A critical look swept aside by the Russian justice system. Sergei Mikhailov, a Russian journalist from Gorno-Altaisk, in Altai, paid a heavy price for daring to criticize the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine in his articles. Which he fully assumes.
A journalist for Listok, a local online newspaper, this 48-year-old man was sentenced very harshly by the Gorno-Altaisk court. According to the Russian prosecutor’s office on Friday, August 30, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison, to be served “in a general regime colony”.
In a statement released on Telegram, the Gorno-Altaisk prosecutor’s office claims that Sergei Mikhailov “published on the internet in March and April 2022 articles containing false information” about the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine. A time frame that harks back to the very beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022.
Before his trial, investigators had accused him of being “motivated by political hatred.” In court on Tuesday, the journalist said he had written the articles pointed out by investigators “so that his readers would not fall into lies, take part in the fighting, become murderers and victims, and harm our brotherly Ukrainian people.”
Russia: The founder of the independent Altai newspaper Listok, Sergei Mikhailov, who has been in pretrial detention for 14 months for “false information” about the army, has demanded that the people who started the war against Ukraine be tried in his place. pic.twitter.com/hoswnzFJ3b
Sergei Mikhailov had previously called the conflict in Ukraine a “terrible situation,” according to a verbatim of his remarks published online.
Constant repression
A repression against the press is far from being new in Russia, even if the phenomenon has taken on considerable proportions with the launch of the invasion of Ukraine two and a half years ago. To do this, Moscow has expanded its repressive arsenal by heavily punishing the dissemination of what it considers to be “false information” or the “discrediting” of the armed forces.
Result? According to the count of the specialized NGO OVD-Info, more than a thousand people have been prosecuted in Russia for having criticized the assault of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine. And not only journalists. Almost all major opponents have been imprisoned or forced into exile, and thousands of ordinary Russian civilians have been prosecuted and sentenced to fines or prison terms for publicly demonstrating their disagreement with the Kremlin.
Another particularly recent example is the sentencing of a Russian blogger to five years in prison in early June. Her only crime? Having read on Twitch testimonies of the massacre attributed to Russia in the Ukrainian city of Buchah. She was therefore found guilty of having “spread false information” about the alleged abuses of the Russian army on her channel YokoBovich. As a reminder, the Russian army is accused of having committed a massacre of hundreds of civilians in this Ukrainian city near kyiv, during its retreat from the region in spring 2022.
This article is originally published on fr.news.yahoo.com
