A pro-war guy got six years for a blog post. A Moscow court threw the book at Sergei Udaltsov, a leftist activist who sometimes backed the Ukraine war but also criticized Vladimir Putin. The 2nd Western District Military Court convicted him of justifying terrorism over an article he wrote more than two years ago. In that writing, he defended a group of Marxist activists from Ufa who got tagged as terrorists after a police raid.
The sentence shows you can get locked up just for your words in Russia now. Udaltsov's piece argued that the justice system messed up with those young Marxists, calling their prosecution wrong. He was a big figure in the old Bolotnaya Square protests. The ruling makes it clear that criticizing law enforcement or court decisions brings heavy time, pointing to a major free speech crackdown.
This all happens while the war in Ukraine keeps changing Russia's political rules. Observers say the conflict lets authorities act without much scrutiny, making it easy to just jail anyone they dislike. The situation creates a stark contrast where top leaders face no domestic legal fallout for the war, but a guy like Udaltsov gets a max-security term for writing an article questioning a single case.
The sentence shows you can get locked up just for your words in Russia now. Udaltsov's piece argued that the justice system messed up with those young Marxists, calling their prosecution wrong. He was a big figure in the old Bolotnaya Square protests. The ruling makes it clear that criticizing law enforcement or court decisions brings heavy time, pointing to a major free speech crackdown.
This all happens while the war in Ukraine keeps changing Russia's political rules. Observers say the conflict lets authorities act without much scrutiny, making it easy to just jail anyone they dislike. The situation creates a stark contrast where top leaders face no domestic legal fallout for the war, but a guy like Udaltsov gets a max-security term for writing an article questioning a single case.
