A Smolensk military court has sentenced blogger and ex-employee of Alexey Navalny’s headquarters Sergey Komandirov to six and a half years of imprisonment over justifying terrorism charges for his repost on Russian social media Vkontakte, reports Telegram channel Komandirov’s Case.
During the proceedings, the prosecutor asked for seven years of jail time. The case against the opposition blogger was initiated after he had reposted a video from web-series Judge Gramm to his Vkontakte page, while asking to financially support the series’ creator Karim Yamadaev. According to the investigators, Kamandirov shared a video containing “signs of terrorism justification, terrorism ideology formation, and belief in acceptability of carrying out terrorist activity”.
Komandirov has been held at a Smolensk pre-trial detention facility since October 2021. Later on, he was also charged with such criminal offences as rehabilitation of Nazism, insulting a government official, and incitement to hatred, reports OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights project.