(Moscow) A Moscow court on Friday found opponent Ilya Yashin guilty of spreading “false information” about the Russian army by criticizing the offensive in Ukraine, a conviction illustrating the climate of relentless repression in Russia.
The court found Ilia Yashin guilty of having committed the “crime” of disseminating false information about the Russian army, said the president of the court, according to an AFP correspondent on the spot.
The sentence of this charismatic opponent, aged 39, was to be announced at the end of the statement of the verdict, which sometimes takes several hours. The prosecutor had requested nine years in prison.
Mr Yashin’s trial was particularly watched in Russia, as he was one of the last prominent Russian opponents not to have fled the country or not been imprisoned.
A sign of the ambient tension, the trial was marked by several excesses. During a hearing in late November, a scuffle broke out outside the courtroom, with court security officers pinning the opponent’s father to the ground.
Arrested in June and placed in pre-trial detention in July, Mr. Yachine was tried for having denounced during a live intervention on YouTube “the murder of civilians” in the Ukrainian city of Boutcha, near Kyiv, where the Russian army was accused of abuses, which Moscow denies.
Dressed in a gray sweatshirt, handcuffed, Mr. Iachine arrived in court Friday smiling, multiplying winks and hand gestures in the direction of his relatives and even finding the opportunity to joke.
“I believe that the judge does not want to read the verdict,” he said, as the magistrate was slow to enter the courtroom.
“Impunity”
The opponent was prosecuted on the basis of articles of the Criminal Code introduced shortly after the start of the offensive in Ukraine and which punish those who “discredit” the Russian army or “publish false information” about its actions.
These texts are vague and their scope very broad. Critics of the Kremlin see it as a “catch-all” tool to pursue all critical voices.
Despite his arrest, Mr. Yashin continued to harshly criticize the authorities and denounce the military intervention in Ukraine.
At the beginning of November, he accused the Russian judges of being “servants” of power and of giving Mr. Putin a “sense of impunity”.
Mr. Yachine was close to opponent Boris Nemtsov, assassinated in 2015, but also to anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, imprisoned since the beginning of 2021 after surviving poisoning which he attributes to the Kremlin.
His trial was one of many legal cases launched against opposition politicians or private individuals who criticized the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
In July, an opposition municipal deputy in Moscow, Alexei Gorinov, was tried for spreading “false information” about the Russian army after denouncing the conflict in Ukraine and sentenced to seven years in prison.