Russian Blogger Sentenced to Five Years in Jail over Tweet Calling for Attacks on Children of Police

A Russian court docket on Tuesday sentenced a blogger to five years in a penal colony for a tweet calling for attacks on the kids of police, a ruling his lawyer said changed into unparalleled.

Vladislav Sinitsa, 30, published the tweets after a police crackdown towards protesters who’ve known it as free-of-charge elections. “It’s an act of intimidation,” stated legal professional Denis Tikhonov after a Moscow district court docket determined Sinitsa responsible for inciting hatred.

The expenses fall under Russia’s harsh anti-extremism rules. Tikhonov advised AFP the sentence became “without precedent in its severity”.

The ruling additionally comes in the context of an ongoing squeeze on net freedoms in Russia, wherein social media remains one of the few places wherein the opposition can communicate with relative freedom.

Sinitsa, who frequently posted on Twitter under the pseudonym Max_Steklov, became detained ultimate month over a tweet he wrote on July 31. Sinitsa, from a city outdoor Moscow, posted approximately attending numerous competition protests and advised others to go to them.

In one tweet, a reply to a pro-Kremlin blogger, he imagined a scenario wherein people found the homes of law enforcement officials to kidnap and kill their children. The post became picked up and stated by way of seasoned-Kremlin media.

Russian investigators said, “the crook cause of the defendant changed into geared toward arousing enmity and hatred towards all law enforcement officers and their family individuals”. Sinitsa’s attorney stated his client admitted to writing “this debatable post” but rejected extremism charges.

“He stated this post became no longer a name to all people; it changed into a conversation with a political opponent,” said Tikhonov. Opposition chief Alexei Navalny said in reaction to the decision: “Sinitsa wrote a dumb submission approximately taking revenge on the children of police. Millions of such dumb posts are written every day.”

Navalny stated he changed into continuously receiving such messages thru social networks and was known as Russia “an idiot” for issuing this kind of verdict. Sinitsa’s case became rushed via a single hearing, which his legal professional said became pretty unusual and deprived him of a truthful trial.

Prosecutors had requested the maximum feasible sentence of six years. “It would be truthful to acquit him, at the least now, not to position him in jail,” his mom instructed the impartial channel TV Rain.

Russia has, in the latest years, creasing several criminalized online content, regularly jailing people for sharing or publishing records deemed extremist or illegal.

The regulation presently forbids the sharing of content judged extremist, though rights organizations say this label is also applied to competition material.

In July, a court docket jailed a blogger from the industrial town of Tolyatti for 365 days for making “public calls for terrorism” with a tweet about a suicide bomb assault on the offices of the FSB safety corporation.