19 August 2025
by Sergei Davidis
Source: Facebook
[On 19 August 2025 Sergei Davidis, one of the leaders of Memorial, was sentenced in absentia to six years in a penal colony on a charge of justifying terrorism using the internet – RiR]
It’s hard to comment on today’s sentence handed down by military judge Krivosheev: six years’ imprisonment.
In the context of the hundreds and thousands of people who have been imprisoned in Russia for real, even seriously discussing the sentence issued against me in absentia makes me uncomfortable.
It will have no effect on my real life. Not that it was meant to.
The criminal case and the expected sentence for it is yet another signal, a political statement in the name of the state.
It might have happened by accident, but the choice of grounds for the criminal case was quite symbolic.
Today any given public person will have a stack of statements punishable from the standpoint of Russian punitive laws and their application in practice. So do I. But they chose a Facebook post that was absolutely irreproachable from any standpoint, in fact a repost of the public statement of our project, Support for Political Prisoners. Memorial, which recognizes the Azov Regiment prisoners of war as political prisoners. The persecution of prisoners of war for the very fact of their military service and participation in military actions violates the Geneva Conventions and in and of itself is a war crime. There’s nothing to argue about here.
So the repressive machine’s attention was drawn specifically by my human rights activity, and the sentence demonstrates its attitude toward that.
Of course, though, the decision of the 2nd Western District Military Court will have no impact of any kind on that activity. We are going to support political prisoners, gather and disseminate information about them, and create and develop an infrastructure for solidarity with victims of Russian political repressions: Russians, Ukrainians, and citizens of other countries. We will fight for their release.
We can only reach these goals together.
So that today’s sentence, I hope, will be yet another reason to support political prisoners and our project.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
