The court sentenced 11 people to penal servitude in the case of the Telegram channel “What to do”

The Butyr District Court of Moscow handed down 11 sentences to actual terms in the case of incitement to mass riots in the “Chto delat” Telegram channel. Lawyer Aleksey Pryanishnikov writes about this.

The journalist from Tomsk, Igor Kuznetsov, in particular, was sentenced to six years in a general regime colony. The owner of the channel “Chto делать” Dmitry Chebanov was sentenced to 7 years and 6 months of imprisonment.

The court sentenced 22-year-old Maria Platonova, a former employee of the staff of State Duma candidate Anastasia Bryukhanova and a student of the HSE design school, to five years and two months of prison, with a suspended sentence for the period of pregnancy and until the child turns 14. As “Mediazona” writes, she is the only one who denied her connection with the channel. Chebanov’s common-law wife Zhanna Chernova received the same term. The other seven defendants were sentenced to terms of six to eight years of imprisonment, two of them – in a penal colony, the rest – general.

The prosecutor’s office requested from seven to 11.5 years of imprisonment. All the defendants, as reported by OVD-Info, were found guilty of incitement to mass riots and inciting hatred by an organized group.

According to the indictment, those convicted in the regional chats of the “What to do” channel incited people to protest on the days of the State Duma elections in September 2021.

• On August 1, the Telegram channel “Chto делать” published an announcement of an all-Russian action “without criminal elements, but daring in its essence.” Details were communicated only to its participants. On September 5, the authors of the channel began to publish videos in which people from different cities light fires in public places.
• The owner of the Chebanov channel and four more people were detained on September 5, 2021 when they tried to hang a banner on the building of the Central Children’s Store in Moscow, they were arrested for 15 days under the charge of petty hooliganism, and subsequently a criminal case was opened. The investigation and trial dragged on for two and a half years.