Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin yesterday 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 long-time ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was convicted in December 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 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, “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 is punishable by up to five years in prison, while “deliberately spreading false information” about it, for which Yashin was convicted, carries a maximum 15 years.
Yashin, 39, yesterday said he had told the truth in his video and that his conscience was clear.
He asked for the 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 Yashin’s 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.
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 pro-Western subversives who deserve prison.
Lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, who had defended Kara-Murza in court and has also previously defended Yashin and Navalny, said he had had to leave Russia a few days before the verdict.
“Both the prosecutor and the trial judge ... said it was necessary not only to remove me from the Chamber of Lawyers but also to consider opening a criminal case,” he told the US broadcaster Voice of America in an interview posted on YouTube.
“I received a warning through one politician that there was interest from at least one deputy prosecutor-general who was overseeing our case...
“Right now in Russia, an attack is being waged not only against journalists — just as there was previously against politicians — but also against lawyers. Several of my colleagues are already in detention.”
In court, Yashin said Russia would one day be a 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.”