Russian Caught Leaving Note on Putin's Parents' Grave: 'Take Him With You'

A woman from St Petersburg has been placed under house arrest after she left a note on the grave of Vladimir Putin's parents describing the Russian president as a "freak and a killer."

Before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Irina Tsybaneva, a 60-year-old accountant, had never been particularly political, her son Maxim Tsybanev told independent Russian language news outlet Mediazona.

Even after Russian troops went into Ukraine, she did not discuss the war with her family, which includes two children and three grandchildren.

But on October 6, the day before Putin turned 70, she managed to evade security at Serafimovskoe cemetery where Putin's parents' gravestones lie, to leave a note that expressed her view of the president and the war he had started.

"Parents of a serial killer, take him with you, we have so much pain and misery from him, the whole world prays for his death," it said. "Death to Putin, you raised a freak and a killer."

The cemetery guard found the note and sent it to law enforcement, and she was identified from the cemetery's surveillance cameras.

On October 10, police came to Tsybaneva's apartment. She was taken into custody where she was locked up "for a long time," Tsybanev said and she immediately confessed to writing the note, which was confirmed by a DNA test and a handwriting expert.

After she was placed in a temporary detention center, a criminal case was opened accusing her of desecrating a burial place based on political or ideological hostility, which can carry a five-year jail sentence.

Experts concluded that the note contained a "negative assessment of Russian President Vladimir Putin." In explaining her actions, she told the court that she had watched a TV broadcast which made her realize that "everything is very frightening, everything is very sad, many people have been killed."

She has been sentenced to house arrest until November 8, 2022, and prohibited from using the internet, phone, or mail. Tsybanev told Mediazona that the punishment was "harsh" but that "in the context of the current situation in this country it's really not that bad."

A clamp down on dissent by the authorities in Russia could land those who publicly oppose what the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" with a jail sentence of up to 15 years.

News outlet Meduza reported that it was unclear how she managed to get to the tombstones as security had been stepped up there in September after activist Anastasia Filippova left a small sign at Putin's parents' grave.

It said, "your son is behaving disgracefully! He skips history classes, fights with classmates, threatens to blow up the whole school! Take action!"

Putin's parents, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Putina, who were both born in 1911, died in 1999 and 1998 respectively, before their son became president.

Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin for comment.