The Chernihiv Court of Appeal has imposed a real three-year prison sentence on Andriy Novokreshchenov over social media posts. In these, the 49-year-old who was born in Russia, but is now a Ukrainian citizen, claimed that Ukraine had never existed and called for a ‘people’s referendum’ on merging part of Ukraine with Russia and Belarus. Both the first and the appellate court had agreed that this fell under Article 110 § 1 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code (deliberate actions aimed at changing Ukraine’s territorial borders), however, the first court had imposed a suspended sentence, with a year’s parole. All of Novokreshchenov’s posts were undoubtedly anti-Ukrainian, however, they did not call for any violent challenge to Ukraine’s territorial integrity, something that the European Court of Human Rights would take into account should this case ever end up before it.
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Halya Coynash: Ukrainian blogger gets sentence over post
An armed pro-Russian militant stands guard at a barricade outside the village of Shchastya near the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk on May 14, 2014.
