He stayed in Russia and kept saying the war in Ukraine must end. Now opposition politician Lev Shlosberg is going to prison for more than 11 years.

Filed 1w ago · Via Meduza · The Buffoon Desk

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At Rest

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Prime Minister's Office · GODL-India · via Wikimedia Commons

A Pskov court sentenced Yabloko deputy chair Lev Shlosberg to 11 years and one month in a penal colony for 'discrediting' the Russian military and spreading 'false information' about the armed forces, Mediazona reported.

One charge stemmed from a debate recording in which Shlosberg argued for a swift end to the war; he says he was convicted for repeating his opponent's own words. The other charge came from a February 2022 Telegram repost of a British tabloid front page, published before Russia's information law even existed.

At closing arguments, none of Shlosberg's three lawyers could attend, and the judge assigned a state lawyer over his objection despite his legal right to decline one. When he tried to speak about ending the war during his final statement, the judge repeatedly cut him off as irrelevant to the case.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A legal system that must invent a crime retroactively, staff the defense against the defendant's wishes, and then rule the subject of the trial irrelevant to the trial is not adjudicating anything — it is filling out paperwork around a decision made elsewhere. The elaborate courtroom choreography is the tell: no one goes to this much trouble to look lawful unless they know exactly how unlawful it is. When arguing for peace becomes an eleven-year offense, the state has confessed what it thinks the war can survive being said about it.

Source: Read the original at Meduza → Scored: At Rest · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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