Press Release, 14.07.2026

Photo: Maxim Kruglov at the Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The prosecution in the trial of Yabloko Deputy Chairman Maxim Kruglov has lodged an appeal with the Moscow City Court. This was announced on Tuesday, 14 July, by the politician’s lawyer, Sergei Badamshin. According to an excerpt from the appeal, the prosecution is asking the court to “overturn” the verdict handed down by the Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow and to “send the case back for a new trial at the same court, before a different judge”.

Kruglov’s defence had also called for the verdict to be overturned earlier insisting that Kruglov should have been released, having filed its own appeal against the sentence on 30 June.

It should be noted that Maxim Kruglov was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony over two Telegram posts expressing regret over people’s deaths, in a case brought under Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code (“disseminating information about the Russian Armed Forces”). The court of first instance, presided over by a judge of the Zamoskvoretsky District Court, ruled that the prosecution had convincingly proven Kruglov’s guilt in committing the offence with which he had been charged, motivated by “political hatred”. However, the experts who had carried out a psycholinguistic examination of Kruglov’s posts told the court that they had found no signs of aggression or hatred whatsoever, but had instead identified a “very cautious, very correct” expression of his own feelings, including regret.

Kruglov’s defence maintains that the investigation and the prosecution committed a huge number of violations, that there is “no corpus delicti in the case” whatsoever, and that the only possible verdict for Kruglov is an acquittal.

In his last word, the politician stressed that throughout his life and career he had been guided solely by “love for his country – a country where human life is valued”.

According to Yabloko leader Nikolai Rybakov, the entire trial against Kruglov is “a demonstration of the decay of the law enforcement agencies and a return to the times of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror”. The party maintains that the prosecution of Maxim Kruglov is entirely political in nature.