CNN
 — 

A St Petersburg court has sentenced a 19-year-old woman to nearly three years in a penal colony after she was accused of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army, including by gluing a quotation on a statue of a Ukrainian poet.

Darya Kozyreva was sentenced to two years and eight months, the Joint Press Service of Courts in St. Petersburg said in statement Friday.

Kozyreva was arrested on February 24, 2024, after she glued a verse by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko onto his monument in St Petersburg, according to OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights group.

The verse from Shevchenko’s My Testament read, “Oh bury me, then rise ye up / And break your heavy chains / And water with the tyrants’ blood / The freedom you have gained,” OVD-Info said.

A second case was brought against her in August 2024, following an interview with Radio Free Europe in which she called Russia’s war in Ukraine “monstrous” and “criminal,” OVD-Info said.

During one of her hearings, the teenager maintained that she had merely recited a poem, and pasted a quote in Ukrainian, “nothing more,” the court press service said.

The anti-war activist has had previous run-ins with the law, having been detained in December 2022 while still at high school for writing, “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases,” on an installation dedicated to the twinning of the Russian city of St Petersburg and Ukraine’s Mariupol, the rights group said.

She was then fined for “discreditation” a year later and expelled from university for a post she made on a Russian social media platform discussing the “imperialist nature of the war,” according to Memorial, one of the country’s most respected human rights organizations.

Describing Kozyreva as a political prisoner, Memorial condemned the charges against her as “absurd” in a statement last year, saying they were aimed at suppressing dissent.

Prosecutors had been seeking a six-year sentence for Kozyreva, Russian independent media channel, SOTA Vision, reported from inside the courtroom. Video footage by Reuters showed Kozyreva smiling and waving to supporters as she left the court.

Kozyreva’s lawyer told Reuters they would likely appeal.

The verdict was condemned by Amnesty International’s Russia Director Natalia Zviagina as “another chilling reminder of how far the Russian authorities will go to silence peaceful opposition to their war in Ukraine.”

“Daria Kozyreva is being punished for quoting a classic of 19th-century Ukrainian poetry, for speaking out against an unjust war and for refusing to stay silent. We demand the immediate and unconditional release of Daria Kozyreva and everyone imprisoned under ‘war censorship laws,’” Zviagina said in a statement.

Russia has a history of attempting to stifle anti-war dissent among its younger generation. Last year, CNN reported that at least 35 minors have faced politically motivated criminal charges in Russia since 2009, according to OVD-Info. Of those, 23 cases have been initiated since Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Currently, more than 1,500 people are imprisoned on political grounds in Russia, according to a tally by OVD-Info, with Moscow’s crackdown on dissent escalating since the war began. Between then and December 2024, at least 20,070 people were detained for anti-war views, and there were 9,369 cases of “discrediting the army,” relating to actions including social media posts or wearing clothes with Ukrainian flag symbols, according to OVD-Info.

Rome
CNN
 — 

US Vice President JD Vance met senior Vatican officials on Saturday for talks that follow sharp criticism by Pope Francis of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

The Vatican said that during the meeting an “exchange of opinions” took place concerning migrants, refugees, and prisoners.

The vice president, a Catholic, has been visiting Rome with his family over the Easter weekend and attended a Good Friday service in St. Peter’s Basilica.

On Saturday morning, he met Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See Secretary of State, and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister. Any meeting with Pope Francis, who is continuing to recover from double pneumonia, has not been confirmed.

Saturday’s meeting represents the first in-person talks between the Holy See and the second Trump presidency and comes amid tensions between leaders of the Catholic Church and the Trump administration.

“There was an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” according to a Vatican communique released following the meeting.

Vance’s office later released its own readout, which stated that the vice president and Parolin discussed “their shared religious faith, Catholicism in the United States, the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world, and President Trump’s commitment to restoring world peace.”

The statement shared photos from the Vatican showing Vance smiling while greeting Parolin, Vance laughing at a table with Vatican officials, and Vance and his children walking through the Vatican alongside its famed Swiss Guards.

Ahead of Saturday’s talks, Parolin told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the “current US administration is very different from what we are used to and, especially in the West, from what we have relied on for many years.”

With regards to the Trump administration’s push for a ceasefire in Ukraine, the cardinal said the Holy See “clearly supports the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” and that “it is up to the Ukrainians themselves to decide what they are willing to negotiate or potentially concede from their perspective.”

Just before he was hospitalized in mid-February, Francis issued a rebuke of the Trump administration’s immigration policy and refuted the vice president’s use of a theological concept, the “ordo amoris” (“order of love” or “order of charity”), to defend the administration’s approach.

“The true ‘ordo amoris’ that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” the pope wrote in a letter to the US bishops.

The Vatican has also expressed concern about the USAID cuts imposed since January, while a US bishop born in El Salvador has called for Catholics to resist deportations by the Trump administration, which have included to prisons in El Salvador.

But after Catholic bishops criticized the Trump administration’s actions on immigration, Vance suggested they were motivated by their “bottom line,” as the Catholic Church receives government money to help resettle immigrants. The bishops’ conference said in response that the federal funds do not cover their costs for this work.

The Vatican statement released following the meeting with Vance on Saturday said that during the talks “hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the State and the Catholic Church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged.”

Despite any tensions, the Vatican is used to talking to leaders with whom it disagrees and the statement noted “the good existing bilateral relations between the Holy See and the United States of America, and the common commitment to protect the right to freedom of religion and conscience was reiterated.”

CNN
 — 

The Trump administration is ready to recognize Russian control of Crimea as part of the US proposal to drive an end to the war with Ukraine, an official familiar with the framework told CNN on Friday.

Crimea, southern Ukraine, has been under Russian occupation since it was illegally annexed in 2014. Four other Ukrainian regions – Donetsk and Luhansk in the east and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south – have also been partially occupied by Russia since its full-scale invasion in 2022.

There has been no immediate comment from Kyiv but the suggestion the US could recognize Russian control of Crimea is unlikely to be welcomed – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in March that his government would not recognize any occupied territories as Russian, calling that a “red line.”

Zelensky said at the time that the territories would “probably be one of the most sensitive and difficult issues” in peace negotiations, adding that, “for us, the red line is the recognition of the Ukrainian temporarily occupied territories as Russian. We will not go for it.”

The US proposal for an end to the war would also put a ceasefire in place along the front lines of the conflict, the source told CNN on Friday.

The framework was shared with the Europeans and the Ukrainians in Paris, France, on Thursday, the source said. It was also communicated to the Russians in a phone call between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Despite US President Donald Trump’s claim that he would be able to end the war in Ukraine in one day, American attempts to reach a peace agreement have largely stalled in the face of Russian intransigence, leading to a growing sense of frustration in the White House.

After Rubio warned Friday that the US was ready to “move on” from efforts to bring peace to Ukraine within days if there were no tangible signs of progress, Trump offered a less hardline approach, saying that Rubio was “right” but projecting more optimism about the prospects of a deal.

Pressed on a timeline for the US to walk away, Trump said: “No specific number of days, but quickly, we want to get it done.”

The source that spoke to CNN on Friday said that there are still pieces of the framework to be filled out, adding that the US plans to work with the Europeans and the Ukrainians on that next week in London.

The Trump administration is simultaneously planning another meeting between Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russians to get Moscow on board with the framework, the source said.

Russia has imposed a brutal and repressive regime on Crimea and its people over the past 11 years, human rights observers say, stomping out any sign of opposition.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has repeatedly reported on the human rights violations allegedly committed by Russia in occupied Crimea – from unlawful detentions, to sexual abuse and torture, to forcing people to send their children to Russian schools and training programs.

Russia has repeatedly denied accusations of human rights abuses, despite substantial evidence and victim testimonies.

Roughly 2.5 million people lived in Crimea before 2014 and many more would regularly visit the tourist hotspot, known for its beaches and nature reserves.

According to official data from the Ukrainian government, more than 64,000 have fled the peninsula to other parts of Ukraine since the annexation. However, Crimean NGOs estimate the number of refugees might be twice as high, as not everyone has officially registered with the government.

Meanwhile, Moscow has worked on its plan to “Russify” the peninsula. It put in place incentives to persuade Russian citizens to relocate to Crimea and the Ukrainian government estimated in 2023 that some 500,000 to 800,000 Russians had moved there permanently since it was annexed, with the number jumping sharply after the opening of the Kerch bridge that connects Crimea to Russia.

Maksym Vishchyk, a lawyer at Global Rights Compliance, a non-profit that advises the Ukrainian authorities on investigating and prosecuting international crimes, said Moscow has repeated the same pattern across other occupied territories.

“When Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula, it commenced a campaign of systematic targeting of communities or individuals it perceived as those who became an obstacle in the Russification campaign… with devastating effects on the social fabric in general, but also communities, families and individuals,” he told CNN in an interview last year.

“And Crimea has been kind of their playbook. Policies and patterns and tactics (Russia) applied in Crimea were then applied as well in other occupied territories. So, we see essentially the same patterns in all occupied territories, both since 2014 and since 2022.”