A Moscow court this week sentenced two exiled reporters to 11 years each in a penal colony for distributing “fake” news about Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The reporters, Ruslan Leviev and Michael Nacke, were also banned from managing a website for four and five years, respectively.
Leviev is the founder of the Russian independent investigative project Conflict Intelligence Team, and Nacke is a Lithuania-based video blogger. Russian authorities have labeled both as “foreign agents.”
They were not present at Tuesday’s hearing and neither intends to return to Russia to serve his sentence, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom group, which condemned both sentences.
“The 11-year sentences handed to exiled journalists Michael Nacke and Ruslan Leviev are proof that Russian authorities’ harassment of those who dare to report independently on the war in Ukraine does not stop at the country’s borders,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, said in a Thursday statement.
The journalists were charged in connection with three YouTube videos posted in March 2022 — one on Nacke’s YouTube channel, and two featuring the reporters that were posted on the YouTube channel Popular Politics, which is run by jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s team.
In the videos, the reporters discussed Russian military actions, including Russian shelling of the grounds of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and the adoption of the law criminalizing “fake” information about the Russian army.
The reporters were convicted on three counts: distributing “fake” information as a group, “out of political hatred,” and by creating artificial evidence, according to CPJ.
A lawyer with Setevye Svobody, a Russian freedom-of-expression legal assistance organization, told CPJ that the reporters intended to appeal their sentences.
“Authorities must not contest the journalists’ appeals, immediately drop all charges against them, and let the press report freely on the war,” Martinez de la Serna said in his statement.
The sentences came after Russian lawmakers in March 2022 changed the country’s laws to impose prison terms of up to 10 years for discrediting or distributing “fake” information about the Russian military.
Moscow regularly sentences dissident journalists in absentia, including Ilya Krasilshchik, an exiled former publisher of the independent news website Meduza, who was sentenced in June to eight years behind bars on similar charges.