The Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow sentenced Yabloko deputy chairman Maksim Kruglov to seven years in a general-regime penal colony in a case over alleged military “fakes,” according to a Mediazona courtroom correspondent. Prosecutors had earlier asked for an eight-year prison term.
In addition to the prison sentence, the court barred Kruglov from administering internet resources for three years. The criminal case was based on two social media posts the politician published shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine.
One of the posts referred to Russia’s alleged war crimes in Bucha. In the other, Kruglov published photographs of destroyed Mariupol and cited UN figures on dead soldiers.
Final statement
In his final court statement, Kruglov did not admit guilt. He said that in the post about the dead he had relied on UN data as a trustworthy source of information. Speaking about the Mariupol post, he noted that he had used the wording “apparently” when describing the destruction, which in Russian indicates an assumption and allows for the possibility of error.
Commenting on the Bucha post, Kruglov recalled that it began with the words:
“Some kind of hell in the city of Bucha.”
He said he still could not describe what happened there in any other way. According to him, the same post also called for an international investigation into war crimes, which, he argued, showed that he did not know who exactly was responsible for what had happened.
Kruglov also said that, in his view, the indictment contains not a single word proving a motive of political hatred, the factor that makes the charge more severe.
“It turns out that political disagreement is identical to hatred. That is powerful. That is serious. It is a marker of the development of our country’s political system,” he said.