Russian blogger jailed for 6.5 years for reporting strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets

A Moscow court has sentenced a Russian blogger Andrey Kurshin to six and a half years in prison for spreading “false information” about the Russian military on his popular Telegram news channel, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Tuesday.

Kurshin, who founded the pro-army but war-critical Moscow Calling Telegram channel, was detained last August and placed under house arrest for posts he made about a Russian attack on a maternity ward in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region in November 2022, as well as for detailing a Russian strike on a residential building in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih in July 2023.

“This trial is like a scene from Harry Potter, when Umbridge forced him to write ‘I must not tell lies’ with his own blood,” Kurshin said in court.

Kurshin, who before running a Telegram channel fought in a pro-Russian militia in eastern Ukraine in 2014–2015, appears to have taken a more critical stance towards the Kremlin after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, reporting on Russian strikes on Ukraine, criticising official Defence Ministry statements, and often mocking staunch pro-war propagandists on his channel.

Despite his critical statements about the country’s military leadership, Kurshin appears to have supported the Russian army, and was publicly thanked by a popular military blog for sending first-aid kits to Russian servicemen in February 2023.

While most pro-war Russian bloggers welcomed his arrest, calling Kurshin a “malicious element”, others defended his right to “criticise the decisions” of the Kremlin and the Russian military command.

After Tuesday’s court hearing, Kurshin told reporters that he was “considering” returning to the front in Ukraine as part of a state-wide prisoner recruitment program, but, according to Mediazona, doubted that he’d be accepted, as “the command wouldn’t want to deal with such a controversial case”.