The Basmanny District Court of Moscow has issued an in absentia verdict in the case of military «fakes» to journalist Dmitry Kolezev, former editor-in-chief of Republic and founder of the Yekaterinburg publication It's my City. According to the Network Freedoms project, he was sentenced in absentia to seven years and six months in prison.
Judge Timur Vakhrameev also banned the journalist, whose YouTube channel has more than 400 thousand subscribers, from administering pages on the Internet for three years.
The persecution of Dmitry Kolezev, who left the country because of the war, became known in November 2022, when the Ministry of Internal Affairs added him to the federal wanted list. At that time, RIA Novosti and Kommersant-Ural sources claimed that a case of military “fakes” had been opened against Kolezev because of an Instagram post about the killings in Bucha (clause “d” of part 2 of article 207.3 of the Criminal Code).
Kolezev’s case was sent to court in mid-July 2024. The first hearing was scheduled for today, at 11:00.
“Oh, how fast. At the very first hearing in my criminal case, I was immediately sentenced to seven and a half years in prison and banned from journalism for three years (there are a lot of smileys about the latter). I thought it would drag on for at least a couple of days, but it turns out that it’s some kind of judicial fast food: get a sentence in two hours,” the journalist commented on the decision.