A Moscow court on Thursday sentenced a Russian media publisher to eight years in prison in absentia for criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ilya Krasilshchik, who left Russia after the invasion and now lives in Berlin, is a former publisher of the exiled Russian news outlet Meduza, which is based in Latvia.

Krasilshchik was charged in absentia in April 2022 with “spreading fake news about the Russian military motivated by political hatred” over comments about the massacre of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, by Russian troops.

Spreading “false information” about Russia’s military became a criminal offense in Russia soon after the invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.

Krasilshchik now runs the “Help Desk” project, a media platform and service that helps those impacted by the war in Ukraine.

Besides his previous work at Meduza, he formerly served as editor-in-chief of the Russian lifestyle magazine Afisha.

In addition to the prison sentence, the Moscow court banned him from administering websites for four years.

Responding to the sentence on Twitter, Krasilshchik said he “will now have four years of excuses for why I’m not answering messages.”

The press freedom group the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, called on Russia to drop the charges against Krasilshchik when they were brought against him last year.

“Russia’s new laws criminalizing so-called ‘fake’ information about the war in Ukraine serve only one purpose: to censor and criminalize accurate coverage of the conflict,” Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, said in a statement at the time.

In a Facebook post commenting on the sentence, Krasilshchik said he will not appeal the sentence.

“The circus is over, and to hell with it,” he wrote.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press.
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