This Tuesday, Russia sentenced veteran human rights activist Oleg Orlov, one of the founders of the historic NGO Memorial, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 and dissolved by Russian justice a year earlier, to two and a half years in prison. He is the latest victim of Russian laws that equate criticism of military intervention in Ukraine as a criminal offense for discrediting the military.

Orlov, who is 70 years old, was one of the last critical voices against the Kremlin who was not either in prison or in exile.

The trial against the activist was held at the initiative of the prosecutor’s office, which did not accept a previous conviction in which he was imposed a fine instead of a prison sentence.

The first trial ended in October 2023. The court then sentenced him to pay a fine of 150,000 rubles (1,500 euros), a very lenient sentence in a Russia accustomed to imprisoning critics of power.

Curiously, the fine was what the prosecution had requested. But then he changed his mind and ended up appealing the sentence to get a prison sentence.

The prison sentence was expected. “No one doubts that I will be convicted,” Orlov said after the start of the new trial.

In his last word on Monday, Orlov denounced the “strangling of freedom” in Russia and “the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine.”

The accusation against him is based on his demonstrations against the Russian offensive against Ukraine and on an opinion column against Russian power published in the French online newspaper Mediapart.

“I don’t regret anything,” he said on Monday in his last intervention before the judge.

He also took the opportunity to denounce the death on February 16 of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalni in an Arctic prison. He described what happened to Navalny as “murder” and asked supporters of the Russian opposition to “not lose courage.”

This February the Russian Justice Ministry included Orlov in the register of “foreign agents” and prosecutors updated the charges against him, stating that his alleged crimes were motivated by “ideological enmity against spiritual, moral and patriotic values.” traditional Russians.

Memorial assures that the reinvestigation of this case was done exceptionally quickly.

Oleg Orlov has been a human rights activist since the 1970s. He was also one of the founders of Memorial in the late 1980s.

Memorial was the main organization that fought in Russia to preserve the memory of Soviet repressions and also documented current ones.

In the 1990s, Orlov took part in negotiations for the exchange of prisoners during the Chechen war and in 1995 he offered himself in exchange for hostages captured in a hospital in the city of Budyonnovsk.

Between 2004 and 2006 he was a member of the Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, an advisory body to the Presidency of Russia. She left him after the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

In 2011, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, accused Orlov of defamation, charges of which he was acquitted.