Defiant student activist calls on Russians to ‘fight’ back after suspended jail sentence

Yegor Zhukov, 21, had only just escaped the jaws of Russian justice and an expected four-year prison sentence.

But as he addressed hundreds of supporters from the steps of Kuntsevo District Court in Moscow, the student blogger was in defiant mood.

“Don’t separate these court cases from politics, because it’s all about the politics,” he said on Thursday. “They have turned these courtrooms into an institute of repression. We need to fight it.”

Mr Zhukov’s three-year suspended sentence was one of four unexpectedly lenient verdicts handed to young protesters in Moscow on Friday.

Judges imposed guilty verdicts in all episodes, but the tariffs they imposed were considerably less than requested by state prosecutors.

Pavel Novikov, 32, was released with a fine of 120,000 rubles (£15,000). He had been put on trial for “injuring” a police officer at the 27 July protest rally in Moscow. A video showed him throwing a small water bottle in the officer’s direction. Prosecutors had asked for three and a half years’ jail time.

Vladimir Yemelyanov, 27, was handed a two-year suspended sentence. He was arrested in connection to the same protest rally – his crime, pulling a truncheon-waving police officer away from protesters.

Prosecutors asked for a four-year custodial sentence, despite a statement from the officer that he had “no complaints in relation to the defendant”.

Unusually, the judge announced she would be taking “mitigating circumstances” of his financial support for his elderly grandmother and great-grandmother into account – and would be releasing Mr Yemelyanov on parole. Immediately following the verdict, the young man rushed to embrace his grandmother, who had been watching nervously, sedatives in hand.

A fourth defendant, Nikita Chirtsov, did receive a custodial sentence for assault – he had pushed during skirmishes. But even then his tariff was much reduced, and he received one year instead of the three and a half years requested by prosecutors.

Later, prosecutors announced they were dropping charges in relation to a fifth defendant, Sergei Fomin.

In the four months since protests unexpectedly broke out in Moscow, authorities have invested extensive police resources in Russia’s young protest generation. In total, 90 state investigators were assigned to the so-called Moscow Affair. This is nearly 50 per cent more than the number deployed following the 2004 school terror attack in Beslan.

Initially, the security bloc was intent on a clampdown. In quick time, courts convicted six young men in often wild sentencing – in one case a man received five years for a tweet.

But public outcry forced authorities to drop half a dozen other cases. The Kremlin was also pushed to overturn the verdict in the case of 23-year-old actor Pavel Ustinov, jailed for resisting arrest even though footage showed he was more precisely the victim of an unprovoked assault by police.

Friday’s verdicts suggest that the Kremlin has become worried about the possible radicalising effect of a hardline strategy.

The case of Yegor Zhukov, who was the most prominent of the protesters sentenced on Friday, seems to underline such fears. Before his “extremist” YouTube videos criticising the Kremlin caught the attention of the Russian government, the politics student was but a little-known blogger.

Since then he has emerged as a potential opposition leader.

His defiant final words in court were widely shared before his verdict – and were seen by some as a rallying call for further protests.

“I’ve been given the opportunity to undergo this trial, this suffering, in the name of the values close to my heart,” Mr Zhukov said. “Ultimately, your honour, the more frightening my future is, the more broadly I will smile in its direction.”