The Russian prosecutor's office on Monday (December 5th) demanded nine years in prison against the imprisoned opponent Ilya Iachine, said the supporters of this long-time critic of the Kremlin currently on trial for having denounced the offensive in Ukraine.
"
The prosecutor has requested nine years of deprivation of liberty
," Ilia Iachine's team said in a message posted on social networks.
"Incitement to hatred"
The activist, aged 39 and arrested in June, is accused of having "
spread false information
" about the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine with "
incitement to hatred
", a crime punishable by 10 years in prison.
He is accused of having denounced during a live intervention on YouTube "
the murder of civilians
" in the Ukrainian city of Boutcha, near Kiev, where the Russian army has been accused of abuses, which Moscow denies .
His arrest did not prevent him from continuing to criticize the authorities in an acerbic manner and to denounce the military intervention in Ukraine.
At the beginning of November, he accused the Russian judges of being "
servants
" of power and of giving Vladimir Putin a "
sense of impunity
".
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He is prosecuted on the basis of articles of the penal code introduced shortly after the start of the offensive in Ukraine and which punish those who "
discredit
" the army or "
publish false information
" about it.
These texts are vague and their scope very broad, with critics of the Kremlin seeing them as a “
catch-all
” tool to pursue all critical voices.
Ilia Iachine, who began to act very young in the 2000s, was close to the opponent Boris Nemtsov, assassinated in 2015, but also to the anti-corruption activist Alexeï Navalny, imprisoned since the beginning of 2021 after surviving a poisoning that he attributes to the Kremlin.