The poster displayed on the wall of Narva Fortress, Estonia, on 9 May 2025. Photo: Jack Styler
A Moscow court has sentenced the head of Estonia’s Narva Museum to 10 years in prison in absentia for spreading “false information” about the Russian military and “rehabilitating Nazism” for a giant poster it produced comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, Mediazona reported on Thursday.
Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, the director of the museum, which faces the western Russian city of Ivangorod across the Narva River, has had a poster hung on the external wall of Narva Fortress calling Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” each year since 2023 to coincide with Russia’s Victory Day celebrations in May.
This year, the poster featured an image of Putin and Hitler’s faces spliced together, accompanied by the caption: “Putler: War Criminal!”.
In recent years, the two border cities have become known for holding competing Victory Day celebrations, with the Russian side first setting up a screen and stage for a concert visible to Narva’s primarily ethnic Russian residents in 2023.
For the past two years, some 200 metres away, the Estonian government has organised its own concert on 9 May to mark Europe Day, celebrating the 1950 Schuman Declaration that laid the groundwork for the creation of the European Union.
Russia’s Investigative Committee first issued an arrest warrant for Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova in January, charging her with spreading “false information” about the Russian army. At the time, she told Estonian public broadcaster ERR that the ruling was a “great honour”.
In June, the Investigative Committee brought fresh charges of “rehabilitating Nazism” against Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, saying she had “facilitated the display on one of the walls of Narva Fortress of posters depicting the president of the Russian Federation with captions containing false information about his commission of war crimes” in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova previously told ERR that the “Putler” poster had been a message intended for Ivangorod’s Russian audience. “A full-scale war has been going on next to us for four years, which Putin unleashed. We call a dictator a dictator; war crimes, war crimes”, she said.
