Photo: Farida Kurbangaleyeva / Telegram
Russian former national news anchor Farida Kurbangaleyeva has been sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Friday.
Kurbangaleyeva, who resigned from her role in protest over the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and went into exile, was convicted of spreading “false information” about the Russian military and “justifying terrorism”.
The second defendant in the case, Alexey Baranovsky, who fought for Ukraine as part of the Freedom of Russia Legion, which fights alongside the Armed Forces of Ukraine against the Russian military, was also sentenced in absentia to six years in a penal colony.
The prosecution said that Kurbangaleyeva had “consciously used her reputation and media resources as a former presenter on a national TV channel” to publish an interview with Baranovsky on her YouTube channel in May 2024, which included “assertions of … heroism” regarding the legion’s activities. The prosecution also considered posts on her Telegram channel to be “false information” about the army.
Kurbangaleyeva hosted the Vesti news programme on Russian state TV channel Rossiya-1 until 2014, and after going into exile she hosted the news on the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty-affiliated TV channel Current Time from 2018 to 2021. She now lives in Prague and runs her own YouTube channel.
Reacting to her sentence on her Telegram channel, Kurbangaleyeva wrote: “I’ve decided to recover from the blow with a glass of rosé in a café in the town of Châteaufort near Paris. I have to think about how to live with all this…”
A Moscow court first issued a warrant for Kurbangaleyeva’s arrest in absentia in June 2024, when she was also added to the Russian government’s list of “foreign agents” and “extremists and terrorists”.
In February, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office lodged a formal request with Czechia for the extradition of Kurbangaleyeva, which was turned down. This was the first known instance of Russia submitting an extradition request to an EU country for a Russian citizen facing charges of justifying terrorism or spreading false information.