Russian rock legend Yuri Shevchuk was convicted and fined today for exposing Russian attack on Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the concert.

A court in Ufa found the singer guilty of “public actions aimed at discrediting the call to the Russian armed forces” and sentenced him to pay a fine of 50,000 rubles (about 800 euros), according to the press service of the judiciary. announced.

On May 18, addressing his audience in Ufa, the 65-year-old singer repeated that “the motherland is not to kiss the president’s ass all the time,” according to videos posted online.

“Now people are being killed in Ukraine, why? Our children are dying in Ukraine, why?” he addressed the crowd, expressing his sorrow for “the youth of Ukraine and Russia, who are dying (…) because of the Napoleonic plans of our Caesar.”

Although Shevchuk was sentenced to pay a fine, Russian criminal law provides for penalties of up to five years in prison if the offense is repeated and there are aggravating circumstances.

The singer, who was not present at the trial today due to Covid-19 quarantine, sent a written statement through his lawyer Alexander Peredruk, in which he stressed that he “was always against war, in any country and in any era.” “.

“All problems and difficulties of a political nature between countries and peoples should be resolved through diplomacy,” he said.

The leader of the rock band DDT, well known in the former Soviet Union, has denounced Putin’s influence for years and even challenged him at a televised meeting in 2010.

He was also one of the instigators of a major protest movement in Russia in 2011-2012 that was crushed by the Kremlin.

Prior to the Putin era, Yuri Shevchuk campaigned against the first Chechen war between 1994 and 1996.

He began his career in the 1980s, the last decade of the USSR, and became popular with his anti-establishment songs in this crisis empire. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Shevchuk was already a figure in Russian rock.

^{Source: APE-MEB, AFP.}