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Russian Jewish politician faces 12 year prison sentence for sharing Daily Mirror front page
In February 2022, Lev Shlosberg shared a post on Telegram which included a picture of the British paper's coverage of the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine days earlier
A Russian Jewish politician who is a senior member of the country’s only genuine opposition party looks set to receive a jail sentence of more than a decade, after he shared a Daily Mirror front page in February 2022 which condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Prosecutors are demanding that Lev Shlosberg, deputy chairman of the Yabloko party, receive 12 years imprisonment in a penal colony for what was described as “spreading fake news” about the Russian military.
In February 2022, days after Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, Shlosberg shared a post on the Telegram social media platform from Ekho Moskvy, a Russian radio station which has since shut down. That post featured the front page of the UK’s Daily Mirror on 25 February, showing an injured Ukrainian woman, and below her, an image of Vladimir Putin. The front page caption read: “Her blood…his hands”, going on to refer to Putin as “power crazed”.
Shlosberg was arrested in December 2025 in connection with this case and has been in custody since, despite his lawyers pointing out that the section of Russia’s criminal code which he was arrested under was only introduced after he shared the front page in question. Upon his arrest, he was added to an official list of individuals which the Russian state has termed “terrorists and extremists”.
Mediazona, an exiled Russian news outlet, managed to get a correspondent into the court room in the city of Pskov, where Shlosberg’s case was heard this week. According to the outlet: “The arguments proceeded without Lev Shlosberg’s lawyers—they did not attend the hearing due to work on other cases and personal circumstances. They were absent for the two previous days as well. For all three days, Shlosberg was assigned lawyer Leonid Skripilev; each time the politician challenged him, but Judge Victoria Malyamova denied the challenge, despite the right established by the Criminal Procedure Code and the Constitutional Court to refuse the services of a specific defender.
“The judge also did not allow the lawyer to review the records of previous hearings or conduct a full consultation with Shlosberg, citing the fact that they had time to discuss before the hearing. The politician noted that they had only 18 minutes.”
The prosecution asked for a prison sentence of 12 years and one month over Shlosberg having shared the Daily Mirror front page, as well as a separate discussion on a YouTube channel in which Shlosberg had called for “the earliest possible cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.”
Yabloko, also known as the Russian United Democratic Party, is the only opposition party in Russia to have publicly and vocally opposed the invasion of Ukraine. Last week, Russia’s supreme court officially barred the party from fielding candidates in the upcoming elections for the State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia, despite the likelihood that none of their candidates would have been elected.
Shlosberg, a longtime campaigner against state overreach, has served as head of Yabloko’s Pskov branch for the last 30 years. In August 2014, after a newspaper which Shlosberg had headed published information regarding the funerals of Russian soldiers who had died in the invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas region, Shlosberg was targeted by a physical assault, leading to cranial injury.
No date has yet been set for Shlosberg’s sentencing.
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