A Moscow courtroom sentenced the co-chairman of Memorial, the Russian rights group that was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, to 2 and a half years in jail on Tuesday for “discrediting” Russia’s navy by voicing his opposition to the battle in Ukraine.
Though the Kremlin ordered his group liquidated in late 2021, the co-chairman, Oleg Orlov, 70, selected to remain in Russia after its invasion of Ukraine two years in the past and has continued to criticize his authorities regardless of a local weather of accelerating repression.
In November 2022, Mr. Orlov wrote an article headlined “They Wished Fascism. They Acquired it,” by which he blamed President Vladimir V. Putin and the broader Russian public for the invasion and for permitting the nation to slide “again into totalitarianism.”
Almost a yr later, he was convicted of “repeated discreditation” of Russia’s armed forces. That cost carries a sentence of as much as 5 years in jail, however he was punished solely with a high-quality of 150,000 rubles, about $1,600, due to mitigating components together with his age and his outstanding public profile.
Prosecutors, accusing him of exhibiting “a motive of enmity and hatred towards navy personnel,” requested that he be retried and jailed for 3 years. A Moscow courtroom heeded that request and reheard the case, ensuing within the sentencing on Tuesday.
Mr. Orlov has maintained his innocence and denounced the costs as bogus.
“I don’t plead responsible, and the accusation is just not clear to me,” he instructed the courtroom throughout a listening to in mid-February. “The courtroom, regardless of my requests, was unable to obviously clarify the essence of the costs introduced in opposition to me.”
Rights teams and america ambassador to Russia, Lynne M. Tracy, condemned the sentence.
“In earlier occasions his efforts have been awarded on the highest ranges,” Ms. Tracy mentioned in a press release posted on the embassy’s web site. “In as we speak’s Russia he’s being locked away for them.”
Since Mr. Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine two years in the past, repression has been on the rise in Russia. There are lots of of political prisoners within the nation, in response to Memorial, Mr. Orlov’s group, which was based in the course of the fall of the Soviet Union to doc rights abuses of the Stalin regime.
Greater than 20,000 individuals have been detained for protesting the battle in Ukraine, together with nearly 400 because the demise of Russia’s major opposition determine, Aleksei A. Navalny, was introduced this month.
