By Lucy Papachristou
LONDON (Reuters) – A Moscow district councillor serving a seven-year sentence for criticising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine staged an anti-war protest from the courtroom cage on Wednesday at the start of a new trial against him on charges of justifying terrorism.
In summer 2022 Alexei Gorinov became the first individual in Russia to be jailed under a wartime censorship law, introduced soon after the invasion launched that February, which punished the dissemination of “deliberately false information” about the Russian army.
He is now charged by Russian prosecutors with “justifying terrorism” for alleged conversations he had with cellmates about Ukraine’s Azov battalion, which Moscow considers a terrorist group, and the bombing of a bridge in Russian-annexed Crimea, independent outlet Mediazona reported.
Gorinov, 63, risks up to five more years in prison if found guilty.
His lawyers and supporters have voiced concerns about his health in prison, where they say Gorinov regularly suffers from bronchitis and is sometimes forced to shovel snow while ill.
From behind the bars of the defendants’ cage in the city of Vladimir east of Moscow, Gorinov held up a sign on Wednesday reading “Stop killing” and “Let’s stop the war”, accompanied by a drawing of a peace sign.
Opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who was freed from a Russian prison in an East-West exchange in August, hailed Gorinov as an “indomitable” voice of protest and urged that he be included in a future prisoner swap.
“Behind him are almost three years of prison cells and prison transfers, constant pressure and ruined health,” Yashin wrote on Telegram. “But Alexei raises an anti-war poster in court again.”
Public protest against the war is rare in Russia, which has cracked down on any opposition to the Kremlin’s policies with lengthy prison sentences, but dissidents such as the late Alexei Navalny have used their right to speak in court as an opportunity to express dissent.
In July 2022, Gorinov, a former member of the Krasnoselsky district council in Moscow, was sentenced to seven years in prison after he told a council meeting that Russia was waging a war of aggression against Ukraine.
Dmitry Muratov, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian newspaper editor, said in a YouTube broadcast that other prisoners were given hidden microphones and planted in Gorinov’s cell, where they were instructed to provoke him to speak about the war in Ukraine.
Reuters could not independently verify that accusation.
Prosecutors say Gorinov spread ideologies promoting terrorism among four fellow inmates while he was being treated for pneumonia in prison in January 2023. His remarks touched on attacks on the Crimean Bridge and the actions of the Azov battalion, Mediazona reported.
Gorinov denied the terrorism charge on Wednesday, the outlet said.
“I have nothing to do with your terrorism and never have in my entire life,” he told the court.
“I was imprisoned for seven years only for speaking out… about the fact that civilians are suffering and children are dying during the war,” Gorinov said.
“Life has shown that I was right.”
(Reporting and writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Angus MacSwan)
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