A criminal case was opened against Vladislav Sinitsa, who was sentenced to 5 years for a tweet about the children of security forces.

A criminal case was opened against Vladislav Sinitsa, who is serving a sentence in Kostroma penal colony No. 1, for calls for extremism (Part 2 of Article 280 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by the Network Freedoms project.

According to investigators, Sinitsa, while in the medical unit, registered an account on Twitter. From there, for several days, he “negatively characterized military personnel and employees of the Russian Guard, and also called for violent actions against Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation as a whole.”

The man categorically denies the accusations. As Network Freedom writes, the account appearing in the case file was registered in October. On October 13, the first tweet appeared in it - a quote from the very post for which Sinitsa was sentenced to five years in prison. Until October 24, about fifty tweets were published on it, after which the account was not updated. According to the man's defenders, evidence of his guilt may be falsified.

In September 2019, a court in Moscow sentenced Vladislav Sinitsa to 5 years in prison for inciting hatred against security forces and their relatives with the threat of violence (clause “a” of Part 2 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code). According to the prosecution, he used the nickname “Max Steklov” and wrote a tweet about a snuff video with the children of a “valiant defender of law and order” in response to a question about the advisability of de-anonymizing police officers.

Sinitsa himself insisted that he did not call anyone to do anything, but only “analyzed the facts of world history” and came to the conclusion that if the beatings of protesters by security forces continued, “popular unrest” could begin.

Experts from the Center for Independent Expertise and the Center for Forensic Expertise and Research criticized the examinations that were prepared by the investigation and formed the basis for the man’s charges.