The prosecutor’s office appealed against the “soft” sentence of sociologist Kagarlytskyi

The Russian prosecutor’s office appealed against the sentence of sociologist Boris Kagarlytskyi, who was fined in the case of justifying terrorism, and again asked him to be sentenced to real imprisonment.

On December 12, the Syktyvkar court sentenced Kagarlytskyi to a fine of 600,000 rubles. The accused was acquitted in the courtroom. The prosecutor’s office demanded five and a half years in prison for him.

The criminal case against Boris Kagarlytskyi was initiated in the summer of 2023. The reason was a video on the YouTube channel of the publication “Rabkor”, the editor-in-chief of which is Kagarlytskyi, and a sociologist’s post on the Telegram channel, in which he said that he understood the military significance of Ukraine’s attack on the Crimean bridge.

The bridge connecting the Crimea annexed by Russia with the Krasnodar Territory was blown up in October 2022 as a result of a special operation by the SBU. Then five civilians were killed, including the driver of a commercial truck, who was carrying explosives without knowing it. In Russia, the explosion is being investigated as a terrorist act.

At the trial, Kagarlytsky denied guilt. Commenting on the sentence, he considered it “soft”, explained how “humanely” the court dealt with him because of his fame, compared to many others accused of justifying terrorism.

• 65-year-old Boris Kagarlytsky is a sociologist, political scientist, director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements, a well-known left-wing publicist, and a member of the dissident movement in the USSR. In 2022, he was entered by the Ministry of Justice of Russia in the register of so-called foreign agents.