The 2nd Western District Military Court sentenced Mikhail Zharikov, a former employee of the press service of the Nizhny Novgorod hockey club “Torpedo”, to six years in a general regime colony because of posts on social networks. This was reported by OVD-Info with reference to lawyer Alexei Matasov.
The Nizhny Novgorod resident was also banned from writing on the Internet for four years. Zharikov was found guilty of disseminating military “fakes” motivated by hatred (clause “e” of Part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code), public justification of terrorism (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) and two episodes of rehabilitation of Nazism (clause “c” of Part 2 of Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code) . The state prosecution asked that he be sentenced to eight years in prison.
As OVD-Info writes, the case of military “fakes” against Zharikov was opened on July 6, 2023. The reason for it was a post on Instagram, where a Nizhny Novgorod resident talked about the murders, rapes and looting that the Russian military is committing in Ukraine. Because of the publication about the bombing of Zakhar Prilepin’s car, the man was charged with an article about justifying terrorism.
The security forces added two episodes of rehabilitation of Nazism to the case after seeing violations in Zharikov’s posts on VKontakte. Nizhny Novgorod wrote about the actions of the Soviet army during the liberation of Prague in World War II. He claimed that the city was liberated by an armed formation under the command of Andrei Vlasov and the Czechoslovak resistance.