During the debate in the Basmanny District Court of Moscow, the state prosecution asked that Pussy Riot participant and former Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov be sentenced to nine years in a general regime colony in the case of military “fakes” (clause “e” of Part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom.
The prosecutor’s office also asked to ban Verzilov from writing on the Internet for four years.
The reason for the case was two tweets and two posts on Instagram with a story about the murders in Bucha. According to the security forces, 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 posts on social networks about what is happening in Ukraine, Verzilov “created a real the threat of citizens forming a false opinion about the goals and objectives of a 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 spoke about the publications of the Dye, Verzilov’s posts were not mentioned in it.
At one of the meetings on the case of the 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.
The former publisher of Mediazona left Russia in 2020 after a series of searches at 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 included Verzilov, along with Mediazona and the publication’s editor-in-chief Sergei Smirnov, into the register of “foreign agents.”