness to justify the war and the senseless deaths,” one message read. Prosecutors later argued that the statement posed a threat to Russian society.
Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2023 for “spreading false information” about Russian forces
Police escort Sasha to a hearing at the Vasileostrovsky district court in St Petersburg in November 2023
Sasha replaced five supermarket price tags in April 2022 with messages urging shoppers to oppose the war and challenge Russian propaganda
An elderly shopper noticed the protest and reported Sasha to the authorities, in an incident that recalled the culture of denunciations associated with the Soviet era.
The woman later defended the decision, saying: “I am proud of what I’ve done.”
Authorities used supermarket CCTV to trace Sasha to a friend’s home, arriving just minutes after she had left. Investigators then pressured her friend to call her back, asking her to return to the property.
“They ambushed my friend and made him invite me over,” Sasha told Our News Outlet. “They didn’t introduce themselves, they just grabbed me. I screamed ‘help, save me’, and fought them because I thought they were going to rape me.”
The artist and musician, now 36, was interrogated for hours as police sought to establish whether she had acted alone or belonged to what they suspected was an organised activist network.
Officials classified Sasha as a threat to society and held her in custody throughout the investigation. She was eventually charged under laws criminalising the spread of “fake” information.
During the years before, during and after her trial, Sasha said her physical and psychological health declined sharply in what she described as the “inhumane” conditions at St Petersburg’s Detention Centre No. 5.
She also said prosecutors denied her vital medication and basic supplies needed to manage coeliac disease, bipolar disorder and a heart condition.
Sasha was held in a courtroom cage for as long as nine hours during a hearing in St Petersburg in April 2022
Sasha’s physical and mental health deteriorated during her years in the “inhumane” conditions at St Petersburg’s Detention Centre No. 5
Coeliac disease is a severe autoimmune condition where the body attacks itself when a sufferer eats gluten. It can cause life-threatening complications.
Prisoners were forced to drink contaminated tap water that ‘made hair fall out’ and caused ‘severe skin problems’, while Sasha became deathly ill after she was given the option to either eat gluten or starve.
‘I could only eat dinner, which was either cabbage or potato,’ Sasha said. ‘I couldn’t eat the breakfast of porridge with water, nor the lunch of a 300ml measure of soup.’
The Russian-national was crammed into a small cell with 17 other prisoners, which was kept under constant surveillance by a camera inside, where she was psychologically tortured by those convicts who were cooperating with prison authorities.
‘They would gaslight me by repeatedly saying “Sasha stinks” and make me go and wash my clothes by hand,’ she described. ‘I would then dry the clothes in the freezing cold and put them on. They would then say I smelt again and I would have to do it all over again.’
Sasha described how she was also yelled at by the women if she didn’t put certain products in the ‘exact spot’ they should be in. ‘It was collective bullying,’ she said.
The women would also force Sasha to watch shows about the Russian-Ukrainian war on TV, which were left rolling on repeat. ‘They watched them from dawn to night,’ she described.
‘I had friends in Ukraine. I also worked in a kids camp as a counsellor in the country. That is the reason I protested, I couldn’t keep silent as these children were hiding from shrapnel caused by my country.’
‘I actually found out they never watched shows about the war on TV before. This was just invented for me,’ Sasha added.
Sasha is pictured with her wife Sofya Subbotina near the Mosel River in Koblenz, Germany
Sasha later discovered that officials had intentionally recruited her prison mates to inflict psychological abuse due to the growing media campaigns around Sasha’s arrest on the outside.
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This turmoil was heightened as Sasha was prohibited from speaking or seeing her then-girlfriend Sofya Subbotina for a year, as authorities called her now-wife as a witness. Her family had to flee to France over fear of being pressured by the State.
The couple – who were not legally recognised under the anti-LGBTQ country’s legislation – were later granted permission by the judge to speak for two hours a month.
Russia’s prisons are regarded as among the harshest in the world, due to overcrowding, psychological control, torture and severe living conditions – made worse by the unforgiving climate, which drops to minus nine degrees celsius.
A former Ukrainian prisoner Khuan Alberto Leyva Garsiya described how he suffered ‘every imaginable form of torture’, including daily beatings, electric shocks and sexual abuse.
It is understood 5,050 people are currently being persecuted by Russia in politically-motivated criminal cases. Meanwhile, 2,399 political prisoners are currently behind bars, according to human rights group OVD-Info.
Sasha recalled how prisoners were handed a thin, ‘scratchy’ blanket and a mattress so useless her ‘spine would touch the metal frame’ upon entry, while she was left ‘shivering’ from the cold during the winter.
‘Those were the coldest days of my life. It was super cold,’ she said. ‘I naturally have low blood pressure and was anaemic by the end of my detention, which made the cold unbearable.’
This reached new heights when prison guards would forget prisoners during their allocated one hour of exercise outside, which took place in a small 10ft by 16ft (3m by 5m) courtyard with ‘bars as a ceiling’.
‘There were around 800 prisoners but only around eight members of staff on during a shift,’ she recalled. ‘Sometimes we would be out there for hours in a cramped long line in the freezing cold.
‘We could also be forgotten in the shower room for half the day, which we were only able to go to twice a week. One prisoner started taking a book with her, just in case.’
However, as her health worsened, Sasha said she was determined to ‘not die in the prison’. With the determined help of her Sofya, alongside human rights groups, she was eventually moved to a room shared by only one other and get medical attention.
Alongside the help and campaigns, the activist credits staying active as the reason behind her survival.
‘I would lap the courtyard when I went out. My legs were aching when I was released, I could barely walk because my joints were so sore,’ Sasha said. ‘I would be dead because of my depression if I wasn’t able to exercise.’
Sasha was kept behind bars night and day during her year-long trial as she spent eight to nine hours in a cage in court, unable to drink water or go to the bathroom.
She was subsequently convicted in November 2023 of ‘discrediting the Russian army’ under repressive laws adopted in the wake of the invasion – and sentenced to seven years.
It was one of the first trials to be brought under the legislation, which effectively criminalises all anti-war activism, and sparked international uproar.
In an interview with the Russian website Bumaga, the ‘informer’ defended her decision to call the authorities after spotting the stickers.
‘I am the “informer”,’ she said in the interview. ‘I’m proud of what I’ve done. Is it not a disgrace to see a crime and then just walk by? Did I send her to lay out these price tags? What do you want me to say, that she’s a good girl? Should she be forgiven?’
Instead of fearing the years ahead behind bars, Sasha described feeling a level of acceptance as the sentence was given in court.
‘I knew I would get some sort of sentence,’ she said. ‘I had hoped it would be four or five years, but I was then able to count down the days. I decided then I wasn’t sitting in jail but I was very slowly moving towards getting out at a molecular pace.’
However, her fear intensified a year later when, without warning, she was taken her prison cell by authorities and kept in the dark about what was going to happen to her.
Sasha was moved to another prison where she spent four days. She was then told to pack her things the next day as a ‘free’ woman.
‘I grabbed all my stuff and then this squad of men wearing balaclavas dragged me to a bus filled with others,’ she described.
‘We were told that if we spoke, they would put a bag over our heads and handcuff us. One man then said that we were part of a political exchange.
‘But I didn’t believe him, I thought he was telling us this because he didn’t want us to panic and we were rather being taken to a forest to be shot.’
The group were then put on a plane and flown to Ankara in Turkey.
They were then moved onto a separate aircraft to Cologne, Germany, where the historic 16-person multi-national prisoner exchange took place.
This included Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, deep-cover Russian spies, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and US Marine Paul Whelan.
Sasha now lives in Berlin, Germany, with her wife and continues to protest against Russia and its ongoing conflict with Ukraine through her artwork and music. This includes the release of an upcoming comic book, documenting her years behind bars.
When asked whether she regrets her act of defiance, she simply says: ‘Nope. This was a journey of my life. But it is years of turmoil all over a sticker.’
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