The 39-year-old Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin has been arrested for protesting against the war of aggression against Ukraine.
The Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin.
Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin has been sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in Moscow for allegedly “spreading false news about the army”. The guilt of the accused has been fully proven, the Moscow District Court said on Friday, according to the Mediazona Internet portal. The judge rejected the defense’s objection that these were Yashin’s personal assessments. The public prosecutor had demanded nine years in prison for the opposition politician.
The 39-year-old, who is one of the last remaining prominent opposition figures in Russia, spoke of a political staging of the process. “With this hysterical verdict, the authorities want to scare us all, but in fact they have only shown their weakness,” said the politician on the Telegram channel immediately after the announcement.
Yashin is considered a confidant of the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who is imprisoned in the penal camp. He has protested Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and condemned war crimes by the Russian army. Because the Moscow native publicly denounced the massacre carried out by Russian soldiers in the Kiev suburb of Bucha in a stream in April, the authorities initiated proceedings for defamation of the Russian armed forces in the summer. Since then, Yashin has been in custody.
In a post on his Telegram channel, Yashin urged his supporters to continue opposing the war in Ukraine.
Navalny described the verdict on Twitter as “shameless and lawless”.
1/4 I’ve known Ilya Yashin @IlyaYashin since he was 18. He is probably the first friend I made in politics. Today Yashin got 8.5 years of prison for an anti-war statement on the Internet.
— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) December 9, 2022