MOSCOW: Russian military courts sentenced more than 1,000 people on terrorist charges last year, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, referring to a massive wave of prosecutions during the Ukraine offensive.
\nRussia\u2019s secretive military courts prosecute captured Ukrainian soldiers, Russians accused of working with Kyiv or sabotaging Moscow\u2019s army, domestic opponents of the Kremlin, and alleged radicals and terrorist groups.
\n\u201cMilitary courts have a key role in deciding on criminal cases with a terrorist direction,\u201d Putin said in a speech to Russia\u2019s top judges.
\n\u201cLast year, around 950 such cases were looked at, 1,075 people were sentenced.\u201d
\nRussia regularly sentences people over opposition to the Ukraine offensive, while convicting captured Ukrainian soldiers on treason and terrorist charges.
\nThe Geneva Conventions prohibit the prosecution of prisoners of war (POW) for taking part in armed hostilities.
\nMoscow has also intensified its targeting of alleged jihadist cells since the March 2024 massacre at a Moscow concert hall that killed 145 people \u2014 an attack claimed by the Islamic State.
\nThe crackdown at home is of a scale not seen since the Soviet era.
\nThe OVD-Info rights group says 1,184 people have been prosecuted in Russia for their opposition to the Ukraine conflict \u2014 including 258 for justifying \u201cterrorism\u201d and 58 for \u201cacts of terrorism.\u201d
\nThe Memorial rights group says Russia has 868 political prisoners, though its co-founder Oleg Orlov told AFP last year there were \u201ca lot more\u201d that campaigners did not know about.
\nJailed for \u201cdiscrediting\u201d Russia\u2019s armed forces, he was then released in a prisoner exchange with the United States.
\nPutin on Thursday praised Russia\u2019s judges for their \u201cdedication\u201d in overseeing the ballooning case load.
\nHe said Russia had created 100 courts and appointed 570 judges in occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, where Moscow has jailed an unknown number of Ukrainians for opposing Moscow\u2019s military offensive.
\n\u201cThey are completely integrated in the united Russian judicial system,\u201d Russia\u2019s Supreme Court chief Irina Podnosova told Putin.
\nShe said military courts had seen a steep rise in overall cases during the Ukraine campaign.
\n\u201cIn 2024, they looked at 18,000 criminal (cases), 13,000 administrative (cases) and 9,000 civilian (cases),\u201d she added.
\nLittle is known of the fate of Ukrainians sentenced by Russian-installed courts in the four Ukrainian regions Russia annexed in 2022 \u2014 Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia.
\nRussian courts are known for their low acquittal rates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MOSCOW: Russian military courts sentenced more than 1,000 people on terrorist charges last year, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, referring to a massive wave of prosecutions during the Ukraine offensive. Russia\u2019s secretive military courts prosecute captured Ukrainian soldiers, Russians accused of working with Kyiv or sabotaging Moscow\u2019s army, domestic opponents of the Kremlin, and alleged …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77409,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77390\/revisions\/77409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}