“To find out I was the first one to be charged was both amusing and shocking. I joked that I was officially declared a decent person,” said Veronika Belotserkovskaya, a food entrepreneur and blogger with almost 1 million Instagram followers. She was one of three Russians charged under the new law carrying a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, and that marked an escalation in Russia’s crackdown on anti-war dissent.

The investigative committee said the case was opened against Belotserkovskaya over posts published on her Instagram page that “contained knowingly false information about the use of the Russian armed forces”. Belotserkovskaya, who has fiercely criticised Russia’s action in Ukraine, said the specific charges against her could land her in jail for 10 years.

“I am exactly the type of person Putin had in mind when he launched his speech last night. He wants to frame people like me as traitors, the fifth column,” she said from her house in the south of France, where she settled during the pandemic and where she now runs an upmarket cooking school. “I live a good life, post pretty pictures online about food. They now want to portray me as the face of the ‘decadent west’.”

Belotserkovskaya was referring to the speech the Russian president made on Wednesday in which he called for a “necessary self-purification of society”, aimed at western-minded Russians who weren’t “mentally” with the nation.

“The Kremlin has de-facto brought back the Soviet term of ‘enemy of the state’ by referring to Russian people as ‘national traitors’,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. “We are entering a new phase of a process that has been going on for a while. The goal is to discredit everyone who voices his opposition against Putin.”

Belotserkovskaya said she was “a sensible person. I am definitely not planning on returning to Russia as long as these charges are there”.

She says it was telling that the authorities did not charge a journalist or a politician under the new law, but a food and lifestyle blogger. “They are aiming to punish a much broader swath of society,” she said.