The Basmanny District Court of Moscow sentenced in absentia the founder of the Conflict Intelligence Team project Ruslan Leviev (Karpuk) and journalist Michael Naki to 11 years in a penal colony in the case of military “fakes” (points “b”, “c”, “e” of part 2 of article 207.3 Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). This is reported by the telegram channel “Caution, news”.
In addition to imprisonment, the court banned Leviev and Naki from administering the sites for five years. Earlier, the prosecutor requested 13 years in prison for convicts.
The reason for the case was the words of Leviev during a stream on the YouTube channel “Popular Politics” about the shelling of a children’s hospital in Mariupol by Russian troops. The decision to initiate proceedings states that the Russian Defense Ministry denies any involvement in this incident.
The case against Leviev and Naki was considered again. On the eve of the verdict, a change of judges took place: instead of Judge Yevgenia Nikolaeva, the decision was announced by Elena Lenskaya, who, among other things, was involved in the persecution of opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. Because of this, sanctions were imposed on Lenskaya by the EU, the US, Canada and the UK.
In August of this year, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation recognized the Conflict Intelligence Team organization as “undesirable”. The department claimed that the main purpose of the CIT is “collection and publication of information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, including personal data of Russian military personnel, used in the future to discredit.”
In May, it became known that Leviev had been arrested in absentia.
In November 2022, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation entered Ruslan Leviev into the unified register of “foreign agents”.
Conflict Intelligence Team was founded by Leviev in 2014. The project is investigating the circumstances of armed conflicts, including in Ukraine, Libya and Syria. In early March 2022, Leviev announced that the CIT had closed its office in Moscow and its entire staff left the country in order to be able to continue working and “record every course of the war, as this will definitely come in handy for the court in the future.”
