Veteran human rights activist Oleg Orlov was sentenced to two years and six months in prison by a Moscow Court on Tuesday. He was convicted for speaking against the ongoing war with Ukraine.
Oleg Orlov, 70, in an article denounced the assault on Ukraine. “I don’t regret anything and I don't repent anything,” said Orlov during the closing statement in the court. He also said that the case against him was politically motivated.
His verdict concluded a retrial in which Orlov was earlier ordered to pay a fine. Reportedly, the prosecution had sought a harsher punishment for speaking against President Vladimir Putin's government.
Who is Oleg Orlov?
Orlov is the co-chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial. The Russian rights group won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, a year after being banned and dissolved.
Orlov, was fined $1,628 by a district court last year for denouncing Russia. However a retrial was later ordered in the case.
Orlov's sentence is an attempt to drown out the voice of the human rights movement in Russia and any criticism of the state, said Memorial in a statement. It vowed to continue its work.
I am alarmed and concerned by today's outcome. Oleg Orlov has personally fought for the rights of Russians for more than 45 years, US Ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy said in a statement.
In his closing statement to the court on Monday, Orlov once again denounced the war in Ukraine.
In another incident, a court in Grozny, the capital of Russia's largely Muslim Chechen Republic, sentenced a man to 3 1/2-year in prison for publicly burning a Quran in front of a mosque. Russian state news agency Tass reported that Nikita Zhuravel admitted he did so on the instructions of Ukrainian special services in return for payment.
Meanwhile, Tuesday also marked the ninth anniversary of the killing of Boris Nemtsov, a top Russian opposition figure. Nemtsov, 55, a former deputy prime minister, was shot to death as he walked along the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge late at night on February 27, 2015.
He was one of Russia's most energetic and charismatic opposition figures, and his killing was a blow to Putin's opponents, as was the death of another opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, in a penal colony on February 16.
(With PTI inputs)
