The leader of the pro-government SERB movement, Igor Beketov, known as Gosha Tarasevich, spoke at the hearing in the case of “fake news” about the army against Pussy Riot member and former Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov. SOTAvision reports this.
The case is being considered in absentia in the Basmanny District Court of Moscow. At the meeting, Tarasevich acted as a witness for the prosecution. He said that he does not run Twitter, but reads other people’s publications on this social network — in particular, Verzilov’s tweets.
The SERB leader added that he was “shocked” by the photo of a Pussy Riot member with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and reports of the involvement of the Russian military in the murder of civilians in Ukraine. In a conversation with SOTAvision, Tarasevich said that in the spring of 2022 he paid attention to Verzilov’s publications and found in them both military “fakes” and “insults of the president.”
Verzilov is accused of spreading military “fakes” motivated by political hatred (clause “e” of Part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). The case was opened because of two tweets and two posts on Instagram with a story about the murders in Bucha. Baza and SHOT initially reported the criminal prosecution of a Pussy Riot member in November. Later, this information was confirmed by the security forces in an oral conversation with Verzilov’s lawyer.
According to security officials, the Pussy Riot participant’s publications contain a message “that could lead to an unreasonable increase in social tension and harm the interests of the Russian Federation.” Also, according to the investigation, by posting on social networks about what was happening in Ukraine, Verzilov “created a real threat of forming a false opinion among citizens about the goals and objectives of the special military operation.”
At the end of August it became known that the charge of As evidence of Verzilov’s guilt, he provided a response from a representative of the Ministry of Defense, who was also present in the case of media manager Ilya Krasilshchik. The document talked about Krasilshchik’s publications; Verzilov’s posts were not mentioned in it.
The former publisher of Mediazona left Russia in 2020 after a series of searches of him and his relatives. Before this, a criminal case was opened against him for failure to notify of his second citizenship (Article 330.2 of the Criminal Code). Peter Verzilov's father lived in Canada, and the Pussy Riot member himself studied at a local school, after which he received Canadian citizenship. In September 2021, the Ministry of Justice included Verzilov, along with the founding company of Mediazona and the editor-in-chief of the publication Sergei Smirnov, into the register of “foreign agents.”