Stanislav said he’s been dyeing his hair for years (Picture: East2West)
A Moscow resident has been fined for ‘discrediting Putin’s army’ – because his hair is dyed the same colours as the Ukrainian flag.
Stanislav Nemenov, 25, had gone to a police station to report he was robbed of his mobile phone in a violent bus stop mugging in which he lost a tooth.
But Russian officers instead accused him of ‘discrediting the army’ due to his blue and yellow hair, reminiscent of the Ukrainian flag.
The accusation against him claimed he ‘demonstrated the means of visual propaganda in the form of dyed hair with colour stripes of yellow and blue, coinciding with the state flag of the Republic of Ukraine’.
This attracted the attention of ‘an unlimited circle of people,’ and journalists.
A court imposed a fine of £435, despite Nemenov saying he had no intentions to represent Ukraine by dyeing his hair blue and yellow.
His choice in hair colour resembled the Ukrainian flag (Picture: East2West)
Officers fined him hundreds – despite being a victim of mugging (Picture: East2West)
He claimed he did not support the ‘Ukrainian regime’ and had been colouring his hair since 2017.
The judge found his explanations ‘unfounded’ and imposed the maximum fine available.
One Russian woman was questioned by police after she was accused of ‘causing associations with enemy symbols, discrediting the authorities and our army’.
Antonida Smolina’s alleged crime was posting a photo on social media of her smiling in a yellow coat beneath a blue sky.
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For her accuser lurking on Russian social media platform VKontakte, that reeked of sympathy for Ukraine, independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported.
The Ukrainian flag features a blue top half and a yellow bottom half – representing a golden wheat field below a cloudless sky.
‘A district police officer came to me’, said Antonida, a journalist from Veliky Ustyug, some 470 miles northeast of Moscow.
’He said that a certain Valery P wrote a statement against me to the police.’
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