A Russian court has jailed Darya Kozyreva, a young activist who used 19th-century poetry and graffiti to protest the conflict in Ukraine.

At the court proceedings, the 19-year-old Kozyreva was found guilty of repeatedly discrediting the Russian army after she put up a poster with lines of Ukrainian verse on a public square.

According to a trial transcript, the teenager pleaded not guilty, calling the case against her one big fabrication.

She was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.

According to a tally by Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian human rights group, Kozyreva is one of an estimated 234 people imprisoned in Russia for their anti-war position.

In December 2022, Kozyreva, aged just 17, reportedly sprayed “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases” in black paint on a sculpture of two intertwined hearts, erected outside St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum and representing the city’s links with Mariupol, a Ukrainian city largely razed to the ground during a siege that spring.

In early 2024, after being fined 30,000 roubles ($370) for posting about Ukraine online, Kozyreva was expelled from the medical faculty of St Petersburg State University.