LONDON (Reuters) – Opposition politician Ilya Yashin is being investigated by Russia’s federal Investigative Committee on suspicion of spreading “fake information” about the army, a lawyer for several opposition activists said on Tuesday.
Yashin, a municipal representative for Moscow’s Krasnoselsky district, is an outspoken critic of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He had been due to leave a Moscow jail early on Wednesday after being imprisoned for 15 days for disobeying a police officer – a move that he said was linked to his activism.
“I got a call from an investigator just now – a search of his (Yashin’s) house is starting. Am on my way there,” lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said on social media.
Days after launching an invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russia made it a crime to deliberately disseminate “fake information” about the army, defining this as any report that deviated from official accounts.
Last week Alexei Gorinov, a member of the Krasnoselsky district council, became the first to go to prison for the new offence after receiving a seven-year sentence.
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special military operation” and says it had to defend Russian speakers from persecution and defuse a Western-inspired security threat.
Kyiv and its Western allies say these are baseless pretexts for an unprovoked imperial land-grab.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Cynthia Osterman)
