Russian man sentenced to 7.5 years for criticizing Ukraine invasion, Stalin.

Igor Orlovsky, a resident of Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai, was sentenced to seven and half years in prison for critical comments about the invasion of Ukraine and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the Russian independent outlet OVD-Info reported on Nov.

13. Orlovsky, whom a Russian human rights group called a political prisoner, is currently in detention and was already sentenced to three years in March for reportedly calling for the death of Russian soldiers and President Vladimir Putin on social media. Now, a court in the Siberian Krasnoyarsk Krai convicted Orlovsky of "rehabilitating Nazism" by making a comment on social media that compared Stalin to Adolf Hitler.

"Stalin was as much an aggressor as Hitler," Orlovsky wrote. The man was also sentenced for "discrediting" the Russian military's conduct in its invasion of Ukraine. In his comments on social media, he criticized Russia's bombing of the Mariupol Theater in March 2022 and the killing of Ukrainian civilians during the invasion.

Orlovsky also referenced the words of the Ukrainian Ombudsman about Russian soldiers raping children in Bucha, OVD-Info wrote. During the siege of Mariupol, Russian forces bombed a local theater building marked by the sign "children" that served as a shelter for civilians.

While the exact number of the victims of the attack, denounced by Ukraine as a war crime, remains unclear, the highest estimates are up to 600 civilians killed. The latest case against Orlovsky was opened in December last year. Russia began prosecuting criticism of Russia's war against Ukraine as "discrediting of the Russian military" in March 2022 in order to quell anti-war dissent.

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News Editor

Martin Fornusek is a news editor at the Kyiv Independent. He has previously worked as a news content editor at the media company Newsmatics and is a contributor to Euromaidan Press.

He also volunteers as an editor and translator at the Czech-language version of Ukrainer.

Martin studied at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, holding a bachelor's degree in security studies and history and a master's degree in conflict and democracy studies.