A Moscow court on Monday sentenced writer, journalist and LGBT advocate Masha Gessen in absentia to eight years in prison. The Russian-American citizen, accused of “spreading false information,” was sentenced for discussing, among other topics, the massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha during an interview with a popular Russian blogger. Gessen, who has lived in exile in the United States since 2013, when the Kremlin promoted its first laws against LGBT people, defines herself as non-binary trans and is the author of the book The future is history. Russia and the return of totalitarianism, In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious National Book Award in the United States. On Monday, another Moscow court sentenced a former city councilor in the Russian capital for holding a minute of silence in memory of the Ukrainian victims.
Russian authorities have opened a criminal case against Gessen and have placed the activist on the wanted list by the end of 2023. The Basmanny District Court in Moscow has finally found the writer guilty of “spreading false information” for refuting the official version of the Russian army’s actions in Ukraine. Gessen visited several Ukrainian cities after they had been hit by the Russian invasion, including Bucha itself, Irpin, Gostomel and Kryvyi Rog. “I was not at the front. My goal was to interview people who had suffered war crimes in a calm environment,” the writer explained during the interview with a Russian blogger, in which Gessen stated categorically that there was no possibility that Bucha’s crimes were a setup, as Moscow claims. “For two reasons. There are enough reliable witnesses and we know the names of the victims and their families. All the stories from all the districts of the city are similar. “You visit every house and they tell you a terrible story,” Gessen said. The second reason for the journalist is that she saw the same devastation in Ukraine as in the Syrian conflict: “I am an experienced war reporter, I know the Russian army well. I was not surprised by what I saw in Bucha.”
Born in Moscow, Gessen, 57, a contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker and other American media, announced in 2013 that for security reasons she was returning to the United States, where she had emigrated from the Soviet Union with her family in 1981. A Jew and a strong critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, she has been tried under the same law that the Kremlin has used to imprison many dissidents for “discrediting the actions of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” According to the OVD-Info platform, the authorities have opened at least 1,053 criminal cases against dissidents since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
Actions “typical of a fascist state”
Another Moscow court on Monday sentenced former Moscow councillor Yelena Kotiónochkina, also in absentia, to seven and a half years in prison for having supported a minute of silence against the invasion of Ukraine on 15 March 2022 and describing the actions of Russian troops as “typical of a fascist state”.
Kotionochkina, currently in exile, took part in a small meeting of representatives of the Moscow district of Krasnoselsky, where her colleague Alexei Gorinov, in prison since July 2022, demanded that a children’s competition be cancelled and that a gesture be made in exchange for the children killed during the invasion of the neighbouring country. “Let’s reformulate it —with the slogan— Children against war“I agree with that,” Kotionochkina said ironically when another councillor protested that the children’s painting game had nothing to do with the war that had broken out in Ukraine a few weeks earlier. “I agree with that,” Gorinov replied. Sitting between them was another well-known opposition figure, Ilya Yashin, who was later sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for refuting the official version of the Bucha massacre.
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Kotionochkina fled Russia after security forces searched the municipal building where she worked. The Kremlin’s judiciary also included in its investigation a video released by the dissident about Russian military actions in Ukraine.
That meeting of the seven councillors of the Krasnoselsky district was recorded on the district’s website. Alexei Gorinov, a member of the opposition movement Solidarity, The politician, who promoted the protest, said: “Please tell me, how can we be debating a children’s drawing contest for Children’s Day (…) when, among us, children are being killed every day? For your information, I will tell you that a hundred minors have died in Ukraine, and there are children who have been orphaned. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who participated in World War II,” said the politician, who, at 63 years of age, is serving a long prison sentence and is in a “very worrying” state of health, according to sources close to him who told Morning Express.
The prosecution had requested an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for Kotionochkina, and opposed the request of the politician’s lawyers to have Yashin and Gorinov appear as witnesses. The court sided with the prosecution, which argued that there were “no grounds” for the two former councillors to take part in the trial.
The law “against the dissemination of false information” about the Russian military has been one of the Kremlin’s main legal weapons against the opposition since Moscow approved the new article of the criminal code in early March 2022, at a time when the Russian high command realized that its “special military operation” — the invasion of Ukraine — was failing and there were still anti-war protests on the streets.
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