Imprisoned Kremlin critic convicted again, receives 3-year sentence for opposing war in Ukraine

Imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Gorinov was convicted again on Friday and given a three-year prison sentence for opposing Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.

The three-day trial against Gorinov again revealed Russian intolerance of dissent.

Gorinov, 63, is a former member of a Moscow municipal council who is already serving a seven-year prison term for public criticism of the invasion, according to The Associated Press.

Noting his previous conviction and sentence, a court in Russia’s Vladimir region ordered Gorinov to serve a total of five years in a maximum-security prison. Russia’s independent news site Mediazona quoted Gorinov’s lawyer, who said the new sentence means he will spend a year more behind bars compared to 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 army at a municipal council meeting. Gorinov was accused of expressing skepticism about a children’s art competition in his constituency and saying that “every day children are dying” in Ukraine.

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He was the first known Russian imprisoned under a 2022 law that essentially bans any public statements about the war that deviate from Moscow’s narrative.

In March 2023, Gorinov told The Associated Press from behind bars that “authorities needed an example they could showcase to others (of) an ordinary person, rather than a public figure.”

Last year, authorities launched a second case against Gorinov, his supporters said. He was purported to have been “justifying terrorism” in conversations with his cellmates about Ukraine’s Azov battalion, which Russia outlawed as a terrorist organization, and the 2022 explosion on the Crimean bridge, which Moscow considered an act of terrorism.

Gorinov rejected the allegations against him Wednesday, according to independent news site Mediazona, which quoted him as saying that he only said the annexed Crimean Peninsula was Ukrainian territory and that he called Azov a part of the Ukrainian army.

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His trial began Wednesday in the Vladimir region, where he is serving time in prison from his previous conviction. Photos from the courtroom, published by Mediazona, showed Gorinov in the defendant’s cage with a hand-drawn peace symbol on a piece of paper covering his prison badge and holding a handwritten placard saying: “Stop killing. Let’s stop the war.”

“My guilt is that I, as a citizen of my country, allowed this war to happen and could not stop it,” Gorinov said in his closing statement in court, Mediazona reported.

“But I would like my guilt and responsibility to be shared with me by the organizers, participants, supporters of the war, as well as the persecutors of those who advocate peace,” Gorinov added. “I continue to live with the hope that this will happen someday. In the meantime, I ask those who live in Ukraine and my fellow citizens who suffered from the war to forgive me.”

About 1,100 people have been the subjects of criminal cases over their anti-war stance since the war against Ukraine began in February 2022, according to OVD-Info, a prominent rights group that tracks political arrests. Nearly 350 of them are currently behind bars or have been involuntarily committed to medical institutions.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.