Photo: Dmitry Bykov / Telegram
A court in Moscow has sentenced one of Russia’s best-known writers, Dmitry Bykov, to seven years in a penal colony after finding him guilty in absentia of spreading “false information” about the Russian military and failing to observe his obligations as a so-called “foreign agent”, Mediazona reported on Wednesday.
Though Bykov lives and works in the United States and will not be jailed, his sentence is the latest in a series of sanctions against him and comes just three weeks after he was added to a list of “terrorists and extremists” by Russia’s financial watchdog.
The case against Bykov for spreading “false information” about the Russian military was opened in April, following an interview he gave to popular YouTube channel Popular Politics in October 2023, in which he discussed the Russian shelling of a village in eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region that killed 59 people.
Earlier this year, a separate case was opened against Bykov for failing to fulfil his legal obligations as a so-called “foreign agent”, a status handed out by the Russian authorities to a wide-range of public figures and private individuals, banning them from certain activities and requiring them to announce their status on every post they make online.
Bykov has been the subject of government pressure for over two decades thanks to his longstanding work for outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, an independent radio station that was forcibly shut down in 2022. A 2021 investigation by Belligcat revealed that Bykov’s sudden hospitalisation in 2019 following a trip to Novosibirsk was the result of a nerve agent attack carried out by Russia’s Federal Security Service.
Following his decision to leave Russia in January 2022, the Russian Justice Ministry added him to its registry of “foreign agents”. In January 2024, Bykov was fined 10,000 rubles (€105) for cooperating with a so-called “undesirable organisation” over a conversation he had with musician Boris Grebenshchikov on Novaya Gazeta Europe’s YouTube channel.
