Alexander Nevzorov came under pressure from authorities for alleging that Russian forces deliberately shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol, in southern Ukraine. "Journalist Alexander Glebovich Nevzorov was found guilty (...) and sentenced to imprisonment for a period of eight years," the press service for Moscow courts said in a statement on Telegram. Prosecutors had requested a sentence of nine years in jail.
Nevzorov has left Russia and did not take part in the hearings. Investigators launched the probe in March last year, saying Nevzorov had intentionally published "misleading information" with "inaccurate photographs of civilians affected by the shelling". He was designated a "foreign agent" one month later, a branding that piles bureaucratic pressure on people hit with the label.
After the Kremlin ordered troops into Ukraine, Russia introduced new legislation criminalising what authorities consider to be false or damaging information about the Russian army and the war on Ukraine.
"The person of Alexander Nevzorov, whose publications and statements often irritate many people, can be the object of criticism. But he is undoubtedly one of the main symbols of the new independent journalism that emerged at the end of the 1980s of the last century, at the end of the USSR," said Andrei Jvirblis, secretary of the independent Russian journalists’ union JMWU. "His conviction, which is also quite symbolic because Nevzorov is beyond the reach of Russian justice, is undoubtedly a condemnation of this type of journalism. From this point of view, it does not matter what exactly Nevzorov wrote about Ukraine, whether he "discredited" the Russian army or not. With this judgment, the very possibility of free thought and free expression is condemned and intimidated in Russia."