The Kremlin’s grip has once again tightened around the press. The journalist of the Russian edition of Forbes Sergei Mingazov he was stopped in the city of Khabarovsk on charges of spreading fake news on the Moscow army, with the aggravating circumstance of hatred and enmity.
The man’s lawyer, Konstantin Bubon, said his only “fault” was having relaunched on his channel Telegram “Khabarovskaya Mingazeta” an article on the abuses committed by Putin’s soldiers in Bucha. “They confiscated computers, phones, both his and his wife’s, and the children’s phones and computers”, the lawyer explained to the agency Rbc, adding that the Russian authorities searched Mingazov’s home, and then brought him before the investigative committee which formally communicated the charges to him. The journalist is currently in a temporary detention center and, within the next 24 hours, the judges will have to decide whether or not to formalize the arrest.
The article of the penal code on fake news concerning the army was approved together with that on “discredit” of the armed forces after the invasion of Ukraine began. The maximum penalty foreseen is imprisonment from five to ten years, the deprivation of right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for the same amount of time and one fine three to five million rubles. According to estimates by various international media, to date they are 132 people convicted of this type of crime.
As for the events described in the article relaunched by Mingazov, they date back to the period between March and April 2022. The city of Bucha, in the Kiev region, came under Russian control in the first month of the conflict. After their retreat, the Ukrainians found many in the place civilian casualtiessigns of torture on bodies and mass graves. The Moscow Defense Ministry has always denied the “alleged killings” of innocent people, stating that “no local residents suffered acts of violence”. Furthermore, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has repeatedly stated that video and photographic evidence of the massacres cannot be trusted, because Federation experts have found “signs of forgery”, and defined the case as “staging masterfully orchestrated” by the Kiev authorities.
Vladimir Putin himself declared, in conversation with the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, that Moscow “knows who prepared this provocation, with what means and what kind of people worked on it”.
