A Moscow police officer could face a lengthy prison term after the wiretapping of his phone revealed that he had criticized the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Sergei Vedel, who was originally from Bucha, Ukraine, the scene of alleged Russian atrocities last year, had made disparaging comments about the war in conversations with his relatives, according to an indictment that was reported on the Telegram channel of opposition politician Ilya Yashin.
He had worked as a driver for one of the chiefs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. A month before the start of the war, his phone was wiretapped, which Yashin said could have been as part of an investigation into his boss or because of his Ukrainian origins.
It was discovered that during his phone conversations with friends last March, Vedel denied that Ukraine was run by Nazis, a stance that was one of the Kremlin’s justifications for its war.
He also said that one of the reasons for the war was a bid by Moscow to change power in Kyiv and he outlined the heavy Russian troop losses in the early days of the invasion.
In March 2022, a criminal case was opened against Vedel in connection with the public dissemination of false information about the actions of the Russian army.
Vedel’s lawyer said that a private conversation could not be considered public dissemination of information, according to Yashin and reported by independent Russian language outlets.
However, the indictment said that these views caused “a feeling of anxiety, fear and insecurity on that part of the state” in the employee who had tapped Wedel’s phone.
The prosecutor approved the charges and Vedel will appear in Moscow’s Perovsky Court on Wednesday. Yashin said that Vedel has been in jail for a year and was the first person arrested in Russia under the country’s criminal code article about “military fakes.”
As part of the measures introduced at the start of what Moscow calls the “special military operation” to crack down on dissent, tough laws were introduced.
Spreading “fakes” can result in a prison sentence of up to 15 years, while “discrediting” the army can result in a five-year term.
Yashin himself was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for opposing the invasion of Ukraine.
Yashin had been tried with spreading false information meant to discredit the Russian army after he wrote a series of posts about the murder and torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops in Bucha, Vedel’s hometown.
A Moscow police officer could face a lengthy prison term after the wiretapping of his phone revealed that he had criticized the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
