A court in the Moscow region has upheld a 6.5-year sentence for Sergei Komandirov, an activist from the city of Smolensk. In July 2022, he was convicted for reposting a video of a mock trial with Vladimir Putin as a defendant. The appeal against the court decision was filed by the young man's mother. A telegram channel created in support of Komandirov reported the news on January 31.
The appeal to reverse Sergey Komanidrov's conviction has been considered by the military court in Vlasikha near Moscow on January 31. The meeting was held behind closed doors. During the trial, it was revealed that the person who had filed a complaint against Komandirov to the prosecutor's office and the expert linguist in his case are the same person. SOTA telegram channel cites the lawyer Yevgeny Gorbachev as saying that the expert lacks the necessary linguistic education and is an interested party at the trial.
The activist's defense team requested a retrial of the case and new expertise. The prosecutor responded that the grounds for this request were "frivolous."
Sergey Komandirov has been in jail since July 2022. He has been convicted of justification of terrorism. He was also found guilty of inciting hatred or hostility, rehabilitation of Nazism, and insulting a government official. His crime consisted of reposting a video with a mock trial of Vladimir Putin, Igor Sechin, and Dmitry Peskov.
The judges had passed the verdict in a speedy regime as they spent a day for each of the four volumes in the case. Such a speed was a record for Russian courts.
