A 72-year-old pensioner has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for allegedly spreading on the Internet a publication about Russian military casualties in Ukraine, human rights groups said on Monday. Moscow Timesand AFP.

Yevgenia Maiboroda from the Rostov region in southern Russia was prosecuted under a law that prohibits the intentional dissemination of “false information” about the Russian military.

Maiboroda admitted his guilt, but denied the motives of “political hatred”, as claimed by the prosecutor’s office, reports the human rights group OVD-Info.

She shared two posts on her page on the VKontakte social network: one with an “emotional video” about the conflict, and the other about the number of dead soldiers, the human rights group “Network Freedoms” reported.

The group said she felt the need to share the posts after her brother was trapped under the rubble of a building that collapsed after shelling in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

A spokesman for Rostov’s Shakhtyn court confirmed Maiboroda’s sentence to AFP and said she was charged with illegal content on her VK account, without elaborating.

Moscow declared criticism of its military illegal shortly after launching its offensive against Ukraine in February 2022. Thousands of opponents of the conflict were censored, detained or exiled.

The ailing 61-year-old pensioner, who criticized the conflict, was sentenced this month to more than eight years in prison for treason, a charge he denied.

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