Yevgeny Bestuzhev. Photo: Dmitry Tsyganov

St. Petersburg political scientist and opposition activist Yevgeny Bestuzhev was handed a suspended sentence on Tuesday for disseminating false information about the Russian Army.

Despite prosecutors arguing for an eight-year prison sentence, Bestuzhev was given an unusually lenient five-year-and-three-month suspended sentence and was set free in court.

Accused of discrediting the Russian military and government in 27 social media posts he made between February and March 2022 criticising Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Bestuzhev denied the charges, telling the court that he had not knowingly fabricated false information, and that he had merely been guilty of “an excessive, emotional, politically incorrect assessment.”

Bestuzhev spent almost two years in pretrial detention following his arrest in November 2022. While in jail, Bestuzhev, who suffers from several chronic illnesses including coronary heart disease, suffered several heart attacks.

An application to the court submitted by Bestuzhev’s lawyer asking for his client to be placed under house arrest until his sentencing was rejected by the judge after the prosecution argued that Bestuzhev was a flight risk, who, it alleged, was planning to move to Estonia, where his daughter lives.

Formerly a professor at Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, Bestuzhev was also the co-chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of Solidarnost, the Russian version of the Polish pro-democracy movement, which was founded by well-known opposition politicians Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov.