Russian woman faces jail for drawing vaginas in breach of Putin's strict porn laws

dailystar.co.uk:

LGBT Russian artist and children's theatre director is facing jail time for drawing pictures of vaginas.Yulia Tsvetkova, 27, has also been accused of being a foreign agent and could be banged up for three-and-a-half years for violating Vladimir Putin's strict porn laws.The artist from Komsomolsk-on-Amur in Russia's Far East posted drawings of vaginas to V Kontakte, a Russian social network.READ MORE: Russia promoting 'Siberian staycation' to Putin's personal hotspots following flight ban She has been on trial in a closed courtroom with a final hearing expected to take place on July 12, according to Amnesty International.

Her case has been rumbling on for a number of years, during which she has lost her job and been forced to close her MERAK youth theatre studio following threats to her child students.She told the BBC: "Speaking of facts, my life has been completely destroyed.

This is not a metaphor, this is reality."Russian site OVD reports Tsvetkova was turned by anti-LGBT activist Timur Bulatov, who claimed the drawings posted to her Vagina Monologues page (a space for body-positive art) violated article 242 of Russia's criminal code.In November 2019, she was arbitrarily detained and put under house arrest, accused of "production and dissemination of pornographic materials".She has since faced five different trials, with prosecutors recently accusing her of working with Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros after she accepted grants for her work from Soros-related groups.As such, prosecutors requested she be officially labelled as a foreign agent.