Moscow Court Sentences Exiled Libertarian Mikhail Svetov to One Year in Prison in Absentia

A Moscow judge on Thursday sentenced Mikhail Svetov, a prominent Russian libertarian and social media influencer who lives outside Russia, to one year in prison in his absence. He was found guilty of breaching Russia's "foreign agent" law, the Moscow Prosecutor's Office said. The law imposes special restrictions on people the state designates as foreign agents, including a requirement to label their published materials accordingly.

What prosecutors allege

According to the prosecutors' statement, Svetov, while abroad, distributed materials on social media without stating that they were created and distributed by a person performing the functions of a foreign agent.

The court ordered him to serve one year in a medium-security penal colony. A separate ruling by an arbitration court also banned him from running websites or social media accounts for three years.

Earlier penalties

Svetov was added to the foreign agent list in November 2022 and has been fined at least five times for the same violation since then. He is 41. He left Russia in 2021, after police searched his home and he served a nine-day administrative arrest linked to protests supporting opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has since died.

In July, Russia's Justice Ministry also added the unregistered Libertarian Party of Russia, which Svetov previously led, to its foreign agent database. Around the same time, state media reported that law enforcement had charged Svetov with "rehabilitating Nazism" over a video of a Ukrainian song that he posted online.