The prosecution considered public a private telephone conversation of former Moscow police officer Sergey Vedel (Klokov), who was arrested for spreading “fake news” about the army, because the conversation was witnessed by an investigator who listened to his phone. This is stated in the indictment, which was read by the politician Ilya Yashin, who met Vedel at the "prison assembly".
Eavesdropping on the conversation, the investigator experienced "a sense of anxiety, fear and insecurity on the part of the state," and this fact turned a private telephone conversation into a public one, the prosecution alleges.
Even at the first interrogation of Vedel, the defense noted that a private telephone conversation cannot contribute to the public dissemination of information (Vedel is charged under Article 207.3 – public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation).
Vedel is charged with distributing “fakes” using his official position motivated by hatred (clauses “a”, “b” and “e” of part 2 of article 207.3 of the Criminal Code), the technician of the emergency control point of the capital’s main department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vedel. According to the case file, he spoke on the phone with friends that Russia was evacuating the wounded Russian military to Belarus and underreporting the death toll. He also said that the Russian military was killing civilians in Ukraine.
