The Military Court of Appeal toughened the sentence for sociologist and editor-in-chief of the Rabkor magazine Boris Kagarlitsky — instead of a fine, he was sentenced to five years in a general regime colony. This was reported by RIA Novosti and SOTAvision.
Kagarlitsky was taken into custody in the courtroom. In addition to the main punishment, he was also banned from administering Internet resources for two years. As a listener who was in court told Mediazona, “the hearing was quite formal, there was a complete feeling that the judge was on Boris Yulievich’s side.” He also added that the sociologist had already paid the fine imposed on him by the first instance.
On December 12, the 2nd Western District Military Court, at an off-site hearing in the Supreme Court of Komi, imposed a fine of 600 thousand rubles on the sociologist in the case of justifying terrorism on the Internet (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code). The prosecutor's office later appealed the verdict. According to the department, Kagarlitsky’s punishment was “unfair due to its excessive leniency.” As the prosecution emphasized, the court did not take into account the nature of the public danger of the crime.
The reason for the criminal prosecution was a video on the Rabkor YouTube channel dated October 19, 2022, entitled “Explosive congratulations to the cat Mostik, Nervous people and events, Attacks on infrastructure.” It talked about the explosion of the Crimean Bridge; the video was later deleted. As Kagarlitsky himself emphasized during the trial, the video hung on the Rabkora channel for 10 months, without raising any questions from the security forces.
Representative of the University Solidarity trade union Pavel Kudyukin said that Kagarlitsky was being judged on the basis of a denunciation Deputy of the Ukhta City Duma from United Russia Leonid Krasnoperov — he spoke at the trial as one of the four prosecution witnesses. The three other witnesses for the prosecution were former employees of Rabkor, and one of them spoke in defense of the editor-in-chief.
The court in Syktyvkar arrested Kagarlitsky on July 26. In September, when the sociologist was already in a pre-trial detention center, a court in Moscow fined him 40 thousand rubles due to the lack of the “foreign agent” label in his publications (Part 4 of Article 19.34 of the Administrative Code).