The Basmanny District Court of Moscow sentenced Pussy Riot member and former Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov in absentia to 8.5 years in prison in the case of military “fakes” (clause “e” of Part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code); He was also banned from writing on the Internet for four years. This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom.
State prosecutor Alexander Kienko asked Verzilov to be sentenced to nine years in a general regime colony and banned from writing on the Internet for four years. Lawyer Leonid Solovyov advocated for the acquittal of his client. “I ask you to acquit Pyotr Yuryevich Verzilov for lack of evidence of a crime,” he said after asking for a term.
Judge Natalia Dudar, leaving for the deliberation room, promised to return “within fifteen minutes” with a verdict. As a Mediazona correspondent noted, the audience was not taken out of the hall.
The reason for the case was two tweets and two posts on Instagram with a story about the murders in Bucha. According to security officials, the 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 citizens forming a false opinion about the goals and objectives of the special military operation.”
At the end of August, it became known that the prosecution, as evidence of Verzilov’s guilt, 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 the publications of Dye, Verzilov’s posts were not mentioned in it.
At one of the meetings on the case of a Pussy Riot participant, the leader of the pro-government movement SERB, Igor Beketov, known as Gosha Tarasevich, spoke. He claimed that he was “shocked” by the photo of Verzilov with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and reports of the involvement of the Russian military in the killing of civilians in Ukraine.
Before the debate, the defense provided the judge with a statement from a Ukrainian citizen who was in Bucha. Judge Natalia Dudar included the documents, despite the objections of state prosecutor Alexander Kienko.
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 he himself studied at a local school, after which he received Canadian citizenship. In September 2021, the Ministry of Justice added Verzilov, along with Mediazona and the publication’s editor-in-chief Sergei Smirnov, to the register of “foreign agents.”