In Russia, opposition politician Andrei Pivovarov has been sentenced to four years in a prison camp. A court found the 40-year-old guilty of promoting a banned organization. However, he has been in prison for over a year.
The well-known Russian opposition figure Andrei Pivovarov has been sentenced to four years in a prison camp for illegal publications. In addition, he was banned from all "social-political activities" for eight years, as Piwovarow's supporters announced on Twitter.
Since the beginning of the military operation in Ukraine in February, the Russian authorities have intensified their crackdown on critics of the Kremlin. Many of them were imprisoned, others fled into exile. However, Pivovarov has been in detention for more than a year.
In the process, he was accused of promoting a banned organization on Facebook. The 40-year-old was formerly head of the opposition movement "Open Russia", which was founded by the oligarch and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. At the end of May 2021, Pivovarov announced the dissolution of the organization, which he justified by saying that its members should be protected from criminal prosecution.
Only a few days later, security forces at St. Petersburg airport took him out of a plane that was already taxiing and was supposed to take him to Warsaw, and arrested him. Pivovarov was taken to a prison in Krasnodar. He was also tried in the southern Russian city. "Open Russia" was founded by Khodorkovsky in 2014 to bring the pro-European opposition in Russia under one roof. Khodorkovsky has lived abroad since his pardon after ten years in prison in 2013.
In another case in Russia, which also involved controversial publications, the feminist activist Julia Tsvetkova was surprisingly acquitted. This was announced by supporters of the 29-year-old and her mother. However, the public prosecutor's office can still appeal, the supporters wrote on Telegram.
Tsvetkova, who campaigns for the rights of women and sexual minorities, was reportedly accused in the trial of "production and distribution of pornography" in the form of caricatures. In 2019, she published drawings of female genitals and naked women on the Russian online network VKontakte. Her trial in far eastern Komsomolsk-on-Amur took place behind closed doors. This was officially justified by the fact that the "pornographic" drawings were shown in the proceedings.
