Moscow, Russia [123RF]
Moscow, Russia [123RF]

The deputy leader of Yabloko, Russia's liberal opposition party, has been sentenced to prison after posting criticism of the war in Ukraine on social media.

The Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow sentenced Maxim Kruglov, 39, deputy leader of Yabloko and a former Moscow city council member, to seven years in prison on Wednesday on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military, according to AFP.

Kruglov was arrested last October in connection with two social media posts he made in April 2022.

He denied the charges throughout the proceedings, saying the posts were simply calls to investigate what had happened.

One post condemned civilian casualties caused by the war in Ukraine. The other criticized the actions of Russian forces in Bucha, a city on the outskirts of Kyiv where hundreds of civilian bodies were found after Russian troops withdrew.

Kruglov is among the senior Yabloko figures to have faced legal action by Russian authorities since last year.

19-year-old antiwar activist also sentenced to 2 years, 8 months last year

Meanwhile, in April last year, a Russian court sentenced Darya Kozyreva, a 19-year-old antiwar activist, to two years and eight months in prison.

A court in St. Petersburg found Kozyreva guilty of repeatedly defaming the Russian military and handed down the sentence, according to Reuters.

In her final statement, Kozyreva said, "I am not guilty. My conscience is clear."

Earlier, Kozyreva had been fined 30,000 rubles (about $338) for posting Ukraine-related content online and was subsequently expelled from the medical faculty of St. Petersburg State University.

In the second year of the war, local security authorities also arrested her on charges of attaching verses from "Testament" — a poem by Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's national poet — to his statue.


yul@heraldcorp.com