Grigory Melkonyants attends his court hearing in Moscow, 25 March 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE / MAXIM SHIPENKOV

A Moscow court has sentenced Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of Russian independent election monitoring movement Golos, to five years in prison for enabling the activities of an “undesirable” organisation, independent media outlet Mediazona reported on Wednesday.

Melkonyants was convicted of enabling the activities of the European Network of Election Monitoring Organisations (ENEMO), which Russia declared “undesirable” in 2021. Golos stopped working with the organisation once it was blacklisted.

Investigators, however, insisted that Golos had continued to work with ENEMO. Melkonyants’s defence team noted that by the time ENEMO had been banned, the Golos organisation had been disbanded in Russia and the public movement of the same name was not a member of ENEMO.

Melkonyants has been under arrest since August 2023, when he was detained in a wave of searches against election observers carried out simultaneously in multiple Russian cities, including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Voronezh and Novgorod. The prosecutor had requested Melkonyants be given a six-year sentence, the maximum for the given charge.

In a final statement in court on Monday, published in full by Mediazona, Melkonyats said that while there was “little to rejoice about” in his situation, “there’s joy in going through this ordeal and becoming stronger and not losing faith in the cause” to which he had dedicated his whole life.

Melkonyats also thanked his friends, colleagues and supporters for fighting to defend him, showing that his work and the cause of free and fair elections was useful and worth fighting for.

“I cannot know how much longer my confinement will last, but I am confident that sooner or later I will be released and reunited with my loved ones and friends. And this anticipation fills my soul with joy,” he said.