The prosecutor's office requested eight years in a general regime colony for RusNews journalist Roman Ivanov in the case of military “fakes.” This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom in the Royal City Court of the Moscow Region.
“The purpose of this article is to intimidate civil society” . In Korolev, RusNews journalist Roman Ivanov is being tried in a case of “fake news.”The reason for initiating a case against the journalist was two posts in his telegram channel, published in April 2022 and March 2023, as well as one post in the public “Honest Royal!” on VKontakte in October 2022.
In them he wrote about the killings of civilians in Bucha and other war crimes of the Russian army (clause “d” of part 2 of article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). Since April 2023, Ivanov has been in pre-trial detention.
50-year-old Ivanov himself did not admit his guilt. During questioning in court, he insisted that the post about Bucha did not say that Russian troops were to blame for the deaths. “Nowhere in my editorial opinion is there a statement that these murders were committed by the Russian Armed Forces,” he said.
“I am a journalist, and my task is to provide information to readers. I provide it. Whether it undermines [the military’s] authority or not, that’s up to the person who received the information and analyzed it,” a journalist from the Moscow region spoke at one of the court hearings. “The main task is for him to have it, so that he knows what is happening in the world around him, what decisions are being made.”
Almost entirely the last meeting before the debate was devoted to the linguistic conclusion prepared for the prosecution by experts Tsypkina and Shikhaleeva. Lawyer Katerina Tertukhina pointed out several violations at once: when preparing the report, the experts were warned of liability under the wrong article of the Code of Criminal Procedure; they studied not only the materials provided by the investigation for their conclusion; at one of the previous meetings, expert Tsypkina admitted that the document was prepared “according to a template” and She hadn't even seen his latest version.
In addition, the formal authors of the examination are not officially employed at Kaluga State University, to which the investigation sent a request for the examination. According to the law, Shikhaleeva and Tsypkina could not at all conduct examinations in criminal cases of an “extremist” nature.
Ivanova’s defender argued that the examination was illegal and tried to exclude it from the case file, including challenging the experts, but judge Tatyana Dulkina considered this to be a delay in the process, rejecting all defense requests. She just sighed and promised to “take into account the defense’s arguments when passing a verdict.”
When the defense had already finished presenting evidence, the state prosecutor suddenly summoned investigator Yan Leshchenko for questioning — Roman Ivanov's wife Maria Nekrasova had previously stated that he had put pressure on her.
Judge Tatyana Dulkina forbade the parties to ask the witness any questions that did not directly relate to the interrogation of Nekrasova, she did not even allow Roman Ivanov to ask on what basis investigator Leshchenko confiscated a new phone from his wife after a search — bought to replace the one already seized .
Tertukhina refused interrogation in conditions where she was limited in questions, so to follow Leshchenko only explained to the court with the help of the prosecutor’s tips that he did not put pressure on the witness, and only wrote down in the protocol that she herself spoke. After this interrogation, Roman Ivanov asked the court for additional time to prepare for the debate: “I think a week is enough.” Judge Dulkina gave half an hour to prepare.