Press Release, 6.09.2022

Photo: Ivan Safronov / Photo by Gleb Shchelkunov, Kommersant

On 5 September, the Moscow City Court sentenced 32-year-old journalist Ivan Safronov to 22 years in a strict regime colony on the charges of “treason”. On the same day, the Moscow Basmanny District Court revoked the registration of the print version of Novaya Gazeta, led by Editor-in-Chief Dmitry Muratov, a member of Yabloko and Nobel Prize laureate. Yabloko leaders comment on these events.

NIKOLAY RYBAKOV, CHAIRMAN OF YABLOKO:

The whole case against Ivan was based, from the very beginning, on information that could be easily found in the public domain. There is no evidence of his guilt.

At the last hearing of the court, the public prosecutor suggested that Safronov admit his guilt and then his term would be cut in half – 12 years in prison. Ivan refused to incriminate himself and received 22 years.

Before that, he spent two years in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention centre without the opportunity to see his relatives and even call his mother. Ivan’s two lawyers were forced to leave the country due to threats of persecution. Another lawyer, Dmitry Talantov, is in pre-trial detention centre right now.

Today’s verdict is a threat to all who want to make research, create, and think freely in my country. There will be increasingly more such trials and verdicts, until each finally understands that the time “out of politics” has ended long ago.

The Yabloko party is demanding a review of the verdict in the case of Ivan Safronov. Freedom for Ivan Safronov!

BORIS VISHNEVSKY, DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF YABLOKO:

The flagrantly unlawful decision of the Basmanny Court to invalidate the license of Novaya Gazeta (which is associated with more than two decades of my life) and the equally unlawful and cannibalistic verdict by the Moscow City Court to give 22 years in prison for an innocent man – Ivan Safronov – mean that Putin’s state has decided to consider honest journalism be a crime.

It is ready to recognise only devotedly servile and hysterically aggressive would-be media (which, in fact, they are not).

It needs as the Solovyovs, Kiselyovs, Skabeevs, Sheinins and other Simonyans as “journalists”.

Destroying Novaya Gazeta on the absurd “accusation” that 16 years ago it allegedly did not provide documents to someone (which are available to the authorities), and imprisoning Safronov for allegedly “disclosing state secrets” (which has not been proven by any material of his “case ”), the unjust justice and its customers spit in the face of Russian society.

Times will change. They will.

All those who fabricated such “cases”, who persecuted political prisoners, closed down independent media, destroyed Memorial [human rights society engaged in the study of the human rights violations during Joseph Stalin’s and Soviet period and commemoration of the victims] and other civil organisations, will be held accountable for this.

And neither “we were ordered”, nor “we were forced”, nor “such were the times” will not be taken into account…

Because they know very well now what they are doing.

Because public prosecutors, who do not hesitate to demand, and judges, who do not hesitate to give a monstrous verdict for an innocent person, cannot help but understand what they are doing.

Those who agree to be the perpetrators of dirty deeds deprive themselves of the right to sympathy and mercy for them – when their turn comes.