A court in Kemerovo found journalist Andrey Novashov guilty of spreading "fake news" about the army and sentenced him to 8 months of hard labor, according to the Network Freedoms project.
He was also banned from publishing on the Internet for a year.
A case was opened against Novashov on March 21, 2022. He became the first journalist to be accused of spreading "fakes" shortly after the introduction of this article into the Criminal Code. The reason for initiating the case was a repost on the VKontakte social network of an article by journalist Viktoria Ivleva about the blockade of Mariupol by Russian troops.
The prosecutor demanded that the journalist be sentenced to 11 months of corrective labor and banned from publishing for two years.
“I refuse to call black white. From the very beginning of the so-called special operation, he considered it a crime against the Ukrainian people. Over the past year, evidence of Russian war crimes committed in the early days of the special operation has only grown. Everything that is said in the posts that I am accused of is true. During the investigation and trial, neither the falsity of the information that I published on VKontakte, nor even the “deliberate falsity” was proved, ”Novashov said in his last word, which is quoted by Dozhd.