Press Release, 20.11.2025

Photo: Lev Shlosberg / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

Yabloko party Deputy Chairman Lev Shlosberg and his defenders Vitaly Isakov and Vladimir Danilov have appealed the sentence in the case of his allegedly “missing ‘foreign agent’ labels”, as Shlosberg saved several videos by other people on his VKontakte social media page without supplying them with his mandatory foreign agent label, which was impossible to do even from the technical point of view. It should be noted that on 5 November, judge of magistrate’s court No. 38 sentenced the politician to 420 hours of community service for keeping five other people’s videos on his personal VKontakte page without his mandatory “foreign agent” labelling. In the appeal against the sentence filed with Pskov City Court, Shlosberg and his defence identify 99 violations committed by the court of first instance.

The text of the appeal barely fitted on 74 pages. The document lists and substantiates violations of the Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code — there are nearly a hundred of them. Lev Shlosberg and his defence state in the appeal:

“Not a single element of the crime provided for in Article 330.1 Part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has been proved. The court was guided by conjectures of persons who do not possess and cannot possess information necessary to establish elements of the crime. The court deliberately did not indicate in the motivational part of the sentence the content of testimony and documents exonerating Lev Shlosberg that were provided to the court by the defence.”

Moreover, “the court denies the competence of OOO VKontakte in administering the social network because the court, due to its biased position, was not satisfied with OOO VKontakte’s answers. Thus, the objective opinion of specialists does not interest the court.”

The text of the appeal also explains to the court of second instance the basic principles of criminal proceedings that the court of first instance ignored.

It also states that the court — both at the stage of judicial investigation and at the stage of delivering the sentence — “on its own initiative”, in violation of Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code norms, deliberately “sought evidence of intent to disseminate (information) by means of preservation”, “substituted legal concepts of preservation and dissemination of information”, used the term “posted”, not provided for in Russian Federation legislation, “invented all circumstances of the subjective side of the crime, did not establish which particular obligation of a foreign agent was violated, did not establish the date, time, place and instrument of committing the crime, invented the presence of socially dangerous consequences, distorted witnesses’ testimony, unlawfully imposed on Lev Shlosberg responsibility for actions of other persons, considered the case in violation of rules of territorial jurisdiction”.

Thus, the court’s sentence against Lev Shlosberg is unlawful and unfounded, delivered with essential violations of procedural law norms, and therefore subject to reversal.

Lev Shlosberg and his defenders ask Pskov City Court to overturn the guilty verdict due to the absence in Lev Shlosberg’s actions of elements of a crime and to deliver an acquittal.

It should be noted that Lev Shlosberg’s criminal case is the first case in Russia about “foreign agent” labels. The case was initiated by police, not by Roskomnadzor (the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications) and the public prosecutor’s office. Proceedings lasted 13 months (the case was opened on 1 October 2024), and the trial took 20 hearings. Case materials comprised six volumes. The public prosecutor’s office demanded that Shlosberg be assigned 440 hours of community service.

In his (not) final statement, Lev Shlosberg declared that hundreds of pages of the case consist of responses to requests about his movements, calls and correspondence that have no relation to the VKontakte videos, whilst the real purpose of this case is total surveillance of him and searching for compromising information. He also emphasised that “this trial will enter the history of Russian law as an example of impeccable defence work in a situation when no one believes any longer in the very possibility of defending human rights and freedoms in our country”.