A Moscow court has sentenced Maxim Kruglov, deputy chair of the Russian liberal party Yabloko, to seven years in prison on charges of spreading “fake” information about the Russian military.
The prosecutor had sought an eight-year sentence.
The criminal case against Kruglov was opened in the fall of 2025, and he has been in custody since October. The charges stemmed from two social media posts: in one, Kruglov wrote about war crimes in Bucha; in the other, he published a photograph of the destroyed city of Mariupol and wrote about civilian deaths, citing United Nations data. He did not plead guilty.
Among the prosecution’s witnesses was an employee of the state-run housing maintenance organization Zhilishchnik who initially introduced himself as a political analyst and a supporter of the Young Guard of United Russia.
In his final statement, Kruglov called the events that drove him to publish the posts “hell.” “It’s impossible to stay silent, and there needs to be an investigation,” he said. “What does any of this have to do with spreading false information?”
Family members, friends, and allies attended the hearing, among them Grigory Yavlinsky, the former chair and founder of Yabloko.
Maxim Kruglov is a deputy chair of Yabloko and led the party’s faction in the Moscow City Duma from 2019 to 2024. Kruglov taught comparative political science at the State Academic University for the Humanities.
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