Imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Gorinov was convicted again Friday for his opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine and sentenced to three years in prison.
A quick three-day trial against Gorinov, once a quiet activist, underscored Moscow’s intolerance of any dissenting voices.
Gorinov, a 63-year-old former Moscow city council member, is already serving a seven-year prison sentence for publicly criticizing the large-scale invasion.
Given his previous conviction and sentence, a court in Russia’s Vladimir region ordered him to serve a total of five years in a maximum security prison, a facility with stricter conditions than the one he is currently in. .
According to independent Russian news site Mediazona, Gorinov’s lawyer said this would mean he would spend a year more behind bars than his previous sentence.
Gorinov was first convicted in July 2022, when a Moscow court sentenced him to seven years in prison for “spreading false information” about the Russian military during a city council meeting.
Gorinov reportedly expressed skepticism about a children’s art competition in his constituency, while claiming that “every day children die” in Ukraine.
He was the first known Russian sent to prison under a 2022 law that essentially bans any public expression about the war that deviates from the official narrative.
His arrest, conviction and imprisonment shocked many. In written comments to the Associated Press from behind bars in March 2023, Gorinov said that “the authorities needed an example that they could show to others (of an) ordinary person, rather than a personality public”.
Authorities launched a second case against him last year, according to his supporters. He was accused of “justifying terrorism” during conversations with his cellmates about the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which Russia has banned as a terrorist organization, and the 2022 Crimean Bridge explosion , which Moscow considered an act of terrorism.
Gorinov vehemently rejected the accusations on Wednesday, independent news site Mediazona reported. He reportedly told the court that he had simply declared the annexed Crimean peninsula to be Ukrainian territory and that he had called Azov part of the Ukrainian army.
Gorinov’s trial began Wednesday in the Vladimir region, where he is serving a sentence stemming from his previous conviction. Photos from the courtroom, published by Mediazona, showed a tired Gorinov in the defendant’s cage, with a hand-drawn peace symbol on a piece of paper covering his prison badge. He held a handwritten sign saying: “Stop killing. Let’s stop the war.
He had part of a lung removed before being imprisoned and suffers from respiratory illnesses behind bars.
In his final statement in court on Friday, Gorinov remained defiant and once again condemned Russian authorities for the war in Ukraine.
“My guilt is that, as a citizen of my country, I allowed this war to happen and I could not stop it,” he said, as quoted by Mediazona.
“But I would like my guilt and responsibility to be shared with me by the organizers, participants, supporters of war, as well as by the persecutors of those who advocate peace. I continue to live with the hope that this will happen one day. In the meantime, I ask those who live in Ukraine and my fellow citizens who suffered from the war to forgive me,” Gorinov said.
According to OVD-Info, a leading rights group that tracks political arrests, since February 2022, some 1,100 people have been involved in criminal cases because of their anti-war stance. In total, 340 of them are currently behind bars or have been involuntarily incarcerated. medical establishments.
