Olga Menshikh near the court building. Photo: Alexandra Astakhova / Mediazona
The Dorogomilovsky District Court in Moscow sentenced 59-year-old nurse anaesthetist Olga Menshikh to 8 years in a penal colony under the article on “fake news” about the army for two anti-war posts on VK, a Russian social media platform. Only 15 people were subscribed to her page. Mediazona closely followed Menshikh’s trial.
On April 8, Olga Menshikh, a 59-year-old nurse anaesthetist from Moscow, found herself handcuffed to a chair. “Eight people with a circular saw came to our apartment, turned everything upside down. They guarded me and my friend who was also in the house,” Menshikh recounted in court. After the search, she was “forcibly” taken to the Investigative Committee, the agency responsible for criminal investigations, where she was charged with spreading “fake news” about the military. The next day, the Dorogomilovsky Court in Moscow placed her under house arrest.
Menshikh was charged for two posts on VK, which are now deleted from her page. The first post, dated July 14, 2022, was written on the day Russian military forces carried out a missile strike on Vinnytsia, a city in central Ukraine.
“[MFA spokeswoman Maria] Zakharova is talking utter nonsense at her freaking briefing. How does the earth even bear her? God, what is she saying... Meanwhile in Vinnytsia, Russia has shelled the city centre for the first time, rockets hit an office building, 12 dead, dozens wounded,” the post read.
The second post was dedicated to the anniversary of the liberation of Bucha: “Bucha—a small town in the Kyiv region—was liberated from Russian invaders on March 31, 2022, exactly five weeks after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. During the five weeks of occupation in Bucha, 458 civilians died, 419 of them were shot and died from torture.”
The investigation concluded that by posting these messages “at an unspecified time and from an unspecified technical device,” Menshikh deliberately “created the appearance of illegal activity violating international law by the Russian armed forces and state authorities.”
At the same time, the author of the posts “foresaw the inevitable onset of socially dangerous consequences in the form of undermining the authority and discrediting the current government, the Russian armed forces, as well as respect and trust in the Russian people in the eyes of others” and knew in advance that such posts “would cause people to feel anxiety, fear, worry and insecurity from the state.”
Menshikh did not plead guilty.
During the investigation, she denied authorship of the posts and said that “anyone” could have gained access to her page. She specifically noted that she did not add anyone as friends herself, and only 15 people were subscribed to her page.
Since 2011, Olga Menshikh worked as a nurse anaesthetist at the Pirogov National Medical and Surgical Centre in Moscow.
“I am the chief innovator there: I write instructions, train in operating rooms, create Excel spreadsheets, do everything,” she said.
With the start of the war in Ukraine, wounded soldiers began arriving at the Pirogov Centre. The nurse admitted that it was emotionally difficult to see them.
In recent years, she has been tried several times under lighter, administrative articles.
On February 25, 2022, she was sentenced to 9 days of arrest for a post that law enforcement regarded as a call to participate in an unauthorised rally, and in June 2023—a fine for disobeying the police at an event on Alexei Navalny’s birthday. According to the protocol, Menshikh “began to behave inadequately, waving her hands.” She said that she just sat down on a bench near the Pushkin monument, when “police officers approached her, took her by the elbow and led her to the bus. She calmly got in, did not resist.”
OVD-Info, a Russian human rights project, mentioned Menshikh among those detained on the day of Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral on September 3, 2022. Case files show that the FSB, or Federal Security Service, “made inquiries” about the woman even before the criminal case was initiated against her. Menshikh recalled in court how during the search, law enforcement officers made it clear that they had been watching her for a long time, including asking “what she was doing in Belarus.”
According to the materials presented in court, on September 26, 2023, Dmitry Prokhorov, an operative of the Moscow FSB, examined Menshikh’s VK page in the presence of “representatives of the public.” Prokhorov took screenshots of the posts and saved them on a disk, which was later attached to the case. But Menshikh’s defence drew attention to the metadata of the files: they were created even before the event.
On October 10, 2023, an FSB expert concluded that Menshikh’s post about Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, contained “information in the form of condemnation of the actions of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine, as a result of which violent consequences occurred.” The expert did not find similar statements in the other materials studied.
The Investigative Committee reported the discovery of “signs of a crime” in Menshikh’s posts on April 1, 2024. On April 17, 2024, Sergey Oganesyan, an expert from the Research Institute of the Federal Penitentiary Service, found signs of public dissemination of “fake news” about the Russian army, “discrediting the activities of an official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” and a motive of hatred and enmity “towards the current authorities, military personnel, the people of Russia and the country as a whole.”
When Menshikh’s case was transferred to court in May 2024, the charge against her was reclassified to spreading military “fake news” motivated by hatred or enmity towards a social group, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
Two prosecution witnesses testified in court. Alikhan Kurmangaliev, a 27-year-old legal assistant from Kazakhstan who has been living in Russia since 2015, said that he “came across” Olga Menshikh’s VK page “accidentally.”
Kurmangaliev could not recall exact dates and wording, but claimed that in one post, Menshikh “assessed Maria Zakharova’s briefing,” and in another, she wrote that Russia “allegedly killed civilians in Bucha,” despite it being “refuted many times that the Ukrainians initiated it all themselves.”
When Kurmangaliev read these posts, he claimed that he took screenshots, stating that he “understood that the publications undermined the foundations of the constitutional order and wanted to see how events would unfold.” He considered Menshikh’s posts to be fake news because he relies “only on verified information—what the authorities publish.”
Menshikh’s lawyer, Leonid Solovyov, asked why Kurmangaliev maintains his social network page under the name Alexey Kurtsev, but the court dismissed the question.
The second witness, 42-year-old Maria Vershinina, an acting senior nurse anaesthetist who worked with Menshikh for 13 years, testified that until 2020, the defendant was “quite an adequate member of the team—compassionate and patient.” However, she then “became fascinated with oppositional views” and “spoke out quite aggressively towards colleagues, most of whom are patriots.”
After the war began, Vershinina claimed that Menshikh called colleagues “vatniks, fascists and Putinists” and “created an unhealthy working atmosphere.” Vershinina “suppressed” such conversations, but other nurses complained to her. She admitted only knowing about Menshikh’s behaviour “at the level of rumours” and did not see her VK posts.
The court also announced Menshikh’s reference from the Pirogov Centre, stating that she was sometimes “unrestrained and emotional in communicating with colleagues” and received oral remarks “for negative statements against the current government.”
None of her colleagues came to support Menshikh in court. According to the defendant, when her relatives wanted to collect signatures for a collective letter of support, they were “warned that each signature would be recorded.”
Menshikh said, “Our society is structured in such a way that politics can be used as pressure on an objectionable employee.”
Nurse Irina Lukanina and operative Prokhorov, who examined Menshikh’s VK page, were also declared as prosecution witnesses but did not appear in court.
On September 12, the court questioned Menshikh, who refused to testify but agreed to answer questions about her character reference.
She said that before house arrest, she cared for her 85-year-old mother, who is “almost deaf, blind and cannot walk.” Every weekend, Menshikh brought her groceries and helped around the house. At the hearing on preventive measures, she asked for house arrest at her mother’s address but was refused.
After this interrogation, the judge unexpectedly announced that the court had received a submission from the Federal Penitentiary Service in Moscow, asking to send Menshikh to a pre-trial detention centre.
The document stated that on August 23 and 27, Menshikh “arbitrarily left the place of execution of the preventive measure in the form of house arrest.”
Menshikh said she “had already had a showdown” with the inspector about August 23, explaining, “They set up their devices in such a way that when I sit in the kitchen at the sink or in the bathroom, they don’t connect. I gave him an explanatory note: let’s check if your device will catch it if I sit under the shower for an hour. He says no, it won’t. Like, he understood everything.”
On August 27, Menshikh admitted leaving the apartment to go to the dentist for an emergency tooth extraction. “I was in so much pain, climbing the walls. I drank the whole first-aid kit, my blood pressure dropped from the medications. It was impossible to endure further,” she said.
Lawyer Solovyov submitted a doctor’s certificate to the court, adding that his client was not hiding, so there was no need to change her preventive measure.
In a fit of passion, Menshikh told the judge, “You’ll send me to prison for seven years anyway, at least I’ll have a healthy tooth!”
While waiting for the decision, she reassured her relatives, “Sooner or later, it would have happened anyway, what’s the difference, today or tomorrow.”
Judge Evgeniya Gorokhova took 12 minutes that day to send Menshikh to a pre-trial detention centre.
On October 2, the prosecutor asked for an 8.5-year sentence in a general regime colony for Olga Menshikh. Lawyer Leonid Solovyov called the term “inhumane” and demanded acquittal.
In her last word, Menshikh addressed the prosecution witnesses. She recalled how Vershinina testified about her “hysterical state,” saying, “Such a state of mine is quite understandable. When a stump of a young man passes by you, you know what feelings visit a woman? Compassion, not hatred, which I am accused of. Maybe at some point, I had a professional deformation due to the wounded I saw in our hospital. I really felt sorry for them.”
She continued, “All the people who surrounded me from the beginning of the investigation said that they had nothing to do with it. Only Kurmangaliyev remains—a boy who confused everything, spoke Russian badly. A citizen of Kazakhstan who doesn’t have Russian citizenship. I will serve my time and I will want to look the person in the eye: I am an old lady, I am 60 years old. Why did you put me in jail without knowing who I am?”
Menshikh said Vershinina agreed to testify because she “has a case hanging over her for the loss of drugs,” and management turned against Menshikh after she “went over the head of the head of department” to suspend an incompetent doctor “with connections” whom she considered guilty of a young patient’s death.
Despite the poor work reference, Menshikh added, her Pirogov Centre colleagues “did not line up to tell what a bad nurse Menshikh is.”
Addressing the prosecutor, she said, “You want to give me a term like they give for murder, but I fought for your health. You are serviced by me under voluntary health insurance. How many prosecutors and judges from all over Moscow have passed through me?”
In the quarantine cell at the detention centre, she found herself among “girls under article 228” (illegal drug possession) and “took on the role of an educator.” She said, “Poor, unfortunate girls with broken lives. I wanted to cry over them. I meet them on a walk, they rush to me with hugs.”
“I consider myself a Christian humanist and always have compassion for people. As a Christian humanist, I can say: take your cross and carry it,” Menshikh concluded her last word.
On October 3, the Dorogomilovsky Court passed the verdict: 8 years in prison with a three-year ban on administering websites.
Editor: Dmitry Tkachev
Support Mediazona now!
Your donations directly help us continue our work