The Safonovsky District Court of the Smolensk Region fined politician Ilya Yashin 30 thousand rubles. A RusNews correspondent reports this from the courtroom.
Yashin was fined due to the absence of “foreign agent” signs in the posts published on his channel by his associates (Part 4 of Article 19.34 of the Administrative Code). This is his second fine under this article.
The politician himself, via video link from the colony, called the requirement to tag his posts censorship. “On what basis was I, a Russian politician, a Russian patriot, recognized as a foreign agent? For me this stigma is an insult. I have always been loyal to my country, my people. And I remain faithful to them,” he said in court.
Yashin’s microphone was turned off at the hearing after he again spoke about his anti-war position. Before the hearing began, he was also not allowed to finish when the politician was asked about his preferred protest strategy for the elections.
At the last meeting on February 28, after Yashin’s speech about the war, the judge banned audio and video recording.
Ilya Yashin, former head of the Council of Deputies of the Krasnoselsky District of Moscow and associate of Boris Nemtsov, serving a sentence in a criminal case about “fake stories” about the military. In December 2022, he was sentenced to eight and a half years of general imprisonment for a YouTube stream with a story about the murder of civilians in Bucha by the Russian military.