Russia sentenced a well-known journalist to eight years in prison for reporting on the war in Ukraine

A Russian court sentenced the well-known journalist in absentia on Wednesday Alexander Nevzorovdeclared a “foreign agent” in Russia, to eight years in prison for spreading false “news” about the Armed Forces immersed in the military campaign in Ukraine, the Interfax agency reported today.

Judge Yevgenia Nikolaeva of the Moscow Basmanny District Court read the sentence against the journalist, who lives outside of Russia, for having “publicly disseminated, under the guise of reliable reports, deliberately false information about the actions of the Russian Armed Forces ”.

The judgment includes the ban for Nevzorov to manage Internet resources for four years.

The prosecutor’s office, which had requested nine years in prison the day before, affirms that the journalist, “expressing his disagreement with the special military operation which is being carried out by the Russian Federation and acting on the grounds of political hatred,” he posted on his Telegram and YouTube channels “fake news” intended to be viewed “by an unlimited number of people in the form of text and video.”

According to the indictment, it was “deliberately false information about the deliberate destruction by the Russian military of the maternity hospital N3 in Mariupol and the civilian population in Buchakyiv region”.

The defense insisted on the acquittal by stressing that Nevzorov used information from open sources.

The journalist had a well-known program called 600 seconds on Leningrad television that was seen throughout the USSR and collaborated with the Echo Moscow radio station, whose closure was forced last year by the Kremlin structures.

The informer was placed on the list of wanted persons and arrested in the absence of Russia.

Nevzorov has been very critical of Russia’s war intervention in Ukraine, but years ago he maintained a nationalist positionwhich in 2015 he regretted, and supported Vladimir Putin during his presidential campaign in 2012.

In 2014, he nonetheless opposed Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula and in April 2021 warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would end in tragedy and humiliation for Russia.

In March 2022, he was accused of distributing false information about the Armed Forces.

(With information from EFE)

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