“I think that I acted properly,” said Irina Gen, a 45-year-old English teacher from Penza, a Volga region city of about half a million people. “I don’t regret it. The only problem is that I didn’t manage to reach the minds of our students.”
Gen is under criminal prosecution for discussing Russia’s war in Ukraine with a group of eighth-graders on March 18. One of the students recorded the conversation and released it publicly, prompting prosecutors to file criminal charges that she disseminated “demonstrably false information about the armed forces of the Russian Federation.”
Specifically, Gen was charged for mentioning Russia’s March 9 air strike on a maternity hospital in the Azov Sea port of Mariupol — an incident that Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who questioned her claimed, without evidence, was “fake.”
