Russia jails journalist for eight years over Ukraine war reporting

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A Russian journalist has been sentenced to eight years in prison after his newspaper reported on Russia’s attacks on civilians in Ukraine, a human rights group said.

Prosecutors convicted Sergei Mikhailov in a court in the Siberian city of Gorno-Altaysk for “spreading false information” about the Russian army that was motivated by “political hatred”, the Net Freedoms Project said.

The 48-year-old journalist and editor at local newspaper Listok, or Leaflet, was arrested in 2022 near Moscow for posting on the publication’s Telegram channel and website about the horrors in the Ukrainian cities of Bucha and Mariupol.

Massacres of civilians in both of those locations have been well-documented, with evidence of summary executions and allegations of war crimes.

It became a criminal offence in Russia to criticise the war in Ukraine under a new law that was adopted just days after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.

More than 1,000 people have been implicated in criminal cases over their anti-war stance since the law’s inception, OVD-Info, one of Russia’s leading rights groups that tracks political arrests, has said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at the time of the law’s introduction that it was “urgently needed because of the absolutely unprecedented information war waged against our country”.

Mikhailov has always denied any wrongdoing and was quoted by Russia’s independent news outlet Meduza as saying he has always written what he considers “to be the truth, albeit bitter.”

In his closing statement in court, he said that “the purpose of the publications is to reveal to my fellow countrymen the truth” about the war and to “protect them from the sophisticated lies of Russian state propaganda”.

In a speech in court earlier this week, Mikhailov defended his reporting and said the Russian narrative of calling the Ukrainian leadership “fascist” had “created a whole virtual universe in the information space, and this fog became stronger and stronger.”

In an audio clip of the speech published by Listok on social media, he was heard saying: “My publications were aimed against this fog, so that my readers were not seduced by lies, so that they do not take part in armed conflicts, do not become murderers and victims and so that they do not harm the brotherly Ukrainian people.”

Beyond the prison sentence, the court ordered Mikhailov be banned from working in journalism for four years.