“Despite the fact that I am in a cell, it is possible that I am much more free than all of you.” These were the defiant words of the 33-year-old Russian artist Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko in the closing statement of her trial in St Petersburg last Thursday. Two hours later the judge sentenced her to seven years in a penal colony. The charge was knowingly spreading false information about the Russian army, all for five pieces of paper with facts about the cost of the war in Ukraine, which she subversively placed in ordinary places for ordinary Russians to see – on products in supermarkets.