MOSCOW — In a highly publicized case, a Russian court gave a political science student a three-year suspended sentence on Friday and banned him from managing websites for two years, for publishing videos in which he criticized the government of President Vladimir V. Putin. Since his arrest at the beginning of August, Yegor Zhukov, 21, a student at Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, has become a symbol of a wave of anti-Kremlin protests that rocked the Russian capital last summer. His videos called upon viewers to use all possible means to depose Mr. Putin, whom he called a “dictator and a tyrant.”Outside the court in Moscow, a crowd of about 300 people, mostly students, chanted “We are Yegor Zhukov” and “accountability and love,” the main slogan from his closing statement, after the verdict. After the verdict, Mr. Zhukov himself insisted that the struggle was far from over, saying that everything was now political and that Russia’s judicial system was a “repressive instrument.”

Source: New York Times December 06, 2019 08:31 UTC