The Moscow City Court approved the appeal sentence for the co-founder of the Memorial human rights center Oleg Orlov: 2 years and 6 months of imprisonment in a general regime colony under the article on “repeated discrediting” of the army.

The prosecutor called Orlov’s sentence “legal and justified.” Lawyer Katerina Tertukhina noted that the client’s actions did not harm anyone and there was no motive of hatred and enmity in his text. In addition, all the expert linguists who saw the crime are incompetent. One of them is a mathematics teacher, another is a translator from English and German, and the third is an expert in “identifying faces from speech phonograms.”

In his last word, Oleg Orlov stated: “During the first investigation and the first trial, I adhered to the principle of good faith. However, the return of my case from the Moscow City Court showed that the court, as well as the investigation, is carrying out a political order.”

In February, Oleg Orlov was recognized as a foreign agent. At the same time, the Golovinsky Court of Moscow sentenced him to 2.5 years in prison under the article on “repeated discrediting” of the army. The human rights activist was tried for an anti-war article in which he called the Putin regime “fascist.” The investigation found in the article a motive of “ideological hostility towards traditional Russian spiritual, moral and patriotic values”, as well as a motive of hatred towards the social group “military personnel”.