State of the art. A St. Petersburg court has fined Russia’s first “foreign agent” after she transformed her mandatory reports into DIY anti‑war statements

Early on, Apakhonchich has become the face of Russia’s “foreign agent” crackdown after becoming one of the very first Russians to be personally added to the registry in December 2020. The Ministry of Justice didn’t try hard to justify the designation and simply cited her sources of income: a salary from a French college for teaching Russian as a foreign language, compensation from the Red Cross, and festival fees transferred via PayPal.

Speaking to Mediazona about today’s fine, Apakhonchich described the situation as a “crime against common sense”

“I think that against the backdrop of the war, this seems like not the biggest problem, but the erosion of the concept of ‘law’ itself… where for the exact same thing (in my case, teaching Russian to foreigners) you can get both a presidential grant and the status of a ‘foreign agent’ (and subsequently a criminal record), makes me sad,” the artist said. “But I believe that this will end. I would like it to end sooner.”

Before the war, Apakhonchich was heavily involved in St Petersburg’s protest art scene. She is known for staging a “vulva-ballet” outside the Mariinsky Theatre in support of persecuted artist Yulia Tsvetkova, as well as her photographic series “9 Stages of the Leader’s Decomposition”.

Under Russian law, “foreign agents” are required to submit exhaustive, quarterly financial and activity reports to the Ministry of Justice. Following the invasion of Ukraine, Apakhonchich stopped complying. Instead, she transformed the bureaucratic forms themselves into DIY anti-war posters and dispatched them to the Ministry.

In December 2023, she crowdsourced kind words from her followers, painting words like “solidarity”, “justice”, and “tenderness” over the financial forms. Her October 2024 submissions contrasted the beauty of her life in exile with the horrors of the war in Ukraine; she illustrated mountains and the Black Sea, reminding the agency that “near the Ukrainian shores, mines are exploding in it.” In February 2025, she covered the bureaucratic forms in painted flora and asked the Ministry: “When will the war end, MinJust?”.

In February 2025, Apakhonchich was placed on the federal wanted list—and she used her July 2025 “report” to mock the officials.

Drawing a wanted poster of herself over the official forms, she informed the Ministry of her travels across Europe, from integration courses for refugees to meeting with freed Russian political prisoner Sasha Skochilenko in Germany and visiting the memorial for the slain opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Amsterdam.