Russia hands an 8-year prison term to a newspaper publisher in Siberia over Ukraine war criticism

MOSCOW: A Russian newspaper publisher was convicted by a court in Siberia on Friday and sentenced to eight years in prison after his paper reported on Russia's attacks on civilians in Ukraine, local media and rights activists reported.

The court in the city of Gorno-Altaysk convicted Sergei Mikhailov, a prominent journalist in the Siberian region of Altai and the publisher of the local newspaper Listok, or "Leaflet" in Russian, of “spreading false information” about the Russian army, the Net Freedoms rights group said.

Under a new law adopted days after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it has become a criminal offense in Russia to criticise the war. Hundreds of Russians, including multiple journalists, have been prosecuted under the law in a government crackdown of unprecedented scale and harshness.

According to OVD-Info, one of Russia's leading rights groups that tracks political arrests, more than 1,000 people have been implicated in criminal cases over their anti-war stance since February 2022.

Mikhailov was arrested in April that year over a series of posts on Listok's social media pages and a story on Listok's website that reported on Russia's attacks on civilians in Ukraine, according to Net Freedoms. He has vehemently rejected the charges, the group said.

Russia's independent news outlet Meduza quoted Mikhailov as telling the court in his closing statement on Wednesday that “the purpose of the publications is to reveal to my fellow countrymen the truth" about the war and to “protect them from the sophisticated lies of Russian state propaganda”.

"All these years I have been writing what I consider to be the truth, albeit bitter," Mikhailov said, according to Meduza.