MOSCOW, Oct 8 (Reuters) – Elena Perepelitsa, a member of Russia’s liberal Yabloko party which opposes the war in Ukraine, has been sentenced to four years in a penal colony for donating money to an “extremist” organisation, state news agency TASS reported on Thursday.
She was the third Yabloko member to be jailed in less than four months as authorities step up pressure on the opposition party, which was largely barred from contesting September’s parliamentary election.
Perepelitsa was found guilty of donating money to the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, which is designated in Russia as a “foreign agent” and outlawed as an extremist organisation.
In a post on Telegram, Yabloko confirmed the verdict and shared Perepelitsa’s statement to the court in which she denied knowingly financing extremist activity.
Since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s use of extremist designations and strict wartime censorship laws have prompted many opposition figures and activists to flee the country, while those who remain risk prosecution for expressing anti-war views and other dissent.
Yabloko’s deputy leader Maxim Kruglov was convicted in June of spreading lies about the Russian army and jailed for seven years.
In August, the party’s deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg was sentenced to just over 11 years in a penal colony for discrediting Russia’s armed forces and spreading false information about them, after condemning the war in Ukraine.
(Reporting by Maxim Rodionov; writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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