A Russian court has detained a 23-year-old woman on suspicion of “restoring Nazism” after a video she shot mocking the World War II monument dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad, the local branch of Russia’s Investigative Committee announced today. .

Alyona Agafonofa, who is a resident of the city of Samara, faces up to five years in prison if convicted of the crime, which is described in part as “spreading information that expresses blatant disrespect to society about the glory days of the army.”

In the video taken in July 2023, Agafonova stands under the “Motherland” statue, an 85-meter-tall statue of a woman holding a sword and pretending to tickle the woman’s breasts while laughing.

The Investigative Committee said the prisoner “committed immoral and cynical actions that insulted the symbol of the stability of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War,” Russia’s term for World War II.

Authorities opened a criminal case after she posted the video on her Instagram wall. He then fled Russia and was put on a wanted list.

Agafonova was arrested this week at a Moscow airport on her way back to Russia and will remain in custody until March 9. A date for her trial has not been announced.

The memorial sits on a hill overlooking Volgograd – known in Soviet times as Stalingrad – and is part of a triptych commemorating one of the bloodiest battles of the war and a decisive Soviet victory against the Nazis.

The Soviet Union suffered over a million casualties during the battle, which lasted from August 1942 to February 1943.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has likened the war in Ukraine – which he sees as a defensive move against a West that he says seeks to dismember Russia – to the challenge Moscow faced when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

The Kremlin repeatedly refers to the government in Kiev as a “Nazi regime” and justifies the invasion of Ukraine as defending Russia against Nazism.

Ukraine – which was part of the Soviet Union and was devastated by Hitler’s forces – rejects these parallels as false pretexts for declaring a war of conquest with the characteristics of an empire. He also points out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish.

Earlier, an activist from Bashkortostan, Rasul Akhiyaretdinov, recorded a video message to Russian President Vladimir Putin asking him to redesign the “Motherland” statue:

“Every believer of any denomination or anyone who respects morality condemns the blatant display of the monument. Times have passed, we draw conclusions our fathers died for a woman’s honor, for her morality, for love. We have realized that only a well-educated and moral family can be the goal and support of the state!” wrote Akhiyaretdinov.

Speaking to V1, the man clarified that he was bothered by the statue’s open chest:

“Here [στο Βόλγκογκραντ] people walk around and look at her breasts. I have seen videos where people even do all kinds of ugliness,” he said.