A Russian blogger was sentenced to more than eight years in prison on Friday.
The reason for the arrest was apparently that, according to a court, he had spread “false information” about Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine. The blogger, named Alexander Nosdrinov, has now been “sentenced to eight years and six months imprisonment in a general penal colony,” according to the court in the Russian city of Krasnodar. Furthermore, the 38-year-old blogger was banned from working in the media for four years.
The convicted blogger ran a small YouTube channel where he posted videos of highway patrol officers apparently breaking the law. He was then arrested in March 2022 after investigators accused him of posting a photo online of destroyed buildings with the caption “Ukrainian cities after the arrival of the liberators”.
Woman denies crime
In an interview with the independent Russian online medium Sota, the wife of blogger Nosdrinov emphatically denied the publication of such photos. According to her, the arrest of her husband was rather an act of revenge by the police for the published videos showing the officers’ misconduct.
Image: kremlin.ru, Совещание по развитию дальневосточных городов (2023-03-14) 01, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (image size modified)
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