Because he spoke to the district parliament about the war in Ukraine – and not about a “special operation” – a Moscow local politician had to go to a prison camp for seven years. It is the harshest penalty ever imposed under the controversial Fake News Act.
A member of a Moscow district parliament has been sentenced to seven years in a prison camp for publicly criticizing Russia’s war against Ukraine. The official justification is that Alexey Gorinov “deliberately spread false information about the deployment of the armed forces of the Russian Federation”. This was announced by the competent court in the Russian capital.
Opponents of the government, on the other hand, criticized the verdict as politically motivated and as a pretext to get rid of the critical 60-year-old lawyer. The politician was convicted under a fairly new law criminalizing alleged “fake news” about Russia’s army. Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine at the end of February, several trials have already begun under the controversial and dreaded law.
But Gorinov’s punishment is by far the harshest imposed to date. The background to the investigations against him is a board meeting of the district parliament in mid-March, which dealt with the question of whether there should be a drawing competition for children. Gorinov and a colleague who has since fled abroad spoke out against such entertainment offerings – with reference to the current suffering in neighboring Ukraine.
In the discussion at the time, Gorinov spoke of “war” – and not of a “special military operation” as officially specified by the Kremlin. Recordings of the meeting later ended up on the Internet – and Gorinov’s words were thus considered by the court to have been publicly disseminated. Russian opposition members were shocked by the verdict.
The spokeswoman for the imprisoned Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny, Kira Jarmysch, wrote on Twitter: “Seven years in prison for Alexei Gorinov, who simply called the war ‘war’ – that is really appalling.” Navalny has also repeatedly spoken of war and criticized the bloodshed in Ukraine.
