Russian politician charged with ‘abusing press freedom’ after calling for end to war in Ukraine

A politician in the Russian Volga region city of Samara has been charged with “abusing press freedom” for a speech he gave in the regional assembly condemning Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine, independent news channel 7x7 Horizontal Russia reported on Thursday.

Grigory Yeremeyev, 69, a member of the Democratic Party of Russia, a party founded in the 1990s that is currently unrepresented at any level of government in the country, faces a fine of up to 100,000 rubles (€1,080) over a speech he gave in late December when he was the only politician to accept the annual invitation to parties not represented in the Samara Regional Duma to address the assembly.

Yeremeyev also posted a transcript of his speech online, in which he said that Vladimir Putin had “long since understood the error” of invading Ukraine, but was now unable to withdraw his troops without going down in history as having lost the war.

Yeremeyev suggested that the Samara deputies should apologise to their constituents, “share responsibility for the failure with Putin” and advise him to stop the invasion, and urged the body to encourage other regional parliaments to vote for a similar initiative.

Continuing the war would lead to the “moral degradation of both parties to the conflict” as propaganda and the daily murder of hundreds of citizens “become commonplace”, Yeremeyev warned. He said that if NATO could not defeat Russia, and vice versa, “the special military operation would crush human lives and destinies” and was “an irrational waste of financial resources”.

According to Gennady Kotelnikov, a deputy at the Samara Regional Duma from the ruling United Russia party, the deputies “roundly condemned” his words and unanimously agreed to alert law enforcement. The Duma also passed a resolution calling for Yeremeyev to be assessed as a “foreign agent”, and describing his speech as “a deliberate attempt to discredit” the assembly.