Russian authorities appear to be intensifying their crackdown on critics of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine by prosecuting individuals quoted by international media.
Yuri Kokhovets, charged for giving an antiwar comment to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, appears in court in Moscow in August 2023. A Moscow court on Monday sentenced a man to five years of compulsory labor for giving an antiwar comment to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty two years ago — a criminal prosecution that showed the Russian government intensifying its crackdown on dissent and that could have a chilling effect on international media still operating in the country.
Kokhovets, in reply, said he found justifications for the war given by President Vladimir Putin and other officials to be baseless, and he said that hostilities should cease immediately.“Our government unleashed this: Putin and his gang of thugs. Russia created all these problems for itself,” Kokhovets said. “For 20 years, they’ve been saying that NATO is a big problem. I don’t see any problems in NATO at all; they will not capture anyone.
Law enforcement officials have focused particularly on remarks about Bucha, a city near Kyiv, where Russian soldiers were accused of committing atrocities, including murdering civilians, during the early weeks of the invasion.Multiple cases were prosecuted retrospectively, sometimes months after critical remarks had been made as Putin and other Russian officials insisted that the alleged atrocities in Bucha were provocation staged by the West and denied the Russian military’s involvement.
Prosecutors demanded a prison sentence of five and a half years but the court on Monday delivered a markedly lenient verdict in today’s Russia by sentencing Kokhovets to five years of mandatory labor, and deducting 10 percent from his salary to be paid to the government.“My whole life has been a mishap, but I had to get lucky at least once in my life; here I walked along the razor’s edge,” Kokhovets told reporters following the verdict.
Both Deutsche Welle and RFE/RL have been declared “foreign agents” by the Russian government, a label widely applied to media organizations and individual journalists critical of the Kremlin who are deemed to be under foreign influence.Moscow’s hunt for war critics has extended far beyond Russia’s borders. European authorities last week arrested a group of people suspected of attacking a Russian political opposition figure Leonid Volkov outside his home in Vilnius, Lithuania.
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