The Moscow City Court has annulled the conviction and sentence of former police officer Sergei Vedel (aka Klokov) who was handed seven years in prison in April 2023 on a charge of distributing "fake information" about Russia's armed forces involved in Moscow's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
The court's collegiate on appeals ruled on July 23 that Vedel's case must be sent back for retrial and ordered him to remain in custody at least until September before his case is retried.
Vedel was the first Russian citizen to face the charge in 2022 right after Russia adopted a law criminalizing any expression of opinion about the war in Ukraine that differs from official statements by Moscow. The law has been used to stifle even minor expressions of dissent.
Vedel's defense team has insisted the charge is illegal as it came about from recordings of private telephone conversations he had with friends, relatives in Ukraine, and colleagues, and therefore cannot be defined as distributing information.
Investigators say that the Ukrainian-born Vedel in three private telephone conversations said that Russian military losses in Ukraine were much higher than official statistics showed. He also said that Russia's military was killing civilians and that Ukraine's government was not led by Nazis, as Russian officials and propaganda have said in justifying the war.
Vedel, who was born and raised in the town of Irpin near Kyiv, was arrested on March 18, 2022, after his telephone conversation with a Ukrainian police officer in Kyiv, who is his 67-year-old father's friend, was intercepted.
During the conversation, Vedel asked the police officer in Kyiv to get information about his friends and their families residing in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.
Vedel admitted to making the statements and offered apologies to the court.
Russian troops were forced to leave Irpin and Bucha in late March 2022 after they failed to capture the Ukrainian capital, leaving behind the bodies of hundreds of dead civilians in the streets.
Kyiv, rights groups, and the United Nations have described the Russian military's actions in Bucha, Irpin, and some other towns as war crimes.
Russia has denied targeting civilians in its attacks on Ukrainian targets, and has repeatedly denied its forces have committed any war crimes even with mounting evidence that it has targeted hospitals, residential areas, cultural centers, and other nonmilitary installations.