Putin government jails deputy leader of Russia’s Liberal opposition party

The deputy leader of Russia’s Yabloko opposition party has been sentenced to seven years in prison due to social media posts that criticized the war in Ukraine.

Maxim Kruglov, a former city councillor in Moscow, was arrested last October on allegations of disseminating “false information” regarding the Russian military.

The charges stemmed from two posts he made in April 2022; one denounced the civilian casualties of the Ukraine war, while the other criticized the actions of the Russian army in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv where numerous civilians were discovered executed following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the area.

According to Russia’s state RIA news agency, a judge at Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky Court sentenced him to “seven years of imprisonment, to be served in a general-regime penal colony.”

Kruglov has denied the charges, asserting that his posts merely called for an investigation into the events, as reported by the independent Mediazona news outlet.

At 39 years old, Kruglov is among several senior figures of Yabloko who have faced legal challenges since the previous year.

Last June, authorities placed Lev Shlosberg, the head of the party’s Pskov branch, under house arrest, and in December, they fined party chair Nikolai Rybakov for sharing a photo of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny on social media.

Navalny, who passed away in an Arctic prison in 2024, is classified as an “extremist” in Russia, and any mention of him or his banned Anti-Corruption Foundation can lead to prosecution.

Yabloko is one of the oldest opposition parties in Russia.

It received millions of votes in parliamentary elections during the 1990s and early 2000s, but has not secured any seats in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, since 2007.

The party claims it has encountered ongoing bureaucratic restrictions aimed at preventing its candidates from participating in elections.

Since the initiation of its offensive in Ukraine in 2022, Russia has implemented a crackdown on dissent that echoes Soviet-era tactics, imposing fines or imprisonment on anyone who voices opposition to the war.

Putin government jails deputy leader of Russia’s Liberal opposition party