MOSCOW (Reuters) – A court in Moscow said on Tuesday it had found Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar guilty in absentia of knowingly distributing false information about the Russian army and sentenced him to 8-1/2 years in prison.
The charges against Zygar stem from an Instagram post he wrote in April 2022 about what he said were war crimes committed by Russian forces in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
Kyiv and the West say Moscow’s troops perpetrated multiple atrocities against civilians in Bucha, a leafy suburb near the Ukrainian capital, before withdrawing further west in 2022. The Kremlin denies its forces are guilty of war crimes and has dismissed the Bucha allegations as “a set up and a fake.”
Moscow’s court service said on Tuesday that Zygar, who left Russia after President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, would be arrested and sent to a corrective penal colony for 8-1/2 years if he returned to Russia.
Zygar, 43, is a former editor-in-chief of Dozhd, an independent Russian-language broadcaster, and author of several books about Russia.
Like Dozhd, his former employer, the Russian authorities have designated him a “foreign agent,” a label with negative Soviet-era connotations which creates various problems for designees.
Zygar made light of the criminal case against him in March in a post on X.
“Russian authorities opened a criminal case against me. What’s funny – they accuse me of spreading ‘fake news’ about (the) Russian army because I wrote about atrocities in Bucha – two years ago. Ok, better late then never.”
Russia has intensified a crackdown on people it views as dangerous dissenters since the start of the war, something it calls a special military operation, with courts sometimes handing down long jail terms to people convicted of breaking fake news laws.
Earlier this month, Moscow-born American journalist Masha Gessen was sentenced in absentia by a Russian court to eight years in jail for comments they made in a YouTube interview with a popular Russian blogger about Bucha.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
Comments