Ilia Yashin denounced on his YouTube channel the war crimes committed by Vladimir Putin’s troops in that Ukrainian city
A Moscow court sentenced former councilor and opposition leader Ilia Yashin this Friday to eight and a half years in prison for “spreading false information” about “the actions of the Russian army”. Yashin, 39 years old and one of the few opponents of Vladimir Putin still at large, was the subject of a criminal case opened in July after he denounced the armed forces on his YouTube channel for committing war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
His trial began when he had already spent 15 days in administrative detention on charges of “disobeying the order of a police officer”. At the time, Amnesty International warned that Yashin could be sentenced to 10 years in prison under Article 207.3 of the Penal Code, introduced after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that it was already being used against opponent Aleksei Gorinov, convicted in July of the describing Kremlin actions as a “war”, while Moscow described it as a “special military operation”.
According to the verdict collected by the Russian agency TASS, the Meshchansky convicted Yashin under that article. The prosecution had demanded nine years in prison against the opponent, who refused to plead guilty and claimed that his comments about Bucha are nothing more than his opinion.
Ukrainian authorities have denounced that in March in this city in the Kiev region, nearly 460 civilians were killed by Russian forces during the first weeks of the invasion. The UN has documented at least 50 executions of civilians, while the International Criminal Court is investigating what happened as a war crime.
EU foreign spokesman Peter Stano described Yashin’s sentence as “unacceptable” and demanded his release and those of other Russian political prisoners “immediately and unconditionally”. Similarly, the NGO Human Rights Watch viewed the ruling as part of Putin’s “ongoing effort” to “dismantle and behead the opposition and silence any criticism of the war”.
Source: La Verdad
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