2024-07-23 17:52:06
A Moscow court found Russian journalist Mikhail Zigar guilty in absentia of intentionally spreading false information about the Russian army and sentenced him to eight and a half years in prison, Reuters reported.
He was charged over a post on Instagram in April 2022 in which he said Russian forces had committed war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
According to Kiev and the West, Moscow’s troops committed a series of atrocities against the civilian population in Bucha, an upscale suburb of the Ukrainian capital, before withdrawing west of Kiev in 2022. The Kremlin denies its forces committed war crimes and downplayed allegations of events in Bucha as “staging and fake news”.
The press service of the Moscow court indicated that Zigar, who left Russia after President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine in 2022, will be arrested and sent to a penal colony for 8.5 years if he returns to his homeland you are
Forty-three-year-old Zigar is the former editor-in-chief of Dozhd, an independent Russian-language television station, and the author of several books about Russia.
Like Dozhd, his former employer, Russian authorities have declared Zigar himself a “foreign agent”, a designation that has carried a negative connotation since Soviet times and leads to various problems for anyone placed in that category.
Zigar highlighted the criminal case against him in March with a post on the X social network.
“The Russian authorities opened a criminal case against me. The funny thing is that they accuse me of spreading ‘fake news’ about the Russian army because I wrote about the atrocities in Bucha – two years ago. Well, better late than never.”
Since the start of the war, which it calls a special military operation, Russia has stepped up its crackdown on people it considers dangerous dissidents. Courts sometimes impose long prison sentences on people found guilty of violating laws to combat the spread of fake news, BTA reported.
Earlier this month, Moscow-born American journalist Masha Gessen was sentenced in absentia by a Russian court to eight years in prison for comments about Bucha in a YouTube interview with a popular Russian blogger.