The Central District Military Court of Yekaterinburg sentenced 36-year-old Igor Yakunichev from the Yamal village of Pangoda to 12 years in a general regime penal colony with the deprivation of the right to administer Internet resources for 5 years. Igor pleaded not guilty, writes It’s my city.
The man was found guilty of publicly “calling for terrorism,” actions directed against the security of the state, spreading military “fakes” and repeatedly “discrediting” the army.
Prior to this, ASTRA reported that the reason for the persecution was the video on his VKontakte page. Among other things, there were published video testimonies of eyewitnesses of the shooting by the Russian military of Vasily Avdeev, a resident of the Kiev village of Berezovka.
In 2023, criminal cases were already opened against the man on military “fakes” (207.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and “propaganda of terrorism” (205.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), as well as an administrative case on “discrediting the army.”
According to It’s my city, until 2022, Yakunichev was engaged in local activism: he covered the problems of his village and district, wrote to the administration and the prosecutor’s office about problems with roads and cleaning. After the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Igor published anti-war videos and wrote complaints to the prosecutor’s office, but this time about the actions of the authorities and the military.
As Mediazona noted, the investigator Alexander Varapaev, the one who did not give out Alexei Navalny’s body to his mother, was investigating his case. Varapaev reclassified his articles to more serious ones, Yakunichev claims.
