Dissident Oleg Orlov, a leading Russian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was sentenced Tuesday by a Moscow court to two and a half years in prison for repeatedly condemning Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine, AFP and Reuters reported. from Agerpres.

“The court decided to find Orlov guilty and sentence him to two years and six months in prison,” the judge announced in his verdict, reports an AFP journalist present at the hearing.

The trial was condemned by international observers as politically motivated, Reuters notes.

70-year-old Orlov was one of the leaders of the Memorial human rights organization for two decades. He was one of the Nobel Peace Prize laureates in 2022, a year after the group was banned and disbanded in Russia.

“Memorial” reported that after the verdict, Orlov was handcuffed and the court decided to immediately take him into custody. In his closing arguments at the court on Monday, Orlov complained about the “stifling of freedom” in Russia, which he called “dystopian”.

Oleg Orlov, convicted for the fact that Vladimir Putin turned Russia into a fascist country

The basis for his accusation was an article he wrote in 2022, in which he claimed that Russia under President Vladimir Putin had become fascist. The district court initially fined him 150,000 rubles (US$1,628), but a retrial was ordered and prosecutors sought a sentence of 2 years and 11 months.

The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, Maryana Katsarova, called Orlov’s trial “an organized attempt to silence the voices of human rights defenders in Russia.”

The memorial, founded in 1989, has documented human rights abuses from the time of leader Joseph Visarionovich Stalin to the present and has protected freedom of speech, focusing on identifying and honoring individual victims.

Yan Ratsinsky, the director of the Memorial while in Russia and the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate along with Orlov and the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine, said last week that Vladimir Putin is “out of his mind” and is no longer the legitimate president of Russia , regardless of whether the West recognizes the presidential elections in March or not.

“If we talk about legitimacy, then Putin is already illegitimate, because since 2011 there has not even been a simulacrum of competitive elections. Total falsification, I’m not talking about reforming the Constitution,” he commented in an interview in Moscow.