Blogland,  Freedom of Expression,  Russia

Russian blogger sent to prison

The latest news from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Russia on Wednesday sentenced a blogger in the city of Tomsk to five years in a Siberian prison for “inciting extremism and hatred” after he criticized Russian military intervention in Ukraine in videos he posted to YouTube and Vkontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook.

The unusually harsh decision against Vadim Tyumentsev, which also bans him from publishing any content online for three years after his sentence ends, is the latest evidence that the Russian government appears set to intensify its crackdown on dissenters online and that it is willing to dole out real prison terms to keep them quiet.

The crackdown began after Putin, who famously called the Internet a “CIA project,” returned as president in 2012 and Russia passed a slew of laws that tightened the government’s control over the flow of news and information online.

The Kremlin has gone so far as to say it is considering the creation of a “kill switch” to unplug the country from the Internet “in case of an emergency.”
…..
A court earlier this month handed down a two-year sentence to Darya Polyudova, an activist in Krasnodar, for online posts critical of Russia’s policy toward Ukraine. She had also carried out one-person protests during which she chanted: “Not war with Ukraine, but revolution in Russia!”

Earlier this year, Rafis Kashapov, an activist from Tatarstan was sentenced to three years imprisonment after being convicted of extremism for allegedly calling for separatism and inciting ethnic hatred. The irony in the charges, of course, is that Russia has supported separatism in Ukraine. Kashapov’s criticisms included railing against Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

Here’s a video of Tyumentsev’s sentencing. If any of our readers understand Russian, perhaps they can offer a translation:

One way of looking at this is that if Harry’s Place bloggers had been living in Russia and posting the sorts of things we have posted about Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, we too would probably be en route to a Siberian prison– if not there already.