Outraged by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo's depiction of the recent Sinai plane crash, Russian Senator Valentina Petrenko decided to respond in kind.
During a press conference on Wednesday called “#IAmNotCharlie: Russian Parliamentarians Respond to Charlie Hebdo,” she presented a cartoon showing a group of people in a cauldron boiling over an open fire, while a military figure with a trident looks on.
The drawing was accompanied by two captions: one above the image saying “Charlie Hebdo are not people — they're monsters!” and one at the bottom adding: “Hell welcomes Charlie Hebdo.”
The original Charlie Hebdo cartoons were published on Nov. 4, sparking outrage among many Russian officials due to their explicit content and 'blasphemous' nature.
Petrenko's stunt soon drew criticism from the Ukrainian cartoonist Yury Zhuravlyev, who pointed out an uncanny similarity between the drawing and his earlier work criticizing the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his entourage.
Zhuravlev told Dozhd TV that he expected the lawmaker to issue a public apology.
Petrenko's aide said that the cartoon “could be used, given that it was freely available on the Internet,” the Meduza online newspaper reported Wednesday.
“Given that it is freely available, it can be used along with comments, shared with other Internet users. Printing it out and passing it as your own work — in my opinion, that is plagiarism,” Zhuravlyev responded in an interview with Dozhd.
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