Moscow student jailed for having pro-kyiv Wi-fi name

A STUDENT in Moscow has been sent to prison for renaming his Wi-fi network “Slava Ukraini”, meaning “Glory to Ukraine”.

The court found 22-year-old Oleg Tarasov, a student at Moscow State University, guilty of “public demonstration of Nazi symbols ... or symbols of extremist organisations” and sentenced him to 10 days in jail.

Russian language reports on the Telegram social messaging network said that Tarasov had bought the router for his student dormitory in October last year and that he had changed its name to “Slava Ukraini” when he set it up.

Security guards at the university launched a manhunt for the owner of the router on Wednesday when they discovered that its name had been tampered with and changed to what the Kremlin views as criminal propaganda.

Tarasov was eventually tracked down by Russia’s Centre E, a specialist anti-extremism unit within the interior ministry.

Reports said that not only has Tarasov been imprisoned for renaming his Wi-fi router, but that it has also been confiscated because it had been used in a crime.

Anti-kremlin protests and proukraine slogans are banned in Russia. Since the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the courts have given thousands of people fines and prison sentences, even for holding up a blank sheet of paper.

Russian human rights activists have also reported that dozens of people have been detained and charged with “discrediting the army” after attending the funeral of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month.

OVD-INFO, a Russian human rights monitoring and legal aid agency, said nearly 20,000 people had been detained for anti-war protests in the past two years. The arrests are often violent. Men have been raped with truncheons and women threaten with beatings and strip searches.

Kremlin propagandists, though, said that the arrest and imprisonment of Tarasov for renaming his Wi-fi router was no different to the arrest of a TV repair man in Latvia this week for tuning connections for people wanting to watch banned Russian TV.