Paediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova, who was charged with spreading fake information on the Russian army, appears in court in Moscow on May 30, 2024. NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images

A doctor accused of criticizing the war in Ukraine in front of a patient was convicted Tuesday of spreading false information about the Russian military and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison, part of an unrelenting Kremlin crackdown on dissent.

Dr. Nadezhda Buyanova, 68, was arrested in February after Anastasia Akinshina, the mother of one of her patients, reported the pediatrician to authorities. Akinshina alleged that Buyanova told her and her son that his father, a Russian soldier who was killed in Ukraine, was a legitimate target for Kyiv's troops and had blamed Moscow for the war.

A video of the outraged Akinshina complaining about Buyanova was widely publicized, and chief of Russia's Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin personally demanded a criminal case be brought against the doctor.

Buyanova, who was born in western Ukraine, denied the accusation, insisting she never said what she was accused of saying. In a tearful closing statement to the court last week, she had urged it to acquit her.

Her defense argued that the prosecution failed to present evidence that the purported conversation took place, including any recordings of it, and alleged that her accuser fabricated the story out of animosity toward Ukrainians, according to the independent news site Mediazona, which reported all of the hearings in the trial.

In her closing statement to the court, Buyanova said it was "painful" to read the accusations in the indictment, and broke down.

"A doctor, especially a pediatrician, is not capable of wishing harm to a child, his mother, or traumatizing the child's psyche. Only a monster is capable of this — and of the words that I allegedly said to them," Mediazona quoted her as saying.

"Spreading false information" about the army has been a criminal offense since March 2022, when Russia adopted a series of laws prohibiting any public expression about the invasion that deviated from the official narrative. Authorities started actively using them against critics and protesters.

According to OVD-Info, one of Russia's leading rights groups that tracks political arrests, more than 1,000 people have been implicated in criminal cases on charges related to speaking or acting out against the war.

Last November, Russia placed Ukrainian singer Susana Jamaladinova on its wanted list, after the singer was reportedly charged under a law adopted in 2022 that bans spreading so-called fake information about the Russian military and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine.

A week before that, a Russian court sentenced artist and musician Sasha Skochilenko to seven years in prison for swapping supermarket price tags with antiwar messages.

Also in 2023, a Russian court sentenced prominent opposition figure and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in a high-security prison for criticizing Russia's war in Ukraine.

Source