Moscow, Dec 5 (AFP/APP):A Russian prosecutor on Monday requested a nine-year prison sentence for Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin for denouncing Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Ukraine.
“The prosecutor requested nine years of imprisonment,” said a statement on the Telegram account of Yashin, 39, who is one of the last vocal government critics still in Russia.
The verdict is expected on Wednesday, according to the state-run TASS news agency that cited the court in charge of the case.
In April, Yashin described the alleged murder of civilians in Bucha as a “massacre”, referring to a town near the capital Kyiv where civilians were found killed after Russian forces pulled back.
He is being tried under new laws that came into force after February, when fighting intensified in Ukraine, to penalise what the authorities deem to be damaging or false information about the Russian military.
The Moscow city councillor is an ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and was close to Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.
Yashin remained in Russia even after Putin sent troops to Ukraine on February 24 and regularly condemned the Kremlin’s offensive in Ukraine to his 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube.
In a court hearing last month, Yashin flashed a peace sign and said he loved Russia and that he was prepared to “pay with my freedom” to remain in the country.
Prosecutors in November argued that Yashin had “inflicted considerable damage to Russia” and “increased political tensions” when Russian troops were fighting in Ukraine.
That hearing ended with a scuffle between court employees and Yashin’s father when it appeared that guards had told Yashin’s mother to stop talking to her son.
Yashin was detained in late June while walking through a Moscow park.
He is accused of spreading “fake” information about the Russian army under legislation introduced after Putin launched the operation in Ukraine in February.
Tens of thousands of Russians — including many independent journalists — left the country after the beginning of the conflict and when the Kremlin in September said it was drafting thousands of men into the army.
Another Moscow councillor, Alexei Gorinov, was sentenced to seven years in prison in July for speaking out against the Ukraine offensive.
Navalny, 46, is serving a nine-year sentence for embezzlement charges, which is widely seen as politically motivated. His political organisations have been outlawed.
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