Dmytro Gordon. Photo: Facebook
A Moscow court has sentenced one of Ukraine’s most prominent interviewers to 14 years in prison after finding him guilty in absentia of inciting a war of aggression, justifying terrorism, inciting hatred and spreading false information about the Russian military, independent news outlet SOTAvision reported on Monday.
Dmytro Gordon was indicted on four charges over a video he made in March 2022, in which he called on the United States to start a nuclear war with Russia. In an interview two months later, he also accused the Russian military of killing civilians in Ukraine.
Gordon was placed on Russia’s wanted list in July 2022, when the opening of a criminal case against him was announced. In April of the same year, his name was added to the national register of “terrorists and extremists”.
A prominent Ukrainian journalist whose interviewees have included Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Gordon has a YouTube channel with over 4 million subscribers, where he interviews public figures. He is also the founder of his own Kyiv-based news outlet, Gordon.
In September 2022, Gordon said he had filed a lawsuit against Russia at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in response to his criminal prosecution in Russia. “Such measures have not been used against any Ukrainian in the history of independent Ukraine,” he said in a November 2022 interview.
“I would like to remind you: they opened a criminal case against me under three or four articles, they put me on the register of extremists and terrorists, they put me on the wanted list, they arrested me in absentia, they declared me a ‘foreign agent’,” Gordon said in the same interview. “A citizen of Ukraine — a foreign agent!”.
