A Russian newspaper publisher was sentenced to eight years in prison by a Siberian court on Friday after his newspaper reported on Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine, local media and human rights activists reported.
A court in the city of Gorno-Altaysk has convicted Sergei Mikhailov, a prominent journalist in the Siberian Altai region and publisher of the local newspaper Listok, or “Palm Leaf” in Russian, of “spreading false information” about the Russian military, human rights group Net Freedoms said.
Under a new law passed days after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it has become a criminal offense in Russia to criticize the war. Hundreds of Russians, including several journalists, have been prosecuted under the law in a government crackdown of unprecedented scale and severity.
According to OVD-Info, one of the main Russian human rights organizations that tracks political arrests, more than 1,000 people have been criminally prosecuted for their anti-war views since February 2022.
Mikhailov was arrested in April of that year over a series of posts on Listok’s social media pages and a story on Listok’s website that reported Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine, Net Freedoms said. He has vehemently denied the charges, the group said.
Independent Russian news outlet Meduza quoted Mikhailov as saying in his closing statement to the court on Wednesday that “the purpose of the publications is to reveal the truth to my compatriots” about the war and to “protect them from the sophisticated lies of Russian state propaganda.”
“All these years I have been writing what I consider to be the truth, albeit bitter,” Mikhailov said, according to Meduza.
