A judge in the city of Yekaterinburg on Tuesday sentenced an editor of the pro-Kremlin news agency Ura.ru to five years in prison after he was found guilty of bribing his uncle, a former senior police official, to obtain confidential internal reports.
Denis Allayarov, 29, was arrested in June on accusations that he had paid bribes totaling 120,000 rubles ($1,600) to his uncle Andrei Karpov, who served as the head of Yekaterinburg’s criminal investigation department before being dismissed last April.
“For 10 months, the journalist paid his uncle, a police officer, for confidential operational reports from the Yekaterinburg Interior Ministry to use as material for his publications,” the Sverdlovsk region’s court system said in a statement.
A Verkh-Isetsky District Court judge found Allayarov guilty of bribing an official and sentenced him to five years in a medium-security prison. In addition to the prison term, he was fined 1.2 million rubles ($16,000) and banned from practicing journalism for four years.
Allayarov pleaded guilty to the charges.
Karpov received a four-year suspended sentence in November after entering a plea deal.
The case against Allayarov comes amid a broader shakeup at Ura.ru. A support group for the journalist suggested the prosecution is linked to a state crackdown on the agency’s former owners, energy tycoons and Austrian citizens Artyom Bikov and Alexei Bobrov.
In October, a Yekaterinburg court ordered the seizure of the duo’s assets following Bobrov’s arrest the month before. Ura.ru has since been acquired by Readovka, another pro-Kremlin media outlet.
Founded in 2006 as an independent investigative outlet, Ura.ru began taking a pro-government line in the early 2010s. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the outlet has faced allegations from investigative media that it accepted payments to publish favorable coverage of Russian military commanders while suppressing critical reporting on the Defense Ministry.
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