On June 28, the Lefortovo District Court of Moscow received materials from the case regarding the dissemination of “fake stories” about the Russian army based on political enmity (clause “d”, part 2 of article 207.3 of the Criminal Code) against pensioner Konstantin Seleznev. OVD-Info drew attention to this.
Security forces searched Seleznev’s house on October 3, 2023, and the next day the man was sent to a pre-trial detention center.
Initially, the pensioner was charged with two posts on his personal page on VKontakte. In one of them, he copied his own letter to the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, in which he talks about the UN report “on the crimes of Russian military personnel in three regions of Ukraine.” In the text, the man also cites an investigation by The New York Times journalists about the killings of civilians in Bucha .
Seleznev titled the second publication with the words “Letter to Putin as the leader of a terrorist state.” In this post, a man criticizes the President of the Russian Federation for assigning an honorary name to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade. “Let me remind you that, according to the court decision, it was the Buk of this brigade that shot down the Boeing of flight MH17 (killing 298 people). Let me remind you that, according to the investigation, it was you, Vladimir Putin, who gave the order to transport this Buk from the 53rd brigade to the territory of Ukraine,” the man wrote.
The investigation into the case was completed in May. The post about the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade was excluded from the final accusation.
You can write a letter to a man:
Konstantin Anatolyevich Seleznev, born in 1960
127 081, st. Vilyuyskaya 4, Moscow, pre-trial detention center-4 “Bear”.
- 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 950 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.