Veteran human rights activist Oleg Orlov was sentenced to two and a half years in prison by a Moscow court on Tuesday after he was found guilty of defaming Russia’s armed forces in a trial that international observers condemned as politically motivated.

Orlov, 70, has served for more than two decades as one of the leaders of the human rights organization Remembrance. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and a year later the organization was banned in Russia and disbanded.

Orlov was handcuffed after the verdict and the court ordered his immediate detention, the memorial said.

In his closing remarks at the trial on Monday, Orlov denounced Russia’s “freedom strangulation,” which he called a “dystopia.”

The charges against him stem from an article he wrote in 2022 in which he said Russia under President Vladimir Putin had descended into fascism.

The district court initially fined him $1,628 last year but later ordered a retrial, with prosecutors seeking a prison sentence of two years and 11 months.

Mariana Katzarova, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, called Orlov’s trial “a calculated attempt to silence the voices of human rights defenders in Russia.”

Established in 1989, the memorial documents human rights abuses from the days of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to the present day and defends freedom of expression, with a focus on identifying and commemorating individual victims.