TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — A Moscow court has sentenced a student activist to eight and a half years in prison for his social media posts criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine, in the latest crackdown on dissent.
Dmitry Ivanov, 23, was convicted of spreading false information about the Russian military, which is a crime under a law passed by the Russian parliament a week after the invasion began.
The law has been used to prosecute individuals who deviate from the official narrative of the conflict that the Kremlin still calls “the special military operation”.
Prominent opposition activists such as Ilya Yashin, who is serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is in prison awaiting trial, have also been charged with spreading false information about the army.
The indictment against Ivanov was based on his posts on the social network Telegram calling Russia’s campaign in Ukraine a ‘war’ and discussing attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, war crimes in Kyiv suburbs such as Bucha and Irpin, and attacks on the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia. Power plant. Most were repeats of messages from other sources.
When he was arrested in April 2022, Ivanov was a student at Lomonosov Moscow State University, one of the largest in Russia, known as MSU. He had a channel on Telegram called MSU Protest.
First, he was detained for 10 days for organizing an unauthorized act, then for 25 days for the same charge, and finally imprisoned for the messages on the social network.
In prison, he was unable to take his final exams or present his thesis. He was expelled from the university.
In his final statement to the court last week, Ivanov dismissed the charges against him as “absurd” and said the crime for which he was being tried “should not exist”. Rejecting the charge, which “from the first word to the last contradicts reality”, Ivanov said that “for my part, I ratify every word I wrote a year ago”.