Russian anti-war journalist Maria Ponomarenko sentenced to six years in prison for posting content on social media considered as “false information”

Published February 18, 2023 | By NewsJive.com

A Siberian court in the Russian city of Barnaul, have sentenced a Russian journalist, Maria Ponomarenko, 45, to six years in prison, for posting content on social media considered by the court as “fake news”. She is also banned from working as a journalist and participating in digital events for the next five years, according to her lawyer Dmitry Shitov.

According to BBC, the prosecutors in the trial, claimed that Maria Ponomarenko had committed a criminal offence, by spreading “knowingly false information” about the Russian armed forces, in the beginning of the war in Ukraine, when she worked for the Russian news agency RusNews in Barnaul, Siberia.

According to the court, the crime that Ponomarenko had commited and now convicted for, was that she posted critical content on social medias about a bombing attack on a theater in the city of Mariupol in March 2022. An attack which Russia had been blamed for but denies of having carried out.

It’s unclear how many people died in the attack, but different sources from western medias estimates the casualties to be around 300-600.

Russia introduced a new controversial law in March 2022, with the mission to counteract “deliberately spreading false information about Russia’s armed forces in Ukraine”. Anyone who violates this law can be fined and jailed between five and ten years.

Maria Ponomarenko commented her sentence and the situation in Russia from her point of view, from the court’s prison cell. She said among other things that the Russian constitution is on her side, but stil they convicted her on arbitrary grounds.

“If it’s a war, then call it a war. Then apply military censorship. On what basis are military censorship applied to me?” said Ponomarenko, in regards to the fact that Russia has not legally defined the conflict in Ukraine as a “war” officially, but instead defines it legally as a “special military operation”.

It’s forbidden in the Russian federation to call or to define the conflict in the Ukraine as “war” or to use the phrase “invasion” to describe the conflict from the Kremlin’s perspective.

President Vladimir Putin himself referred to the conflict in Ukraine as “war” during a speech in December 2022 for some reason.

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