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Moscow resident Yuri Kokhovets, who was previously sentenced to community service for giving comment as part of a July 2022 man-on-the-street interview, has been sentenced to five years in a penal colony for “spreading fakes” about the Russian armed forces. According to reports from SotaVision, Kokhovets was taken into custody in the courtroom immediately after the Moscow City Court passed its guilty verdict.
The court handed down its harsh sentence in response to the prosecution’s demand to toughen the previous punishment by replacing the five years of community service with actual imprisonment.
As Kokhovets pointed out in his final statement, in the summer of 2022 he had not known about the existence of the Criminal Code article on “army fakes” and had not thought the footage would be published. As Kokhovets admits, had he known it, he would not have volunteered to answer the questions. He described the earlier decision of the Ostankino District Court as “wise” and condemned the prison term requested by the prosecution as “disproportionate.”
In the summer of 2022, Radio Liberty conducted a public opinion poll on the streets of Moscow. Journalists asked passers-by whether they thought a “detente was in order between Russia and the NATO countries.”
Kokhovets, as a respondent, stated his opinion, saying that NATO was “not going to occupy anyone” and that Russia was “the author of all of its problems.”
During the interview, Kokhovets also said that Russia was “bombing shopping malls” and that “our soldiers from Buryatia and Dagestan shot civilians in Bucha without any reason at all.”
In March 2023, it became known that the state had initiated criminal proceedings against Kokhovets on the charges of “spreading army fakes.” The next day, Kokhovets was taken into custody and brought to the Yaroslavsky District police station. The police kept him in lock-up for more than two days and finally let him go with a misdemeanor report, a 500-ruble fine (less than $10), and travel restrictions.
Initially, Kokhovets was charged with “spreading fakes” about the Russian army — a “transgression” punishable by up to five years in prison. However, a month later, his charges were upgraded by adding to them the alleged “motive of hatred or animosity,” bringing the maximum prison sentence to ten years.
The prosecution relied on the results of “linguistic analysis” performed by math teacher Natalia Kryukova and translator Alexander Tarasov, claiming that the defendant had been “spreading false information out of politically motivated hatred.” Previously, the two “experts” contributed to the liquidation of the Memorial human rights group.
As Kryukova and Tarasov explained on the stand, they identified the motive of hatred from the phrases “one person can put an end” and “a gang of thugs.” According to them, even though Kokhovets “made no explicit references to the country's leadership, it is clear that he meant them.”
Another prosecution witness was utility service official Radik Gabitov, who testified that Kokhovets’s interview had outraged him. During cross-examination by defense counsel Elena Sheremetyeva, Gabitov said he had given testimony about Kokhovets to a state investigator “in the street near the Moscow Central Ring” approximately one year after the Radio Liberty interview was published. Gabitov never saw that Investigative Committee representative again, and he failed to explain how a brief outdoor conversation had been transformed into a written deposition. After a hint from the judge, Gabitov said he may have mixed up some of the details.