Radio Liberty vox pop contributor given 5 years in prison for comments on war

A court in Moscow has resentenced a Russian man who gave a street interview to Radio Liberty to five years in prison for spreading “false information” about the Russian army, after prosecutors challenged his initial sentence, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Tuesday.

Yury Kokhovets, who told the broadcaster during a street survey in July 2022 that the Russian military had shot “civilians for no reason at all” in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha and that the Russian government “bombs shopping centres” while claiming to “fight nationalists”, was sentenced in April to five years of correctional labour, meaning he would have to live and work at a special correctional centre, a facility that is far less strict that prison.

Prosecutors subsequently appealed the sentence handed down in April, arguing that it had been too lenient and requesting a 5.5-year prison sentence. Meanwhile, Kokhovets’s attorney Yelena Sheremetyeva argued that her client should be acquitted, stressing that Kokhovets had expressed his opinion without knowing that the interview would be broadcast, independent news outlet SOTAvision reported in early September.

Kokhovets said in court on Tuesday that he was not aware he could be charged for speaking about the war at the moment of the interview, and that he did not know the interview would be published online. “Had I known they were going to publish it, I wouldn’t have approached them,” he said.

Sheremetyeva called the new sentence “excessively harsh” and added that Kokhovets’s defence would appeal it.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a US-funded news outlet, was branded a “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities in 2017 and designated an “undesirable” organisation in February.

RFE/RL asked Moscow residents including Kokhovets for their thoughts on the war in Ukraine, posting a video of the results on their Telegram channel on 11 July 2022, which led to the prosecution of Kokhovets in March 2023.