Russian lawyer handed 7-year prison term for speaking out against the Ukraine war on social media

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — A court in Russia on Thursday convicted a prominent lawyer and sentenced him to seven years in prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine on social media, a Russian human rights group reported.

The verdict in the case of Dmitry Talantov, who once chaired a regional association of lawyers in Russia’s central Udmurtia republic, is the latest in the unabating crackdown the Kremlin has unleashed against dissent after sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022. Talantov is one of dozens of Russians arrested under a law adopted just over a week after the invasion that essentially bans any public expression about the war that deviates from the official narrative.

OVD-Info, a Russian rights group that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid, reported Thursday that Talantov was accused of inciting hatred and “spreading false information” about the army — something that had become a criminal offense under the 2022 law — because of several social media posts, in which he condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The lawyer, 63, was arrested in June 2022 and has spent more than two years behind bars.

He has rejected the charges against him, and OVD-Info quoted him as saying in a letter from detention: “I once looked at a photo of a maimed Ukrainian woman and decided that I can’t stay silent anymore. But I remained a lawyer. I published my opinion in way that doesn’t violate the formalistic law. And you know what? It is not my problem that a normal act is perceived by someone as a crime.”

On Thursday, a court in the town of Zavyalovo in Udmurtia, a region about 900 kilometers (roughly 560 miles) east of Moscow, found Talantov guilty and sentenced him to seven years in prison, OVD-Info reported.

According to the group’s data, some 1,100 people have been implicated in criminal cases over their anti-war stance since February 2022. A total of 340 of them are currently behind bars or have been involuntarily committed to medical institutions.

Before his arrest, Talantov was a longtime chair of Udmurtia’s Chamber of Lawyers. He was also part of the team that defended former journalist Ivan Safronov, who was accused of treason in a case that was widely seen as retaliation for his reporting exposing military incidents and shady arms deals. Safronov was convicted in September 2022 and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Also on Thursday, another trial of a Kremlin critic was swiftly nearing its end. The prosecution in the Vladimir region east of Moscow requested a three-and-a-half-year-prison term for Alexei Gorinov, a 63-year-old former member of a Moscow municipal council, on charges of justifying terrorism. This is the second trial for Gorinov; in 2022, he was convicted of “spreading false information” about the army and sentenced to seven years in prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.

The authorities launched a second case against him last year, according to his supporters. He was accused of “justifying terrorism” in conversations to his cellmates about Ukraine’s Azov battalion, which Russia outlawed as a terrorist organization, and the 2022 explosion on the Crimean bridge, which Moscow deemed an act of terrorism.

Gorinov vehemently rejected the accusations during the first hearing in the trial on Wednesday. Independent news site Mediazona quoted him as telling the court that he merely said the annexed Crimean Peninsula was Ukrainian territory and called Azov a part of the Ukrainian army.