A judge in Moscow on Friday sentenced Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser to the Ukrainian president’s office, to 11 years in prison in absentia after finding him guilty of spreading false information about the Russian military and publicly calling for terrorism.
Russian investigators accused Arestovych of publishing false statements about a deadly Russian missile strike on a railway station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk in April 2022.
Prosecutors also accused Arestovych of calling on Ukrainians to sabotage railway lines used to resupply Russian troops in a March 2022 video.
A judge from the Second Western District Military Court delivered the guilty verdict against Arestovych following a closed-door trial.
In addition to the 11-year prison sentence, the judge also banned Arestovych from managing websites for four years.
Prosecutors had requested a sentence of 15 years in prison for Arestovych, according to the exiled news outlet Mediazona.
“What a sophisticated cover-up operation,” Arestovych wrote on Telegram in response to the court ruling.
Arestovych served as an adviser to the head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office until January 2023, when he resigned after claiming a Ukrainian air defense missile caused a deadly strike on an apartment in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
He has since recast himself as a critic of the Ukrainian government and amassed an online following on his YouTube channel. Arestovych now lives outside of Ukraine. Zelensky sanctioned him last year.
Russia added Arestovych to its list of “terrorists and extremists” in May 2023 and placed him on its wanted list in October 2023. Moscow’s Basmanny District Court placed Arestovych in pre-trial detention in absentia in February 2024.
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