‘Take him. You raised a freak and a killer.’ A Petersburg woman is under house arrest after leaving a note on Putin’s parents’ grave

A Petersburg woman has been placed under house arrest for leaving a note on the grave of Maria and Vladimir Putin, parents of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The note addresses the “parents of a serial killer,” and asks them to “take him, we have so much pain and misery from him.” The prosecutor’s office called Tsybaneva’s actions “a brazen crime.” Her son says her punishment is harsh, but “not that bad” in the context of the current political situation in Russia.

A district court in St. Petersburg has placed 60-year-old resident Irina Tsybaneva under house arrest after finding her guilty of desecrating a burial site with politically or ideologically hostile motives. The case was initiated after she left a note on the grave of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s parents. The maximum sentence for this charge is five years.

On October 6, Tsybaneva left a note on the grave of Maria and Vladimir Putin in the Serafimovskoye Cemetery. The note reads: “Parents of a serial killer, take him, we have so much pain and misery from him, the whole world prays for his death [illegible]. Death to Putin, you raised a freak and a killer.”

Police came to Tsybaneva’s apartment on October 10. She was apparently identified and located based on footage from the cemetery’s multiple surveillance cameras. The cemetery guard found the note and sent it to police.

Tsybaneva was taken into police custody where, her son Maxim told publication Mediazona, they “had her locked up for a long time.” Late in the evening she called her son and told him the apartment would be searched. She was later put in a temporary detention facility.

Tsybaneva immediately confessed to writing the note. Police conducted a DNA test, which showed traces of her skin on the paper. A handwriting expert confirmed that she had written the note. A linguistic examination concluded that the note contains “a negative assessment of Russian president Vladimir Putin.” 

It remains unclear how Tsybaneva got to the president’s parents’ grave. Security on the cemetery grounds and specifically around the grave of Maria and Vladimir Putin was strengthened at the end of September, after the activist Anastasia Filippova left a small sign there. Modeled on a page of a grade school notebook, it read: “Dear parents! Your son is behaving disgracefully! He skips history classes, fights with classmates, threatens to blow up the whole school! Take action!”

According to Maxim Tsybanev, cemetery security and the police officers on duty “got distracted, and she somehow left the note.” 

Tsybanev explained her actions to the court, saying “I was just watching a TV broadcast, which was very serious, and there was some news that made me…I realized that everything is very frightening, everything is very sad, many people have been killed.” 

The prosecutor’s office required that Tsybaneva be taken into custody since she had committed a “brazen crime.” The prosecutor justified the arrest, saying that Tsybaneva “committed a crime whose danger to the public lies in insulting the memory of the dead and the feelings of the living toward the dead.”

The court sentenced Tsybaneva to house arrest until November 8, 2022 and forbid her from using the internet, phone, or mail. Maxim Tsybanev told Mediazona “in the context of the actions she took it’s too harsh, but, well, in the context of the current situation in this country it’s really not that bad.”