The Ukrainian-born jewellery artist Aleksandr Dotsenko, who was serving a three-year prison sentence in Russia for allegedly placing anti-war slogans in a supermarket in the Leningrad region, died on 19 February of a heart attack, according to media reports.
Dotsenko, who was 65 when he died, was convicted by a St Petersburg military court of “public calls for terrorist activities” alongside his wife, the artist Anastasia Dyudyaeva, in July 2024. Dotsenko was sentenced to three years in prison, while Dyudyaeva is serving three-and-a-half years.
The couple was accused of inciting terrorism by placing anti-war slogans in a supermarket in the Leningrad region, which investigators alleged threatened “the life of the President of the Russian Federation in order to stop his public activities”. The pair pleaded innocent and their lawyers alleged there were numerous violations in the investigation, including the incorrect translation of texts from Ukrainian into Russian in order to indicate threats against Vladimir Putin.
Dotsenko, in his final statement in court, said: “The prosecutor, by bringing charges based solely on fabrications, conjectures, guesses, and speculation, is effectively wiping his feet on the Russian Federation’s judicial system.”
On 14 February, Dotsenko’s lawyer, Sergei Podolsky, and FreeAsyaSasha, a Telegram channel run by supporters of Dotsenko and Dyudyaeva, reported that he had suffered a major heart attack two days earlier. His lawyer said that prison authorities failed to immediately inform him or Dotsenko’s family of his hospitalisation. By 20 February, FreeAsyaSasha wrote that Dyudyaeva knew that Dotsenko had died. During their trial they had been pictured embracing in the glass cage that hold defendants.
FreeAsyaSasha has published a large number of photographs of the couple’s artworks, as well as Dotsenko’s jewellery creations. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Dyudyaeva, who had worked as a drawing teacher and graphic designer, focused on depicting victims of the war, current political prisoners, and on victims of Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s.
“Putin made me into this kind of artist,” Dyudyaeva told the human rights organisation Memorial.
While in a prison camp in eastern Karelia—a border region seized by the Soviet Union during the Second World War—she has created a series called My Karelia, and worked on illustrations inspired by the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic poem.
