The Tselinny District Court of the Kurgan Region sentenced 33-year-old Alexei Filyugin to one year and six months of forced labor in a criminal case about “discrediting” the army and military “fakes,” this was reported on the website of the regional department of the Investigative Committee.
Filyugin was sentenced on September 28. The court decided that 20% of a villager’s salary during forced labor would be withheld in favor of the state. A resident of the village of Ust-Uyskoye was found guilty of “repeatedly posting false information about military operations on his social network page” from March to April 2023, as well as information that “discredits” the army (Part 1 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code and part 1 of article 280.3 of the Criminal Code).
Filyugin was charged on July 7, and then he was sent to a pre-trial detention center, as reported on the Investigative Committee website. In the resolution imposing a preventive measure, as the SOVA human rights center noted, the arrest was justified by the fact that Filyugina was born in Kazakhstan, where he has relatives, lives in the border area and, “according to operational information, expressed intentions to hide in the Republic of Kazakhstan.” .
In June, the Tselinny District Court fined Filyugin 35 thousand rubles under the administrative protocol for “discrediting” the army (Part 1 of Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Code) because of five posts and a comment on VKontakte, two of which were written from his own page, and four more by a user named Alexey Yakovlev.
They were talking, among other things, about a video called “Putin Hitler” and an image with the inscription “Russia was so proud of the phrase “our grandfathers fought…” Can you imagine if our children were told in 1945 that the Russians would bomb Ukraine, the Belarusians would supply them with shells, and the Germans would help the Ukrainians defend themselves in this war!”
The court materials also mention a picture in which a man extends his index finger forward with the words “Are you ready to die for the dictator? I started the war, you will die! and the post “The bodies of 1,288 killed civilians were found in the Kyiv region, most of them were shot — head of the regional police Andrei Nebitov. Russians, remember — your silence is the justification for the crimes of your marauding army. No one will forget these crimes.”
It is unknown which posts became the reason for the criminal prosecution of Filyugin.