On Monday, Russian prosecutors demanded nine years in prison for jailed dissident Ilya Yashin, supporters of the longtime Kremlin critic, who was on trial for condemning the offensive in Ukraine, said AFP and News.ro.

“The prosecutor asked for nine years of imprisonment,” Yashin’s team said in a message on social networks. The 39-year-old activist, arrested in June, is accused of “spreading false information” about the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine, which “stirs up enmity”, for which a penalty of 10 years of imprisonment is provided.

He is accused of condemning in a direct intervention on YouTube the “killing of civilians” in the Ukrainian town of Bucha near Kyiv, where the Russian army has been accused of abuses that Moscow denies.

The arrest did not prevent him from continuing to sharply criticize the government and condemn the military intervention in Ukraine.

In early November, Yasin accused Russian judges of being “servants” of the government and causing Vladimir Putin a “sense of impunity.”

He is being prosecuted under articles of the Criminal Code, which was introduced shortly after the start of the Russian offensive on Ukraine and which punishes those who “discredit” the army or “publish false information” about it.

These texts are vague and their scope is very broad.

Ilya Yasin, who started his activities very young in the 2000s, was close to the opponent Boris Nemtsov, who was killed in 2015, as well as to the anti-corruption activist Oleksiy Navalny.

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