Moscow (EFE).- The Russian Court on Tuesday sentenced four journalists to five and a half years in prison for allegedly collaborating with the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), an organization founded by the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Journalists Antonina Favorskaya, Sergei Karelin, Konstantin Gabov, and Artyom Kryghar were charged with “extremism” for allegedly working with FBK.
The four defendants, against whom the prosecution had initially sought five years and 11 months in prison, heard the verdict in a glass cell at Moscow’s Nagatinsky Zaton District.
“Everything will be fine, guys, don’t despair. Sooner or later, all this will be over, and those who convicted me will go to jail,” Kriguer said after hearing the verdict.
The independent portal Mediazona reported that several dozen relatives, colleagues, and ers came to the court’s gates to show their for the defendants.
Unlike during the trial, which took place behind closed doors, several dozen people were finally allowed into the courtroom on Tuesday.
“You are the best,” family and friends shouted to their loved ones after hearing the verdict.
Meanwhile, Kriguer’s girlfriend told the press that “the struggle is not over” and that the defense would appeal the verdict.
The four journalists were detained between March and June 2024 for “participating in the creation of journalistic material for YouTube channels of Navalny’s ers.”
Although none of the four were official of the FBK and only wrote about its activities, the prosecutor’s office considered the connection sufficient to open a criminal case.
“To be an honest and professional journalist and not a pitiful propagandist is a crime and an act of extremism in Putin’s Russia,” Kriguer said before the court last week.
Kriguer, whose uncle is also serving time for a comment on social media, claimed that Russia fulfills the characteristics of any authoritarian country, as it is a concentration camp for its inhabitants and behaves like an aggressive state towards the rest of the world.
Favorskaya, a correspondent for the independent portal SOTAvision, was the first detained in March. In April, Karelin and Gavov, AP and Reuters, respectively, followed, and Kriguer, a SOTAvision journalist, in June.
“Even from behind bars, you have to talk about Russian events and problems from Russia. It is difficult to work in such extreme conditions, but it is possible,” said Gabov.
None of the defendants itted to having collaborated with Navalny, who died in strange circumstances in February 2024 while serving time in a Russian Arctic prison.
His relatives, the opposition, and the West blame the authorities for his sudden death and President Vladimir Putin for preventing an exchange that could have saved his life. EFE
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