The first person accused of “fakes about the army” was sentenced to 7 years in prison

A court in Moscow sentenced to seven years of imprisonment the former employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Sergei Vedel (Klokov) on charges of so-called fakes about the Russian army. Vedel was the first citizen of Russia against whom a criminal case was initiated under this article.

According to the indictment, in March 2022 Vedel, a former technician of the main department of the Moscow Ministry of Internal Affairs, spoke on the phone three times with friends and police colleagues about the war. He claimed that the official losses of Russian troops were underestimated, that the killing of civilians took place, and that Ukraine was not ruled by “Nazis”.

Vedel himself is a native of the city of Irpen in the Kyiv region. The prosecution believes that he started “spreading fakes” under the influence of his Ukrainian acquaintances, whom he called after the start of hostilities.

The basis of the criminal case was the wiretapping of Wedel’s telephone conversations. He was arrested on March 18, 2022.

As reported by the Telegram channel “Ostorozhno, Novosti”, in response to the lawyer’s remarks that the telephone conversation cannot be considered public, the investigator stated that the witness of the conversation “due to duty” became a police officer who experienced “a feeling of anxiety, fear and insecurity from the outside state”.

In his last words, Sergey Vedel asked the court for leniency. “I want to return to my family and children. I am an officer, I defended the law for 18 years. I also have many state awards and thanks, during my years of service I had injuries, illnesses, contusions. I ask for understanding and forgiveness,” he said.

• After the start of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, new administrative and criminal articles on “fakes” and “discrediting” of the Russian army were adopted. According to them, anti-war statements and any statements about the war in Ukraine that do not coincide with the official position of the Ministry of Defense are considered an offense. For this, at least 528 criminal cases were opened, including 154 – on the article about fakes about the Russian army, “OVD-Info” calculated.