A Moscow woman has been released from jail for making a hookah out of a traditional Orthodox Easter cake after a high-level judicial body overturned her three-year prison sentence.

The release on July 3 of Ksenia Belousova by the presidium of the Moscow City Court followed a push for leniency from the Russian Orthodox Church, which had said after her sentencing that it would petition the court on her behalf.

A judge had sentenced Belousova to three years and 25 days in prison in May after finding her guilty of offending the feelings of religious believers. The Moscow Times reported,

The charges stemmed from a video she posted on Instagram showing a hookah with a bowl shaped like a kulich, a traditional Russian Easter pastry.

A hookah, also known as shisha, or waterpipe is a single- or multi-stemmed instrument for heating or vaporizing and then smoking either tobacco, flavored tobacco (often muʽassel), or sometimes cannabis, hashish and opium.

Belousova was initially sentenced to 200 hours of community service, but the judge combined the conviction with a three-year probation sentence that Belousova received in August for drug possession to mandate real prison time.

Then the Moscow City Court's presidium reversed that sentence on July 3 separating the two cases.

The court reinstated the original 200 hours of community service for the Easter cake incident and ordered that the woman serve her drug-related probation separately.

Vakhtang Kipshidze, a spokesperson for the Russian Orthodox Church, said that the church welcomed the court decision.

"We believe that the Russian justice system demonstrated humanism, a traditional value of our society, and took into account Belousova's... letter of repentance to our Church," Kipshidze was quoted as saying by the news outlet Podyom.

Earlier, the exiled news outlet Mediazona reported that Belousova's father is a distinguished police officer, while her brother is a decorated soldier currently fighting in the war against Ukraine.

Belousova had said in court that she "occasionally donates to charities," including those that support Russia's war effort in Ukraine.

The Russian Orthodox Church openly supports the full-scale invasion that Russia attempted in February 2022 and that accelerated the conflict between Moscow and Ukraine, which was once a part of the Soviet Union.

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