Social scientist and left-wing activist Boris Kagarlitsky was fined and banned from administering websites, a court ruled
Boris Kagarlitsky © Sputnik / Andrey Stenin
Russian sociologist and prominent left-wing activist Boris Kagarlitsky was released from custody on Tuesday, Russian media reported from the courtroom.
He stood accused of “publicly justifying terrorism” in a video he distributed through the Rabkor news agency, where he serves as editor-in-chief. The prosecution demanded that Kagarlitsky be sentenced to 5.5 years in prison. The court ultimately found him guilty of making “calls for terrorism” but decided not to jail him and instead issued the 64-year-old a 600-thousand-ruble ($6,660) fine, and banned him from administering internet sites for two years.
Kagarlitsky is well known as a sociologist, political scientist, left-wing theorist and lecturer at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. He was arrested back in July after releasing a video about the October 2022 attack on the Crimean Bridge. In the video he stated that it was “understandable” that Ukraine would want to destroy the structure.
Kiev’s forces have repeatedly targeted the Crimean Bridge, which connects southern Russia with the peninsula. In October 2022, in one of its first major attacks on the bridge, Ukraine detonated a truck bomb, killing four people and causing a partial collapse of the road section and a fire on the parallel railway span.
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Prosecutors have insisted that Kagarlitsky “discredited the state authorities,” stating that a psychological and linguistic examination of his video had found that it contained an “acknowledgement of the ideology of carrying out an explosion in order to discredit government authorities.”
Kagarlitsky had previously also been included by the Russian Justice Ministry on its list of “foreign agents” while Rosfinmonitoring – an agency which oversees financial translations to combat money laundering and criminal financing – put the political scientist on its register of extremists and terrorists.
In October, during a speech at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Clublin in Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin was asked by a Canadian political studies professor to look into Kagarlitsky’s case.
The Russian leader stated that he “doesn’t really know who this Kagarlitsky is” but promised to examine the situation and give a response. He has since made no public statements regarding the sociologist and the criminal case.
