Search
The Central District Military Court has fined Ural preacher Eduard Charov 500,000 roubles (US$5,500) in cases relating to repeated “discrediting” of the army (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code) and “justifying terrorism” (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code), reports Mediazona. He has also been banned from running social media accounts for four years. The prosecutor had asked for seven and a half years in a penal colony for Charov.
The case was initiated over two posts on VKontakte. “Discrediting” was deemed to be a repost of a video by Yevgeny Prigozhin on the eve of the 2023 mutiny, in which Prigozhin accused the Russian military leadership of deceiving the public and the president in order to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Justifying terrorism” referred to Charov’s comment under a news post about the arson of a military recruitment office in Polevskoy, a town in the Urals: “This citizen should be awarded the Order of Courage.” In the end, the arsonist was sentenced to two years in a penal colony not for terrorism, but for property damage: according to the case materials, phone scammers had forced them to set fire to the recruitment office.
For more than ten years, Charov has run a shelter for homeless people in Sverdlovsk Region, near Yekaterinburg in the Urals. After mobilisation began, he offered sanctuary to men who did not want to go to war. According to him, seven people reached out to him. In 2023, the preacher had already been fined 65,000 roubles (US$720) for “discrediting” the army (Article 20.3.3 of the Russian Administrative Offences Code) and for incitement of hatred or enmity (Article 20.3.1 of the Administrative Code).
Before sentencing, Charov told Mediazona that imprisonment could become a death sentence for him because of chronic illnesses. Prior to the trial, he was under restrictions on certain actions.