Blogger Vladislav Sinitsa, who is serving five years in a colony for a comic tweet about Russian security forces, faces a new prison term. A criminal case was opened against him – again for tweets. This was reported by the human rights project Network Freedoms, which posted a screenshot from the case file.
It says that Sinitsa, while in the medical unit, allegedly registered an account on Twitter, in which “for several days he negatively characterized the military and employees of the National Guard, and also called for violent actions against Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation as a whole.”
The account in which the entries were posted was created in October 2022, the first publication was a quote from a tweet for which the blogger is serving his current term. As noted by the Network Freedoms project, from October 13 to October 24, about 50 tweets appeared in the account. However, it was not updated anymore, and there is not a single subscriber in the account. “It all looks like a clear falsification,” the project concludes.
Sinitsa has been in IK-1 of the Kostroma Region since 2019. He was convicted under the article “Incitement of hatred or enmity, as well as humiliation of the dignity of a person or a group of persons using the Internet and the threat of violence” (part 2 of article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). In a tweet for which Sinitsa received five years in prison, he suggested a hypothetical situation of what could happen to the children of law enforcement officers if their whereabouts were studied on the Internet. In particular, Sinitsa wrote: "instead of a child, a CD with snuff video comes in the mail."
The blogger himself admitted in court that he was the author of this tweet, noted its unethical nature and indicated that it was a reaction to the actions of law enforcement officers who participated in the dispersal of the Moscow protests in the summer of 2019. The international human rights organization "Memorial" recognized Sinitsa as a political prisoner.