The court of Sevastopol sentenced a 40-year-old Igor Movenko to two years in prison for a comment he made for the "Crimea-Ukraine" community in VKontakte social network.
Movenko was found guilty of public calls to extremism, Dozhd reports.
According to the man's lawyer, Oksana Zheleznyak, the prosecutor requested a probation period but the court went for a tougher sentence on her defendant. The lawyer now says she plans to file an appeal.
The criminal case was launched in April 2017 over the comment published in the summer of 2016.
As noted by "Mediazona", the commentary supposedly "expressed Movenko's pro-Ukrainian position, which Zheleznyak confirmed without specifying the nature of the comment made.
Read alsoCrimean attacked for Ukrainian symbols faces jail term for seeking justiceAs UNIAN reported earlier, citing KHPG, Movenko believes that his persecution is actually a result of him trying to press charges against an attacker who on September 7, 2016, assaulted him over a pro-Ukrainian sticker on a bicycle.
The man who brutally assaulted him claimed to be from the police, though he did not show any ID. The Crimean Human Rights Group later did in fact identify him as Volodymyr Sukhodolsky, who had served in a Berkut special force unit before becoming a turncoat in 2014. He is now working for the Russian police.
There is no evidence that a criminal investigation was ever launched over the attack, though Movenko himself ended up fined two thousand roubles for the sticker because it included a logo of the Azov Battalion officially banned in Russia.
