Russian politician who favours Ukraine ceasefire is jailed for seven years over social media posts

MOSCOW, June 24 - The deputy leader of Russia's liberal Yabloko party, which opposes the war in Ukraine, was convicted of spreading lies about the Russian army on Wednesday and jailed for seven years just over two months before a parliamentary election.

Maxim Kruglov, a former lawmaker in Moscow's city legislature, was arrested in October last year and charged over the content of two posts he had made on the Telegram social media network in 2022, the year Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine.

Kruglov pleaded innocent at his trial and said he believed that the war in Ukraine was a tragedy that must stop as soon as possible.

One of his two posts had referred to U.N. data about the number of people killed in the conflict and another to events in Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, in March 2022. Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russian forces of killing civilians in Bucha; Moscow says the killings there were staged to discredit its troops.

Yabloko, one of Russia's main liberal groups in the early post-Soviet years, now has only a handful of seats in regional parliaments and no seats in the national parliament. But the fact that it still contests elections gives it a platform to voice its anti-war views.

Russia holds elections for the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, in September. REUTERS