68-year-old pediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in Russia on Tuesday for allegedly spreading false information about the Russian army. The pediatrician was reported to the authorities by the mother of one of her patients and at the same time the widow of a fallen Russian soldier, reports TASR according to the AP agency.
Buyanov was detained in February after widow Anastasia Akinshinova claimed a doctor told her son during a search that his father, a fallen Russian soldier, was a legitimate target of Ukrainian forces. At the same time, she allegedly accused Moscow of waging war in Ukraine.
The video, in which an indignant Akinšinová complains about Bujanova, was widely circulated on the Internet, while even the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (Sledkom) Alexander Bastrykin personally requested the initiation of criminal prosecution of the pediatrician.
He denies the allegations
Buyanova, who was born in the city of Lviv in the west of Ukraine, denies the accusations and insisted in court that she never expressed herself as described by the mother of her minor patient. She tearfully asked the Russian court to set her free in closing arguments last week. “A doctor, and especially a pediatrician, is not capable of wishing harm to a child or its mother or to traumatize the child’s psyche. Only a monster is capable of that and such words as I allegedly said to them,” the Russian independent portal Mediazona quoted her as saying.
The defenders of the doctor pointed out that the prosecution did not present any evidence that the alleged conversation between the pediatrician and the seven-year-old son of the fallen soldier really took place. They claimed that the plaintiff made up the story out of pure animosity towards Ukrainians.
Buyanova’s case attracted the attention of all of Russia, with over 6,500 people signing a petition on the Internet demanding her release. The doctor’s supporters also regularly attended court hearings with her, and when the judge read the verdict on Tuesday, they shouted “Shame!”. They were then escorted out of the courtroom. The doctor’s legal representative, Oskar Čardžiev, described the sentence as “unexpectedly severe” and “monstrously cruel”. “We didn’t expect this,” he added.
So-called disinformation about the military has been a crime in Russia since March 2022, when Moscow passed a series of laws banning any public comment on the invasion that deviates from its narrative. The authorities then began to actively use these laws to suppress critics of the regime.
The Russian independent human rights organization OVD-Info, which monitors politically motivated arrests, claims that more than 1,000 people have already been charged or tried in connection with alleged statements against the army and the war in Ukraine.
