Russian authorities have apprehended the deputy chairman of the liberal Yabloko party on criminal accusations of disseminating “false information” regarding the military, as reported by law enforcement on Wednesday.
The Investigative Committee, which handles serious crimes, indicated that the charges against Maxim Kruglov were connected to a Telegram post made in April 2022, where he shared purported “false information” about the actions of the Russian military against civilians in Ukraine.
Kruglov is facing a potential prison sentence of five to ten years if convicted.
When Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in late March 2022, they left significant evidence of killings and other atrocities committed against civilians during the initial phases of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The Kremlin refutes allegations that its forces committed atrocities in Bucha and contends that Ukraine and its Western allies fabricated these gruesome scenes.
Kruglov had been a member of the Moscow city council from 2019 until 2024 and stepped into the role of Yabloko’s deputy chairman in December 2023.
He is now among many individuals imprisoned for opposing the war in Ukraine. Following the invasion in 2022, Russia prohibited “discrediting” and the dissemination of “deliberately false” information about the military.
Another prominent Yabloko figure, Lev Shlosberg, was arrested in June for allegedly “discrediting” the military after advocating for a ceasefire in Ukraine during a debate with historian Yury Pivovarov in January.
After his apartment was searched, as well as his 96-year-old father’s home and Yabloko’s office in Pskov, Shlosberg was initially placed in temporary detention and later moved to house arrest while awaiting trial.
In a separate development, a court in St. Petersburg recently accepted a prosecutor’s request to classify a book by former local opposition deputy Boris Vishnevsky as “extremist material.”
Kruglov, Shlosberg, and Vishnevsky have all been designated as “foreign agents” under Russian law.
