A pregnant city council member in Siberia is being investigated for a crime in Russia. Alexei Navalny, who is in jail for criticizing the Kremlin, has few friends left in the country. Helga Pirogova is one of them. The Investigative Committee says that a case has been opened because false information about the Russian army has been spread.
Pirogova is an independent city council member in Novosibirsk, which is the third largest city in Russia.
The 33-year-old has said that Russia’s military action in Ukraine is wrong. If she is found guilty, she could spend up to three years in prison. Her supporters say that she is four months along in her pregnancy.
Thursday, she was held for a short time.
“They need an easy-to-fight enemy inside the country,” she told AFP on Friday.
When asked how she felt, she said, “I’d rather not be in this situation, but what can you do?”
When Pirogova used Twitter in July to talk about a news story about the funerals of soldiers who had died in Ukraine, investigators said she had posted “false information.”
She said she wanted to “revive” the troops to punish them for their part in Moscow’s offensive and then “let them go back to their graves.”
She later deleted her tweet because it was “too emotional.”
She said she wanted to get people’s attention on the fact that Russians in some provinces were so poor that they bragged about how nice funerals were instead of crying over the dead.
In a Facebook post this week, she said, “You can invite the whole town.”
In March, Pirogova caused a stir when she went to a council meeting wearing the colors of the Ukrainian flag—a blue shirt and a crown of yellow flowers.
