Russian schoolboy gets five years in colony for anti-Putin leafleats

A Moscow military court sentenced a 15-year-old teenager Arseniy Trubin to five years in a juvenile colony for distributing anti-Putin leaflets

That’s according to Radio Svoboda, Ukrinform reports.

According to an investigation run by the FSB, the teenager, based in Oryol region, was engaged in "spreading propaganda materials of an extremist nature at the request of his handlers from the Ukrainian paramilitary association Freedom of Russia. In particular, he would put in mailboxes leaflets with the image of Vladimir Putin and the inscription reading ‘do you need such a president?’”.

The investigators stated that the teenager is "fascinated by politics" and "the ideology of liberalism", as a result of which he "disapproves of Vladimir Putin's policy and does not support the war in Ukraine." In addition, he "formed the opinion that there is no freedom of speech and independent mass media in the Russian Federation" while "lawlessness and corruption" reign over the country.

According to Turbin's mother, the FSB claims that the leaflets with Putin's image were given to her son by representatives of the Freedom of Russia Legion, asking him to "fulfill their instruction to produce and distribute documentary materials."

At the same time, the schoolboy himself says that the image was publicly available on the Internet, and that no one gave him the relevant instructions.

Arseniy Turbin was detained in September 2023 and his apartment was searched.

The human rights watchdog, Memorial, recognized Turbin as a political prisoner.

As reported, Russian opposition journalists, having analyzed criminal and administrative cases heard in Russian courts over the years 2018-2023, came to the conclusion that in terms of the scale of repression, Putin has long surpassed almost all Soviet general secretaries, except Stalin.