Gennady Artemenko with his mother. Photo: First Department

A court in the city of Nizhny Novgorod in central Russia has sentenced a veteran to 18 years in a maximum security penal colony after convicting him of treason, calling for terrorism and the illegal storage of explosives, human rights NGO First Department reported on Friday.

According to the investigation, Gennady Artemenko, 57, contacted representatives of the Atesh organisation, a military partisan movement active in occupied areas of Ukraine, which has since been declared a “terrorist organisation”, in the early days of the war.

At their behest, according to the prosecution, he received instructions to photograph the Russian Federal Security Service building in the city of Dzerzhinsk and to glue leaflets around the city saying “Let’s stop the war together”. The prosecution was not able to provide any evidence of the correspondence between Artemenko and Atesh, however, First Department said.

“We believe that this trial is politically motivated and is due to Artemenko being ethnically Ukrainian. His mother is in Ukraine, and he tried to get permission for her to be transferred [to Russia] so he could take care of her. Artemenko is not a political activist,” his lawyer told First Department.

It is assumed Artemenko’s contact with the Ukrainian authorities asking for permission to travel to the country to bring his mother to Russia is what aroused the authorities’ suspicions.

Artemenko was also given a fine of 350,000 rubles (€3,800) and banned from administering websites for three years.