Russia drops criminal charges for spreading ‘fake news’ about Russian army for first time

The Nizhny Novgorod directorate of the Russian Investigative Committee has dropped criminal charges against a local resident accused of spreading “fake news” about the Russian army, head of the Agora human rights group Pavel Chikov said on his Telegram channel.

This is the first time Russia has dropped charges for spreading “fake news” about the army, human rights defenders note. The case was closed due to the lack of evidence.

The resident of Nizhny Novgorod was hit with these charges after he had posted links to a video depicting the events in Ukraine’s Bucha in April of this year.

The charges were dropped because the video was published “before the official rebuttal of the events that took place in the cities of Irpin and Bucha in Ukraine by the Russian Defence Ministry,” Chikov wrote.

Attorney Yevgeny Gubin managed to prove that the Nizhny Novgorod resident had no intent of spreading fake news about the Russian armed forces.

Bucha, a town in the Kyiv region, was under Russian occupation for over a month following the start of the Russian invasion on 24 February.

Numerous bodies with signs of torture were discovered in the city in April, after Russian troops had withdrawn from the region. Some of the bodies had their hands tied. Oleksandr Pavliuk, who served as head of the Kyiv regional administration at the time, said that over 400 people had been killed in Bucha. Kyiv regional police chief Andriy Nebitov informed that over 900 people had been killed in the Kyiv region.

The Russian Defence Ministry denies all accusations, stating that Bucha was allegedly “staged by the Kyiv regime for Western media”.