By Andrew Osborn
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin on Wednesday predicted he would one day help build a “new and free Russia” after losing his appeal against an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence on a charge of spreading false information about the army.
Yashin, a longtime ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was arrested in June 2022 for statements that he made on his YouTube channel about war crimes allegedly committed by Russian forces in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.
Moscow denies that its forces have committed war crimes or attacked civilians in what it calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine, saying such allegations have been fabricated to damage its reputation.
Yashin’s appeal was turned down two days after his fellow Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was jailed for 25 years on charges of treason and also, like Yashin, “knowingly spreading false information”. Kara-Murza had made speeches in the United States and Europe accusing Russia of bombing civilians in Ukraine.
Moscow introduced sweeping censorship laws shortly after sending its armed forces into Ukraine in February last year, which have since been used to silence dissenting voices.
Discrediting the army can be punished by up to five years in prison, while the offence of “spreading deliberately false information” about it, for which Yashin was convicted, carries a maximum sentence of up to 15 years.
DEFIANCE
Yashin, 39, on Wednesday said he had told the truth about the war in Ukraine in his video and that his conscience was clear.
He asked for the Russian Defence Ministry’s main spokesman – whose words he was accused of contradicting – to be summoned to the court, something the judge swiftly rejected along with his other requests.
The judge also rejected his overall appeal, according to a Reuters reporter at the court.
“The sentence handed down to me is staggering: eight-and-a-half years in prison for a 20-minute speech on the Internet. I have met plenty of murderers, rapists and burglars in prison who have received lesser sentences,” Yashin told the court, according to a copy of his speech on his Telegram channel.
Russian pro-government politicians cast the conflict in Ukraine as an existential struggle with the West, and have portrayed people like Yashin who question Moscow’s actions as part of a pro-Western “fifth column” who deserve prison.
After Yashin was convicted in December, President Vladimir Putin was asked about the case during a news conference, and asked who Yashin was.
In court, Yashin predicted that Russia would one day be a very different place.
“The pendulum of history is inexorable and I know that, once I am eventually freed, I will be one of those who will have to clean up this whole bloody mess,” he said.
“I will become one of those who will build a new, free and happy Russia on the ruins of Putinism.”
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
