LAGOS, Nigeria. (Voice Of Naija) A Russian court has sentenced the deputy chairman of the country’s only officially registered anti-war political party to 11 years and one month in a penal colony for speaking out against President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as Russia’s Supreme Court simultaneously upheld a ban on the same party from next month’s parliamentary elections.
Lev Shlosberg, 63, a senior member and deputy chairman of the liberal Yabloko party, was convicted Monday by a court in the northwestern city of Pskov, approximately 600 kilometres from Moscow, on charges of discrediting the Russian military and spreading false information about the armed forces.
The sentence was reported simultaneously by the Associated Press, Bloomberg, PBS NewsHour, Al Jazeera and ABC News within hours of the verdict being delivered.
The charges against Shlosberg stemmed from two specific acts. The first was a debate in which he publicly called for ending the war in Ukraine.
The second was posting on his Telegram channel a front page from the British Daily Mirror newspaper, published in February 2022 in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion, featuring a photograph of a bloodied Ukrainian woman beside a portrait of Putin, with the headline: “Her blood… his hands.”
For sharing a newspaper front page and calling for peace, Shlosberg will spend the next eleven years in a Russian penal colony. He rejected the charges as entirely without legal foundation.
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The courtroom sentence against Shlosberg was not the only devastating development for Russia’s dwindling opposition on Monday.
In a separate ruling delivered the same day, Russia’s Supreme Court upheld its earlier decision to bar Yabloko from the ballot in the September 18 to 20 parliamentary elections, rejecting the party’s final appeal, the South China Morning Post confirmed.
Yabloko, founded in the 1990s by liberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky, is the only officially registered political party in Russia that has taken an open and unambiguous stance against the war in Ukraine since the invasion began in February 2022.
Its removal from the ballot means Russian voters will go to the polls next month with no legal party option that opposes the conflict openly available to them.
The Supreme Court sided with the Motherland Party, a pro-Kremlin organisation which had filed a lawsuit demanding Yabloko’s removal on the grounds of alleged copyright infringement, excessive campaign spending, and the accusation that Yabloko’s stance on Ukraine amounted to a call to violate Russia’s territorial integrity. Yabloko denied all charges.
As the Supreme Court delivered its ruling on Monday, Yabloko supporters gathered outside the courthouse. Russian media reported that several dozen people were detained by police.
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Yavlinsky, Yabloko’s founder and political committee chairman, condemned the ruling in an online statement, saying it marked “a serious, deepening crisis in the Russian political system and a lack of understanding of a desired future.”
Shlosberg’s sentencing is not an isolated act it is the latest step in what Bloomberg described as “a broader crackdown on dissent” that has been steadily dismantling Russia’s political opposition since the invasion of Ukraine began.
He was first arrested in 2024 on charges of spreading false military information, placed in pretrial detention in December 2025, and has been held behind bars ever since meaning he has already spent months imprisoned before Monday’s formal sentence was even handed down. It was his second trial in two years.
Shlosberg has also been designated a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities a label that carries sharp pejorative connotations in Russia and imposes significant legal and administrative burdens on those who receive it. Several other prominent Yabloko members have been jailed or received the same designation in recent years as Kremlin pressure on the party has intensified.
Monday’s verdict places Shlosberg in the company of a growing roster of Russian opposition figures imprisoned for anti-war positions. Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in 2023.
Ilya Yashin received eight and a half years in 2022.
Alexei Navalny died in a Russian penal colony in February 2024. The pattern is consistent and deliberate: every significant voice of domestic political opposition to the war has been imprisoned, exiled, silenced or killed.
The timing of Monday’s sentencing less than five weeks before Russia’s parliamentary elections was not coincidental. PBS NewsHour, the Associated Press and Bloomberg all noted that the verdict came in the lead-up to the September 18 to 20 vote, with the simultaneous ban on Yabloko from the ballot ensuring that Russians who oppose the war will head to polling stations next month with no credible anti-war party to vote for and with the most prominent remaining voice of that opposition now heading to a penal colony.
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The Shlosberg sentence is a case study in how democracies die not always suddenly, but gradually, through the systematic removal of the conditions that make political competition meaningful.
Free elections require free parties. Free parties require free speech.
And free speech requires that a man can post a newspaper front page on his Telegram channel without facing eleven years in prison.
Russia’s September elections will take place on schedule, with ballot papers and polling stations and all the formal apparatus of democratic participation and they will mean nothing, because the space in which genuine political choice could exist has been methodically destroyed.
For Nigeria, a country whose own democratic institutions face sustained pressure from executive overreach, impunity and the criminalisation of dissent, Russia’s trajectory is not a cautionary tale from afar. It is a warning written in real time.
