Social scientist and left-wing activist Boris Kagarlitsky was fined and banned from administering websites, a court ruled
Russian sociologist and prominent left-wing activist Boris Kagarlitsky was released from custody on Tuesday, Russian media reported from the courtroom.
He stood accused of “publicly justifying terrorism” in a video he distributed through the Rabkor news agency, where he serves as editor-in-chief. The prosecution demanded that Kagarlitsky be sentenced to 5.5 years in prison. The court ultimately found him guilty of making “calls for terrorism” but decided not to jail him and instead issued the 64-year-old a 600-thousand-ruble ($6,660) fine, and banned him from administering internet sites for two years.
Kagarlitsky is well known as a sociologist, political scientist, left-wing theorist and lecturer at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. He was arrested back in July after releasing a video about the October 2022 attack on the Crimean Bridge. In the video he stated that it was “understandable” that Ukraine would want to destroy the structure.
Prosecutors have insisted that Kagarlitsky “discredited the state authorities,” stating that a psychological and linguistic examination of his video had found that it contained an “acknowledgement of the ideology of carrying out an explosion in order to discredit government authorities.”
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