A new criminal case was opened against the poet Aleksand Byvshev under the article on military “fakes” (Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by the “Bloody Lady” telegram channel.
As the project writes, security forces charged Byvshev with a post about the massacres of civilians in Mariupol and Bucha by Russian troops. According to investigators, the man published it on VKontakte between March and April 2022 “in order to undermine the authority and discredit” the authorities and the army.
Since February, Byvshev has been in the Oryol pre-trial detention center in the case of calls for terrorist activities on the Internet ( Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code). A man is being persecuted because of an anti-war poem “To Russian officers or a rhetorical question.” The poet begins the quatrain with the phrase “Rockets are hitting Ukraine” and at the end turns to the Russian military, hoping to find the “Russian Stauffenberg.”
In April, the project “Support for Political Prisoners. Memorial recognized the poet as a political prisoner.
- Alexander Byvshev is a poet and former school teacher. Since 2014, criminal cases have been brought against him several times, five of them because of poems supporting Ukraine and condemning the political situation in Russia. Subsequently, some of the cases were dropped for lack of evidence of a crime.
- Since February 24, 2022—the first day of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—residents of Russian cities have been holding anti-war protests every day and talking about the tragedy online. Anti-war speeches and statements become grounds for criminal prosecution. At the moment, more than 700 people have become defendants in criminal cases initiated due to protest against the war with Ukraine. Read more about this in our infographic .
- Article 207.3 (Public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the armed forces of the Russian Federation) was included in the Criminal Code in March 2022 - in this way the authorities responded to anti-war speeches and statements, as well as the dissemination of information about the war that does not come from official Russian sources. The maximum penalty under this article is 15 years in prison.