Updated to add Roizman’s sentencing.
Russian opposition politician and former Yekaterinburg mayor Yevgeny Roizman has been jailed for a social media post supporting jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, local news outlet It’s My City reported THURSDAY.
Roizman was accused of posting a video clip briefly showing the logo of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, which was banned as an “extremist” organization in 2021, on social media platform VKontakte last February, according to the police.
A court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Roizman to 14 days of administrative arrest after convicting him of sharing symbols linked to an “extremist” organization, It’s My City reported.
His lawyer Vladislav Idamzhapov said his client did not share the video and that the VKontakte page in question did not belong to him.
“We immediately declare that Yevgeny Roizman did not participate in this offense, because he never had a personal account on VKontakte and never used this social network,” Idamzhapov told the state news agency. TASS before the trial.
“I don’t even admit the event happened, let alone my guilt,” Roizman said. said on his way to court.
The Moscow Times has sent a request for comment to Idamzhapov.
Roizman, one of the last opposition figures still in the country and not behind bars, is already awaiting trial for “discrediting” the Russian army, which could see him imprisoned for at least three years.
He was arrested and released pending trial in August for “discrediting” the military for comments criticizing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Roizman has already been fined three times for criticizing the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
More than 450 people, including prominent Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, face criminal charges for expressing their opposition to the war in Ukraine, according the OVD-Info monitoring group.
Roizman was mayor of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, from 2013 to 2018. He was a member of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, from 2003 to 2007.
AFP contributed reporting.