On April 22, a court in the Novgorod region fined local resident Yuri Kartyzhev 30,000 rubles (about $470) for violating Russia’s new law against insulting state officials. The man was found guilty of sharing two posts on the social network VKontakte where he allegedly wrote “Putin is an unbelievable fuckwit.” Kartyzhev’s sentence marks the first known enforcement of this new curtailment of free speech.A man in the Novgorod region wrote two posts about Putin. He says the police tampered with the evidence and planted the obscenities.Yuri Kartyzhev, 34, lives in Malaya Vishera, a town in the Novgorod region’s Malovishersky District. He recently got out of prison, where he served two years for theft. After confessing to the charges, he was ultimately released on early parole. Kartyzhev told Meduza that he currently works a few side jobs, but officially he’s unemployed. He blames Putin, who “brought the country to this,” for the fact that he
The case is going to the European Court of Human Rights.
Also at Meduza, the story I was originally after:Russia's stolen-data industry New ‘BBC’ report explores the black market for ‘data penetrations’
