A Moscow court on Wednesday sentenced well-known Russian journalist Oleksandr Nevzorov, who was accused of spreading “fake news” about the Russian army, to eight years in absentia, Reuters and Agerpres reported.

The prosecutor’s office demanded nine years of imprisonment for him. The court said Nevzorov, 64, was “motivated by political enmity” when he accused the Russian military of deliberately bombing a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in social media posts last March. Moscow considers this statement false.

Nevzorov, who has a YouTube channel with nearly 2 million subscribers, called the investigation ridiculous and left Russia with his wife last March. On Wednesday, a court ordered that Oleksandr Nevzorov be sent to prison if he ever returns to Russia and banned him from managing content on the Internet for four years.

“I don’t think that Russia will exist in nine years,” the journalist reacted to the verdict. He said he had no plans to return to the country and that President Vladimir Putin was running a “dictatorship based on suffering, blood and denunciation”.

Oleksandr Nevzorov, who became famous as the host of the pioneering news program “600 seconds” in the context of the opening of Soviet society under Mikhail Gorbachev, and was also a member of the Russian parliament, received Ukrainian citizenship after publicly condemning the invasion of Russia, calling the war a “crime” and Ukraine her victim.

Russia has returned to its Soviet-era suppression of dissent

He was prosecuted under a law passed eight days after the invasion that carried prison terms of up to 15 years for intentionally spreading false information about the military.

Since then, Russia has blocked access to news sites that publish content that contradicts the official position on the conflict, and dozens of Russian and international news agencies have left the country.

In another crackdown on press freedom, the Prosecutor General’s Office on Wednesday declared the foreign opposition platform Free Russia Forum an “undesirable” organization that poses a “threat to the constitutional order and security of the Russian Federation.”

The forum, whose prominent members include former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, has held several meetings in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, including an anti-war conference late last year.

“Unwanted” organizations are banned from operating in Russia, and those who support or promote their activities risk prosecution.

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