MOSCOW, Russia (AFP) — Russia on Thursday sentenced a 59-year-old nurse to eight years in a penal colony for denouncing Moscow’s Ukraine offensive on social media.

Moscow has banned criticism of its military campaign, punishing thousands of people with jail terms or fines for speaking out against it.

Moscow’s Dorogomilovsky court found Olga Menshikh guilty of spreading “fakes” about the Russian army, under legislation adopted shortly after the Kremlin sent troops to Ukraine that has been used to silence dissent.

The court ruled that she had published posts “motivated by political hatred”.

Menshikh had criticised a deadly 2022 Russian strike on the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia and alleged the killings of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

She pleaded not guilty and said in court that she felt sorry for the wounded Russian soldiers arriving at the Pirogov National Medical and Surgical Centre in Moscow where she worked as a nurse anaesthetist.

“When a young man passes by, do you know what a woman feels? Compassion, not the hatred of which I am being accused,” she said, according to the independent website Mediazona.

“I felt really sorry for them.”

Wearing a checked shirt, she looked sternly through the glass defendant’s box in court.

Addressing the prosecutor, she said: “You want to give me a sentence like one for murder, but I was fighting for your health. I have treated so many prosecutors and judges from the whole of Moscow.”

Menshikh was arrested in April and placed under house arrest, but was moved to pre-trial detention in September.

Also on Thursday, a court in the city of Penza sentenced a 40-year-old man to 15 years in a strict-regime penal colony for treason and “attempted cooperation with a foreign state on a confidential basis”, regional prosecutors said on Telegram.

In July 2022, Maksim Zotov “tried to make contact with representatives of a foreign state with the intention of cooperating against Russia’s security interests”, prosecutors said.

From October to January that year, he conducted “confidential electronic correspondence” with individuals acting in the name of a foreign state, the statement said.

Zotov also passed information on two Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine to Kyiv’s security services, prosecutors said.

The BBC Russian Service reported last year that Zotov, who comes from a closed nuclear city near Penza called Zarechny, was arrested in January 2023.

It reported that a court document apparently signed by Zotov said he had been caught in a sting operation by Russia’s FSB service, while believing he was corresponding with a British MI6 agent.