A Moscow court has sentenced a prominent Russian opposition politician to seven years in prison over two social media posts about the war in Ukraine, in a case rights groups describe as part of a deepening crackdown on dissent.
Seven years over two posts
Maxim Kruglov, a deputy chair of the liberal Yabloko party and a former member of the Moscow City Duma, was sentenced on Tuesday for spreading what prosecutors called "false information" about the Russian armed forces, Meduza reported. He will serve the term in a penal colony. Prosecutors had sought eight years.
The charges stemmed from two posts published in 2022: one referring to the killing of civilians in Bucha, the town near Kyiv where bodies were found after Russian forces withdrew, and another featuring the destroyed city of Mariupol and citing United Nations data on civilian casualties. Kruglov, who had been held in custody since his arrest in the autumn of 2025, pleaded not guilty.
"A ban on dissent"
In his final statement, Kruglov rejected the premise of the case. "It's impossible to stay silent, and there needs to be an investigation," he said, according to Meduza, questioning what his posts had to do with spreading false information. He has characterized the prosecution as an attempt to criminalize dissent. Reuters reported that he favors a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Russian authorities maintain that such laws are needed to protect the military from disinformation. The court's verdict reflects the prosecution's position that Kruglov's posts were knowingly false and damaging — a characterization he and his supporters reject.
Part of a wider pattern
Rights groups say Kruglov's case is one of many targeting Yabloko, which Amnesty International has described as the last officially registered Russian party still openly calling for an end to the war. Amnesty has documented criminal cases and dozens of administrative actions against party members, and warned that the prosecutions appear aimed at clearing critics from the political landscape ahead of Russia's 2026 parliamentary elections.
Since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has enacted laws criminalizing the "discrediting" of the armed forces and the spread of "false information" about the military, the latter carrying sentences of up to 15 years. The statutes have been used against thousands of people, from street protesters to prominent politicians. Earlier high-profile cases include opposition figures sentenced to long prison terms for publicly condemning the war.
For Kruglov, the sentence means years in a penal colony for words posted online. For Russia's already diminished opposition, his case is another sign of how narrow the space for public disagreement with the war has become.
