The editor of a Russian newspaper has been sentenced by a Siberian court to eight years in prison after his paper reported on Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine, local media and human rights activists reported.
The Gorno-Altaysk city court has convicted Sergei Mikhailov, a prominent journalist from Siberia’s Altai region and editor of the local daily Listok, or “Pamphlet” in Russian, of “spreading false information” about the Russian military, rights group Net Freedoms said.
Under a new law adopted days after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022, criticism of the war has become a crime. Hundreds of Russians, including many journalists, have been prosecuted under the law, in a government crackdown of unprecedented scale and harshness.
According to OVD-Info, one of Russia’s leading human rights groups that tracks political arrests, more than 1,000 people have been implicated in criminal cases for their anti-war stance since February 2022.
Mikhailov was arrested in April of that year for a series of posts on Listok’s social media pages and for an article published on the paper’s website in which he reported on Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine, according to Net Freedoms. Mikhailov has vehemently denied the accusations, the group said.
Independent Russian news outlet Meduza reported, citing Mikhailov in his final statement filed Wednesday with the court, that “the purpose of the publications is to reveal to my compatriots the truth” about the war and “to protect them from the sophisticated lies of Russian state propaganda.”
“All these years I have written what I consider to be the truth, no matter how bitter it may be,” Mikhailov said, according to Meduza.
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– 2024-09-03 23:10:27
