Forward of the decision, Nadezhda Buyanova was led, handcuffed, into the courtroom and locked inside a glass and steel cage.
Via the glass, the 68-year-old paediatrician advised me what she considered her predicament.
“It is absurd, simply absurd,” the physician mentioned.
“I can not get my head round what’s occurring to me. Maybe later I’ll be capable to.”
The paediatrician had been reported to police by the mom of a 7-year-old boy she’d been treating.
The lady had claimed that the physician had made detrimental feedback in regards to the boy’s father, a Russian soldier, who had been killed combating in Ukraine and that the physician had mentioned Russian servicemen there have been reliable targets.
Ms Buyanova denies making such feedback and there’s no audio or video recording to show she made them.
However again in February, she was arrested and charged with spreading false details about the Russian armed forces. After a brief spell below home arrest, she was positioned in pre-trial detention.
Now Ms Buyanova was within the dock and about to be taught her destiny.
Earlier than the decide entered, court docket officers ordered digital camera crews out of the courtroom. Together with different journalists, we have been ushered into the hall.
Minutes later the door to the courtroom opened once more.
“5-and-a-half years!” cried certainly one of Ms Buyanova’s supporters within the public gallery. “She’s been despatched to a penal colony for five-and-a-half years!”
“The sentence is monstrously harsh,” the physician’s lawyer, Oskar Cherdzhiyev, advised me.
“We didn’t anticipate this, even given what is occurring at this time [in Russia]. Only a few phrases proved sufficient to place somebody behind bars for such a very long time.”
Alina, one of many physician’s group of supporters in court docket, mentioned: “For me it was necessary that Nadezhda noticed that a whole lot of us got here at this time, in order that, if a miracle didn’t occur – and we have been all nonetheless hoping for a miracle – it might be simply that little bit simpler for her.”
“It’s extremely troublesome to discuss this. We’re all in shock.”
The legislation in opposition to spreading false details about the military is certainly one of a number of harsh items of laws adopted in Russia for the reason that nation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the purpose of silencing or punishing criticism of the battle.
The imprisonment of a Moscow paediatrician is the newest signal that, for Russia, a battle overseas is fuelling repression at house.
