TVER, Russia -- A court in Russia's western city of Tver has sentenced a man to 10 months of community service on charges of insulting law-enforcement authorities in a video he placed on the Internet.
However, the court also ruled on August 11 that Shamil Kazakov did not have to serve the sentence because of time he has already spent in pre-trial detention and house arrest. The court also dropped charges that he had spread hatred via the Internet.
Kazakov placed a video in June on the Internet which claimed he was refused employment as a police officer due to his Tatar ethnicity. His video "How I Tried to Become a Policeman" subsequently went viral.
In the video, the voice of Tver City Police official Yevgeny Smorodov can be heard telling Kazakov that he cannot be accepted to the police because there is "an unwritten order by top officials not to take representatives of the Caucasus, Daghestanis, Chechens, Tatars, and Muslims into the police force."
Smorodov was fired after the video became public. But Kazakov, whose video juxtaposed images of Russian police with Nazis during World War II, was arrested for inciting hatred online.
