A court in the Russian Volga region republic of Udmurtia has sentenced a lawyer who spoke out against the war in Ukraine to seven years in prison, after finding him guilty of spreading “false information” about the Russian army and “inciting hatred”, Russian human rights group First Department reported on Thursday.
Dmitry Talantov, 63, was first charged in June 2022 for several anti-war posts he made on Facebook in which he condemned the actions of the Russian military in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol as “extreme Nazi practices”.
In September 2022, an additional charge for “inciting hatred” against the Russian authorities using his official position was added to Talantov’s docket.
The prosecutors in the case had requested a 12-year prison sentence for Talantov, a former president of the Udmurt Bar Association, who pleaded not guilty at his trial.
The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Russia, Mariana Katzarova, called for Talantov’s acquittal on Wednesday, reminding the Russian authorities that “acts such as expressing a non-violent opinion or peaceful dissent against the war are protected by international human rights law.”
Katzarova added that Russia’s military censorship laws, introduced in March 2022 to criminalise the spread of what it termed “false information” or “discrediting” the military, had been designed solely to “silence dissent in Russia”.
Before his arrest in June 2022, Talantov defended Ivan Safronov, a former investigative journalist for Russian business daily Kommersant, who was convicted of treason in September 2022 for allegedly transferring classified information to Western intelligence agencies and sentenced to 22 years in prison despite repeatedly denying the accusations.