Tver Resident Sentenced to Two Years in Work-Release Penal Colony for Two Reposts on VKontakte
Takie Dela
May 5, 2016

The Zavolzhsky District Court in Tver has sentenced mechanical engineer Andrei Bubeyev to two years and three months in a work-release penal colony for extremism and separatism, writes Kommersant.

The defendant’s lawyer, Svetlana Sidorkina, said the court delivered its verdict “on all the charges summarily and taking into account the verdict in the first criminal case.” In addition, the time Bubeyev has served in a pre-trial detention facility since May 24, 2015, will count toward completion of his sentence. According to Sidorkina, the verdict will be appealed.

The basis for the charges were two reposts Bubeyev made on the VKontakte social network. He posted the article “Crimea Is Ukraine” by writer and political activist Boris Stomakhin on his personal page and a picture of a tube of toothpaste captioned “Squeeze Russia out of you.”

The prosecution argued this was a violation of Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 280.2 (public calls for extremist activities) and Article 280.1.2 (public calls for actions aimed at violating the Russian Federation’s territorial integrity) and requested that Bubeyev be sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Bubeyev pleaded not guilty.

In August 2015, the blogger was found guilty of extremism and sentenced to nine months in a work-release penal colony for reposting similar matter and pictures.

In February 2016, a court in Yekaterinburg ordered the laptop of single mother Ekaterina Vologzheninova destroyed because she had made certain likes and reposts. Investigators claimed that in 2014 Vologzheninova posted images deemed extremist by FSB officers on a social network. The investigators did not report exactly what was in the images. According to the woman’s attorney, one of the images was a caricature in which a person resembling Vladimir Putin was hunched over a map of Donbass with a knife.

Translated by My Left Foot. Image courtesy of openrussia.org

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Russian Jailed For Reposting ‘Extremist’ Article
RFE/RL
May 6, 2016

A court in the Russian city of Tver has sentenced a man to two years and three months in prison for reposting material about Crimea on a social media network.

The court on May 5 found that engineer Andrei Bubeyev reposted an article by publicist Boris Stomakhin that had earlier been deemed “extremist” and “threatening to Russia’s territorial integrity.”

The piece argued that the Ukrainian Black Sea region of Crimea had been illegally annexed by Russia and should be returned to Ukraine.

In April 2015, a Moscow court sentenced Stomakhin to seven years in prison on charges of promoting terrorism and extremism.

Stomakhin says the charges against him were politically motivated.

In the region of Chuvashia, investigators have accused 62-year-old Nikolai Yegorov of inciting national enmity for reposting the same Stomakhin article.

Yegorov denies the accusation and his trial is pending.