Putin critic sentenced to 6 years in jail by Russian court docket | EUROtoday

A Russian court docket has sentenced a pro-war activist and critic of President Vladimir Putin to to 6 years in jail on Thursday.

Sergei Udaltsov is the chief of the Left Front motion that opposes Putin and can also be affiliated with the Communist Party.

He was arrested in 2024 and accused of justifying terrorism.

According to Russian impartial information website Mediazona, the fees in opposition to him stem from an article Udaltsov posted on-line in assist of one other group of Russian activists accused of forming a terrorist organisation.

Those activists had been handed sentences starting from 16 to 22 years in jail after being convicted earlier this month.

Udaltsov has rejected the fees in opposition to him as fabricated. On Thursday, he denounced the decision as “shameful” and mentioned he was happening a starvation strike, Mediazona reported.

According to the court docket ruling, the activist might be serving his sentence in a most safety penal colony.

Udaltsov was a distinguished opposition determine throughout the 2011-12 mass protests in Russia, triggered by experiences of widespread rigging of a parliamentary election. In February 2012, he took half in a gathering that then-President Dmitry Medvedev held with numerous opposition figures.

Russian authorities have ramped up their crackdown on dissent and free speech after the Kremlin despatched troops into Ukraine, relentlessly focusing on rights teams, impartial media, members of civil society organizations, LGBTQ+ activists and a few spiritual teams. Hundreds of individuals have been jailed and hundreds of others have fled the nation.

In December 2023, a Moscow court docket sentenced Udaltsov to 40 hours of obligatory labor for violating procedures regarding organizing a rally after he was detained on Red Square, the place he tried to unfurl a flag with the picture of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, based on Russia’s state information company Tass.

Udaltsov was beforehand imprisoned in 2014 and sentenced to four-and-a-half years on costs associated to his function in organizing a 2012 demonstration in opposition to Putin that turned turbulent. He was launched in 2017.