Former Torpedo employee sentenced to 6 years for “fakes about the army”

The District Military Court in Moscow sentenced the former employee of the press service of the Nizhny Novgorod hockey club “Torpedo” Mikhail Zharikov to six years in prison. He was found guilty of spreading so-called fakes about the Russian army. The reason for the accusation was his posts on social networks, where he talked about the alleged war crimes of the Russian military in Ukraine.

The investigation into Zharikov’s case was conducted under three criminal articles at once: the distribution of “fakes” motivated by hatred, the public justification of terrorism, and the rehabilitation of Nazism. Zharikov published anti-war posts and photos of destroyed Ukrainian cities on his Instagram page, and also compared modern Russia with Germany in the 1930s. In August, he was arrested and placed in a pre-trial detention center.

According to OVD-Info lawyer Aleksey Matasov, initially the prosecutor requested eight years of imprisonment for Zharykov.

• Administrative and criminal articles about the so-called fakes about the Russian army were added by the State Duma to the Russian legislature shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
• According to these articles, oppositionists, civil activists, journalists and citizens who publish information about the war on the Internet, different from that declared by the Russian authorities and propagandists, are judged.
• Russian courts have already issued dozens of verdicts in cases of so-called fakes about the army. Politician Ilya Yashin received the maximum term – eight and a half years in the colony. As a rule, sentences were handed down in connection with statements about murders in Buch or Mariupol. There are no acquittals based on this article.