Moscow pensioner will sit in a colony for fakes until his 70th birthday

The Timiryazevsky Court of Moscow sentenced 63-year-old pensioner Mikhail Simonov to seven years in a penal colony for making fake stories about the army. The man was detained last November, and the reason was two comments on posts on the VKontakte social network, published back in March.

The pensioner has lived in Belarus in recent years, worked as the director of a dining car on long-distance trains and regularly left his opinion on social networks about the actions of the Russian and Belarusian leadership. They detained him as soon as he arrived in Russia.

Employees of Business FM found Mikhail’s page on the social network – the same person, age, photos from the car. He has a hundred followers and many sharp political comments. In court, Mikhail explained that he did not want to offend the Russian army and did not even know that his page was available to everyone. As a result, seven years in a general regime colony. There are a lot of similar critical comments in social networks, you don’t even need to look for them. Where did such interest in the pensioner come from?

“So that citizens do not get the impression that they receive only suspended sentences under these articles, and only deputies of the district level, officials, privates, policemen bear real responsibility for discrediting, then such cases are introduced into the information space in which for crimes to real terms condemn ordinary citizens. The logic is that if you cannot investigate absolutely all the crimes committed, then you need to create the effect of Russian roulette, and this really cools the ardor of those who want to discredit the army. And the vast majority of criminal cases are initiated exclusively from VKontakte posts. That is, after all, posts on foreign blocked social networks are attracted less, because it is more difficult to prove.

If we analyze open data, including available materials from courts, we can identify two trends. Firstly, most of the sentences in cases of fakes are suspended sentences, fines and correctional labor. There are very few real terms, they can be counted on the fingers, but each such case is at least seven years in prison. This was the case with municipal deputy Alexei Gorinov, foreign agent Ilya Yashin recognized by the Ministry of Justice, Dmitry Ivanov, the author of the Protest MGU telegram channel, and Alexander Nevzorov, media foreign agent, who was tried in absentia. Foreign agent Veronika Belotserkovskaya was also tried in absentia.

Secondly, the mention in the statements of the defendants of children in any context, apparently, is a strong aggravating factor that attracts attention. In the Simonov case, both posts touched on the topic of children directly. And the investigators indicated that they were the main ones, and not dozens of others, in which one could also see unreliable information about the actions of the Russian army.

Simonov’s case was the sixth with a real term, and the first where such a term was received by a completely non-media personality. But it is too early to draw deep conclusions from this, says Fyodor Trusov, managing partner of the Sokolov, Trusov and Partners law firm:

“The position of imposing such cruel punishments under this article on ordinary people has not yet begun. Because something with regard to the Simonov case, after all, here in many respects, I think, is a chain, when each subsequent instance wants to show what great fellows they are and go in the spirit of the times. I would like to hope that this article will not become such a cannibalistic article in terms of real terms for those who are not public oppositionists, for them the rules of the game are slightly different. And as for the Simonov case, we are all well aware that the topic of children among the population causes the most difficult emotions. Sometimes, like a virus spreads through social networks, over the Internet.”

Since the beginning of March last year, when the president signed the law on fakes, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office, 187 cases have been initiated in Russia under the new article. It provides for up to three years in prison, but if there were serious consequences, then up to 15 years.