The sentence was handed down by Judge Orlovtseva at the Simonovsky District Court of Moscow, a Meduza correspondent reported from the courtroom. Yelena Perepelitsa, a psychologist and member of the Moscow branch of the Yabloko party since 2017, had previously served on Moscow election commissions at various levels and ran for municipal deputy in the Maryina Roshcha district.
The prosecution had sought 4.5 years in a general-regime colony and the confiscation of the donated sum — the same 3,500 rubles — along with her smartphone as the instrument of the crime. The judge imposed four years.
The case on financing an "extremist" organization was opened over seven transfers of 500 rubles each. According to the investigation, Perepelitsa set up a monthly donation subscription to the Anti-Corruption Foundation on August 5, 2021, and between August 2021 and January 2022 transferred 3,500 rubles to the foundation.
Perepelitsa was detained in Moscow on July 2. The following day a court sent her to a pre-trial detention center, where she remained until sentencing.
In court she partially admitted guilt: she confirmed the transfers themselves but disputed that the money went to "extremist activity." According to her, she did not notice that she had set up a monthly subscription instead of a one-time donation, and information from the Anti-Corruption Foundation about the legality of donations misled her. She also noted that she is not a supporter of the foundation, since she is a member of Yabloko.
Defense lawyer Olga Pelsh asked that Perepelitsa be found not guilty for lack of a criminal offense: the existence of direct intent to finance extremist activity, she said, is not confirmed by the case materials and rests on assumptions. In the event of a guilty verdict, the defense asked for a punishment not involving deprivation of liberty. Pelsh stressed that Perepelitsa needs constant medication because of hypertension, and that her mother, born in 1942 and suffering from cancer, depends on her.
In her final statement, Perepelitsa said extremist views had never been close to her and that she had always wanted change for the better only through peaceful means. She said she could not agree with the accusation even to secure a lighter sentence, and asked the court for compassion for her 85-year-old mother, who had come to her from Vladivostok to die, and for her husband, who was left alone to care for his ill mother.
Perepelitsa is the fourth woman to receive a real prison term for donations to the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and she has been given the harshest sentence of them.
The previous day, Moscow's Gagarinsky District Court sentenced Sofya Rosenfeld, 50, a candidate of biological sciences and a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Ecology and Evolution Problems, to 3.5 years in a colony for two transfers of 1,000 rubles each. In total, more than a hundred criminal cases over donations to the foundation have been opened in Russia.