Russian Court Accuses Prominent Journalist of “Justifying Terrorism” Over Social Media Posts
Russian prosecutors on Tuesday charged prominent journalist Nadezhda Kevorkova with “justifying terrorism” at the start of a controversial trial, which began nearly a year after her detention. The charges were based on posts she made on her Telegram channel several years ago.
Nadezhda, 66, was placed in the defendants’ dock and, at the start of the session, refused to plead guilty to the charges when asked by the judge. The potential punishment for the charges ranges from a fine to up to 7 years in prison. The case is based on two posts she had previously uploaded to her Telegram channel.
The first post, published on September 23, 2018, was a repost of an article by war correspondent Orkhan Jamal, who died in a mysterious accident in early August of that year in the Central African Republic. His article, written eight years earlier, commented on an armed attack in Nalchik (South Caucasus) in 2005.
The prosecution presented results from experts who concluded that the text “contains references to justifying the activities of participants in an armed insurgency, creates an idealized image of them, and depicts their activities as being coercive and (according to Islamic doctrine), leading (a Muslim) to heaven.”
In another post, dated September 1, 2020, Nadezhda Kevorkova herself wrote that Afghan Taliban fighters were seeking to free their comrades from the prisons of the “Kabul regime” in Afghanistan. Experts found that the text “contains justifications for the activities of members of the (Taliban) movement, which is considered a terrorist organization and is banned in Russia.”
It should be noted that the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Main Directorate for Countering Extremism only took notice of these posts years later, opening an investigation in mid-2023. On May 6, 2024, Kevorkova was detained and transferred to a detention center in preparation for her trial.
According to the indictment presented by the prosecutor, Kevorkova sought “to convey her opinion to an unlimited number of people regarding the recognition of the ideology and practice of terrorism as legitimate, needing support and imitation.”
