The case against the founder of the House with a Lighthouse children's hospice, Lida Moniava, has been dropped

The case against the founder of the charitable foundation and children's hospice “House with a Lighthouse”, Lida Moniava, was closed for lack of evidence of a crime. Previously, Moniava was accused of spreading “fake news” about the Russian army based on political hatred.

The case of spreading “fakes” about the Russian army against the ex-head of the House with a Lighthouse children's hospice, Lida Moniava, was dropped. This was reported to the BBC by three interlocutors close to the charity, and her lawyer Mikhail Biryukov confirmed to the BBC. “Lida was released due to lack of evidence,” one of the BBC’s interlocutors said about the termination of the case against Moniava.

The Telegram channel of Moniava’s support group clarifies that an investigator from the Central Investigative Committee informed lawyer Biryukov about the termination of the case.

How the case developed

On September 2, Moniava was brought in for questioning after a morning search of her apartment. As lawyer Mikhail Biryukov told Mediazona at the time, the case against his client was based on a post on Moniava’s Telegram channel, published in February 2023, on the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It talked, among other things, about a Russian missile hitting a house in Odessa and attacks on other Ukrainian cities.

“According to the investigation, Moniava publicly disseminated in the public domain to an unlimited circle of people in a telegram channel, under the guise of reliable messages, deliberately false information about the actions of the Russian Armed Forces against the civilian population of Ukraine,” the Investigative Committee said then.

The article of the Criminal Code under which Lida Moniava was charged carries a penalty of five to 10 years in prison.

On September 3, a court hearing was held in Moscow to select a preventive measure for the philanthropist. Mikhail Biryukov said on the eve of the meeting that the investigation would most likely request that Moniava be sent to a pre-trial detention center.

The actions against Lida Moniava caused a wide resonance in the capital and beyond. On September 3, more than 200 people came to the Simonovsky Court in Moscow to support the head of the charitable foundation, including the wards and employees of the House with a Lighthouse hospice, the founder of the Vera Foundation Nyuta Federmesser, the parents of politician Ilya Yashin and the former editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Dmitry Muratov.

The news that the investigation was asking Moniave to choose a preventive measure not related to arrest was greeted by those gathered with applause.

As a result, the court did not send the head of the House with a Lighthouse children's hospice to a pre-trial detention center and assigned the charity one of the mildest preventive measures - a ban on certain actions.

As Novaya Gazeta clarified, the court prohibited Lida Moniava from going out on the street from 20:00 to 08:00, communicating with witnesses in the case and using social networks.

She left the post of director, but she will not leave Russia

A few days after the preventive measure was chosen, a message was published on the charity’s Telegram channel that Lida Moniava was leaving her post as director of the House with a Lighthouse hospice and resigning from the board of directors of the charitable organization. This, according to Lida Moniava, would protect the work of the hospice in the future.

She also said that she is not going to leave Russia, despite the fact that she receives a lot of advice to “leave the country.”

38-year-old Moniava is the founder and one of the creators of the House with a Lighthouse charity foundation and children's hospice, which since 2018 has been helping seriously ill children and young people under 30 years of age. She began working in charity programs in 2004, first as a journalist, then as a volunteer, then as an organizer and program manager.

After the start of the war, Moniava launched a separate fund to help refugees from Ukraine, the border regions of Russia and Nagorno-Karabakh. In the post, which formed the basis of the criminal case, there was a request to help with a donation to this fund. In August 2025, it announced the suspension of its work.

In February 2022, shortly after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Moniava signed an open letter to Vladimir Putin, in which representatives of Russian NGOs called for an end to the war.

At the beginning of this year, Moniava was fined 45 thousand rubles under an administrative article about “discrediting” the Russian army. The reason was three posts in her Telegram channel, including a post about the death of a sixth-grader and his parents in Sumy as a result of a Russian attack in April 2025.