Ukrainian service

After her graduation, Poklonskaya worked in the Ukrainian Prosecutor's Office, initially serving as an assistant prosecutor to the Acting Prosecutor of the Republic of Crimea.^[7] She was the assistant attorney of Krasnogvardeisky district in Crimea from 2002 to 2006, and the assistant attorney of Yevpatoria from 2006 to 2010. Between 2010 and 2011, she was the deputy chief of a surveillance law enforcement unit of the Prosecutor's Office of Crimea which was responsible for dealing with organized crime.^[7]

In 2011 in Simferopol, she acted as the state prosecutor in the high-profile trial of Ruvim Aronov, a former deputy of the Supreme Council of Crimea and a former manager of the Saki soccer club.^[11][12] Aronov was prosecuted for his leadership role in the Bashmaki gang, an organized crime group that emerged in Crimea, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Kyiv after the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. The gang had been "known for its cruelty" and had been implicated in racketeering, robberies, eight abductions, and 50 murders.^[12] In December of the same year, Poklonskaya was allegedly assaulted in the stairwell of her home in Yalta. As a result, she suffered partial facial paralysis. The alleged attack was widely believed to have been a revenge attack by the Bashmaki gang.^[13][14] On December 9, 2019, she reported that the information about the beating was not true, saying that “the story that someone beat me up at the entrance is not true."^{[citation needed]}

As a state prosecutor in the case of the Bashmaki gang, she was poisoned during a business trip to Odesa. Poklonskaya described the situation as follows: “I drank a bottle of ordinary water at the hotel when I was on a business trip in Odesa. There was an unknown substance in the water. At the hotel, there was water on the nightstand, as usual. It happened at night - nausea, intestinal and stomach upset. A wild headache, my head was splitting to such an extent that I wanted to die.” Subsequently, the unidentified substance was removed from the body; after the poisoning, Poklonskaya filed a report, telling the manager that she would no longer be able to work on this matter.^[15]

In the same year, she was appointed the inter-district environmental prosecutor of Simferopol.^[10][16][17] Following that, she was transferred to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office in Kyiv, where she served as a senior prosecutor.^[10][18]

From October to December 2012, Poklonskaya worked as head of the prosecution with the proceedings of the Court of Appeal of Crimea. Later, from December 2012 up until March 2014, she was a senior attorney of the 2nd division of the General Directorate of Internal Affairs involved in pre-trial investigation and public prosecution management supervision with oversight of law enforcement in criminal proceedings.^[7]

On 25 February 2014, Poklonskaya handed in her resignation, in which she stated that she was "ashamed to live in the country where neo-fascists freely walk about the streets"^[10] (a reference to radical Euromaidan activists). Instead, she was given a vacation and left Kyiv for Crimea where her parents lived.^[10]

Prosecutor of Crimea

On 11 March 2014, amid the Russian occupation of Crimea, Poklonskaya was appointed Prosecutor of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.^[19] Poklonskaya was appointed to the position by Sergei Aksyonov after the position had been reportedly rejected by four others,^[20][9] including the former Vice-Prosecutor of Crimea, Vyacheslav Pavlov.^[21] A press conference given by Poklonskaya on that day resulted in her becoming an internet phenomenon. Poklonskaya's appointment was confirmed by Russian authorities on 25 March, around the same time Ukrainian judicial authorities declared her a wanted criminal due to alleged involvement in conspiracy to overthrow constitutional order or seize state power.

Immediately following her appointment as Prosecutor, she was involved in an investigation into the violent attacks committed against Crimean Berkut members.^[9] On 19 March 2014, Poklonskaya confirmed that investigations were ongoing into a shooting in Simferopol which killed two while denying reports that the shooter had been detained. She compared the shooting to the "sniper attacks on Independence Square in Kyiv" from 18 to 21 February, and stated her belief that the shooting was meant to "provoke violence between the military forces" of Ukraine and Crimea.^[22]

Crimea, which in the meantime had come under Russian control^[23][24] and become a federal subject of Russia (since then Crimea is under dispute by Russia and Ukraine^[25]), saw the creation of its new Prosecutor's Office, now subordinated to Russia's Prosecutor General Yury Chaika. On 25 March, Chaika appointed Poklonskaya as acting Prosecutor of the Republic of Crimea for this new office.^[26][27] On 27 March, Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika granted Poklonskaya the rank of Senior Counsellor of Justice.^[23][28] On 4 April, Poklonskaya gave the approval for the Russian FSB to begin an operation to arrest Yevgeniy Pomelov, the assistant attorney of Yalta, as part of a larger bribery case.^[29]

On 11 April, the Prosecutor General of Russia personally presented Poklonskaya with her official papers as a Russian legal officer.^[30] On 2 May, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Poklonskaya Chief Prosecutor of Crimea.^[31] On 4 May, Poklonskaya accused the Crimean Tatars' self-governmental body (the Mejlis) of extremist activity, warning that the Mejlis could be dissolved and outlawed across Russia.^[32][33]

In June, Poklonskaya was appointed as a judge to "guarantee impartiality in the selection of winners" for Russia's Five Stars singing competition, which would select Russia's entrant for the Intervision Song Contest.^[34][35] In September, Poklonskaya declared that those who did not recognize the annexation of Crimea by Russia, as well as those who incited ethnic strife, would be deported.^[36] Also in November 2014, Poklonskaya was rated as the sixteenth out of the hundred most promising politicians in Russia by the Institute for Social-Economic and Political Studies.^[37]

In March 2015, Poklonskaya was appointed as the head of the Japanese-Russian Friendship Society.^[38] In May 2015, Poklonskaya accused local activist Alexander Kostenko of making Nazi gestures during the Maidan protests, and that they were judging "not just [Kostenko], but the very idea of fascism and Nazism, which are trying to raise their head once again". Kostenko would later be sentenced to four years in a penal colony.^{[citation needed]} On 11 June 2015, Putin granted Poklonskaya the rank of 3rd Class State Counsellor of Justice which corresponds with the military rank of Major General.^[39]

Poklonskaya resigned as Prosecutor General on 27 September 2016 due to her election as MP in the State Duma during the 2016 legislative election.^[40] Prior to her resignation, she was the youngest female general in Russia, at age 36.^[41]

Religion

Poklonskaya is deeply religious, and is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In March 2017, she claimed that a bronze bust of Tsar Nicholas II in Simferopol was seeping fragrant myrrh.^[78] The Russian Orthodox Church stated that they did not detect traces on the bronze bust, but instructed the church priest to continue observation; in the past some Roman Catholic worshippers had made claims of weeping statues of the Virgin Mary.^[78] Poklonskaya's statement drew ridicule from some Russian netizens.^[79]

In February 2017, Poklonskaya led a campaign to block the release of the film Matilda for its allegedly blasphemous portrayal of the affair between Tsar Nicholas II (who has been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church) and the ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya.^[80] In April, Poklonskaya released a 39-page report attempting to denounce the film and alleging, among other claims, that the historically evidenced and well-documented affair could not have happened as Kshesinskaya was, in the opinion of the report's authors, "too ugly to have attracted the attention of the Tsar".^[81] Poklonskaya was accused of being the head of an unofficial "Orthodox Taliban" by Deutsche Welle.^[82] Poklonskaya has argued that Nicholas II's abdication in 1917 was legally null and void.^[83]

Later, in 2020, during an interview, Poklonskaya noted the following on this matter: “My opinion is that there is no need to show saints in a bad light, and Nicholas II has been canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Foreign Orthodox Church. Well, I have a special, personal attitude. But for some reason I thought that I was smarter than everyone else and I had the right to tell people: if you sin, don’t sin, look, don’t look, this is beautiful, and this is not beautiful. This is my mistake. I admit. I was mistaken in that I thought that I had the right to dictate and impose my opinion."^{[citation needed]}

Criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine

In April 2022, the Moscow Times reported that Poklonskaya had labelled the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a "catastrophe."^[75] In a video address to an international forum she said, "People are dying, houses and entire cities are destroyed leaving millions of refugees. Bodies and souls are mutilated. My heart is bursting with pain. My two native countries are killing each other, that's not what I wanted then and it's not what I want now."^[75]

Also in April 2022, she had told a popular YouTube blogger that Ukraine's society has "changed" in the eight years since the beginning of the war in Donbas with pro-Russian separatists and that Ukrainians "would not greet Russia with flowers."^[75]

Later that month Poklonskaya also criticized the Z military symbol as used by the Russian invasion force.^[75] After doing this she received an immediate response from Rossotrudnichestvo head Yevgeny Primakov who claimed that the letters Z and V are "symbols of the very liberation of Ukraine from the obvious evil of terrorists and bandits."^[75] She also proposed investigating the Bucha massacre as a war crime, called reports about US biological laboratories in Ukraine “fantasy” and stated that she did not consider Ukraine a Nazi state.^{[citation needed]}

According to the Moscow Times Poklonskaya's break with Russia's official line that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a "special military operation" to "de-Nazify and demilitarize" Ukraine was practically unheard of for a sitting official.^[75]

Criminal case and sanctions

Following her appointment as Prosecutor General of Crimea on 11 March 2014, Poklonskaya was listed as a wanted criminal on the website of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs,^[87] due to alleged involvement in conspiracy to overthrow constitutional order or seize state power.^[88] Poklonskaya's previous criticism of the opposition protests in Ukraine, and the "anti-constitutional coup"^[18] led the Ukrainian government to launch a criminal case against her and strip her of the civil service rank of Counsellor of Justice.^[18]

Poklonskaya was sanctioned by the United Kingdom on 5 May 2014 in relation to "actively implementing" Russia's annexation of Crimea.^[89][90] On 12 May, the European Union added Poklonskaya to its sanctions list.^[91][92] This barred her from entering EU countries and any of her assets there, if existent, were to be frozen.^[93] Canada imposed similar sanctions on Poklonskaya a month later,^[94] followed by Japan on 4 August.^{[citation needed]} Australia followed soon after, sanctioning Poklonskaya on 2 September.^[95] On 19 December, the United States introduced its individual sanctions against several Ukrainian separatists and Russians, of which Poklonskaya was the only woman.^[59][96] In 2021, Ukraine added Poklonskaya to its sanctions list.^{[citation needed]}

In an interview in 2020, Poklonskaya noted that, despite visa sanctions, she travels abroad with a diplomatic passport.^{[citation needed]}