Russia uses the law to suppress journalists and activists.
A journalist for an independent Russian news outlet was sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday for writing an article about alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
Roman Ivanov, a staff member at the Online Russian News Network, was convicted of publishing “fake news” about the Russian military under a wartime censorship law passed shortly after the sweeping invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
Russia has used these laws to target journalists and activists who report information that contradicts the Kremlin’s account of Moscow’s alleged special military operations in Ukraine.
The charges against Ivanov stem from articles he wrote about the Butcha massacre in Ukraine, a United Nations war crimes report and Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
The articles were published on the social media accounts of “Chestnoye Korolyovskoye”, a news channel run by Ivanov, who blogs about local issues in Korolev, a small city outside Moscow where he lives.
A prosecutor at the Korolev city court asked for an eight-year prison sentence, RIA Novosti reported.
A human rights group said Ivanov gave another powerful account of what he called Russia’s “crimes” in the Ukraine war during his closing arguments in court on Tuesday.
“Our country has been plunged into an avalanche of grief and misfortune,” Ivanov said, adding that he decided to post about the Bucha incident so that Russians could see the war “beyond fear, pain, sorrow It brings nothing but destruction and loss.”
“We must understand that everything that happens (in Ukraine) is our fault,” Ivanov said.
The text of his speech was posted on the memorial website of one of Russia’s most prominent human rights groups, whose director Oleg Orlov was sentenced last month to two and a half years in prison for “smearing the Russian armed forces.”
Ivanov is the second Russian journalist to be jailed for “fake news” after her colleague Maria Ponomarenko was charged last month with accusing Moscow of bombing a home in Mariupol, Ukraine, in the early months of the invasion. theater and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Another Russian journalist is on trial for encouraging street protests with public calls for “extremism” on Telegram three years ago, the outlet said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
