Moscow pensioner imprisoned for 8 years for demanding investigation into Bucha killings

A court in Moscow sentenced a 64-year-old man to eight years in prison on Monday for spreading “false information” about the Russian military over two anti-war posts he made on social media, independent news outlet Mediazona has reported.

In December 2022, Konstantin Seleznyov took to VK, Russia’s largest social media platform, to demand an investigation into the Bucha massacre and cited Western media outlets as well as a UN report detailing the war crimes committed by the Russian military during its month-long occupation of the Kyiv region town. In another post he wrote two months later, Seleznyov called Vladimir Putin “an illegitimate president” and “the head of a terrorist state”.

Seleznyov was arrested in October 2023 and sent to a pretrial detention centre in Moscow, where he was reportedly held in an overcrowded 20-bed cell with 30 other people where inmates had to take turns sleeping.

As is increasingly common in political cases, Seleznyov’s trial was held behind closed doors, with neither activists nor journalists being permitted in the courtroom, in an attempt to minimise the chances of press coverage.

“A man was convicted essentially for recounting what he read in The New York Times and recapping a UN report,” Seleznyov’s lawyer Oskar Cherdzhiev told independent news outlet SOTAvision, describing the verdict as “very cruel”, and saying that his client had “reacted calmly” to the sentence, which he had been expecting.

Russian prosecutors have repeatedly prosecuted those who condemned the Russian war crimes committed in Bucha using the wartime censorship laws that were introduced shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In one case in November, Dmitry Talantov, 63, a lawyer from the Russian Volga region republic of Udmurtia, was sentenced to seven years in prison on the same charge as Seleznyov for condemning the brutality of the Russian military in the Ukrainian cities of Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, which he described as “extreme Nazi practices”.