A Moscow court on Wednesday sentenced exiled Russian academic plagiarism campaigner Dmitry Zayakin to five years in prison in absentia on extremism charges.
Zayakin was arrested in August 2022 on accusations of “financing extremist activities” over a donation of 1,000 rubles ($13) he made to the late opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
He is believed to have fled Russia in October 2022, around the time the Interior Ministry placed him on its wanted list. Navalny ally Georgy Alburov posted a photo on Oct. 29 of that year showing Zayakin arriving in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Russian authorities declared the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Navalny’s wider political network “extremist” in 2021.
On Wednesday, the Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow found Zayakin guilty of financing extremism and sentenced him in absentia, according to the independent news outlet Mediazona.
Zayakin had denied the charges through his lawyer last month.
He is a journalist and co-founder of Dissernet, an online network that investigates plagiarism in Russian universities and academic publications. Dissernet volunteers have uncovered plagiarism in the doctoral work of numerous top officials in the Russian government.
Authorities previously labeled Zayakin a “foreign agent” and added him to the country’s list of “terrorists and extremists.”
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