The court in Moscow fined Oleg Orlov 150 thousand rubles

The Golovinsky district court of Moscow imposed a fine of 150,000 rubles on the co-chairman of “Memorial” Oleg Orlov under the article about “repeated discrediting of the army”. The prosecution demanded a fine of 250 thousand. Also, the prosecutor proposed to appoint a psychiatric examination of Orlov, stating that he has “a heightened sense of justice and a lack of instinct for self-preservation.”

The reason for Orlov’s accusation was his article for the French publication Mediapart, which was reposted on Facebook. According to the investigation, in the text the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine are characterized as “criminal, fascist, related to the killing of civilians and the destruction of civil infrastructure.”

• The article on the discrediting of the Russian army was added to the Russian Criminal Code after the invasion of Ukraine and is usually used to prosecute anti-war activists.
• In Soviet times, a “heightened sense of justice” was often indicated as one of the symptoms when making psychiatric diagnoses for dissidents and oppositionists. In 1977, the World Psychiatric Association adopted a declaration condemning the use of psychiatry in the USSR for political repression.