St. Petersburg court issues first fine for sharing drone-strike aftermath footage since 2025 ban
More than a year after St. Petersburg banned publishing images of drone-strike aftermath, a local court has issued its first fine under the rule, penalizing a man 4,000 rubles for an online video.
A magistrate court in St. Petersburg has fined resident Shakhzodbek Tursunbaev 4,000 rubles for sharing an online video showing the aftermath of a drone strike, according to a spokesperson for the city's court system.
Court officials said Tursunbaev posted the footage on the afternoon of July 24, adding a caption suggesting no translation was needed to understand it. Judges ruled that the post violated a ban issued by the St. Petersburg governor prohibiting the distribution of photos and videos depicting the aftermath of drone attacks.
According to the Russian Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti, the video showed damage from a strike on Wildberries warehouses in the Shushary district of St. Petersburg and in the Utkina Zavod industrial zone in the Leningrad region. The channel noted that this is the first fine of its kind issued in the city since the ban on publishing attack-aftermath imagery took effect in January 2025.
In recent months, people across Russia have repeatedly faced detention for posting footage of drone-strike aftermaths. Residents of Volgograd and Krasnodar, for example, have been detained after sharing videos of fires at Wildberries warehouses struck by Ukrainian drones.
