Russian politician faces criminal charge for condemning Ukraine war

LONDON (Reuters) -Russian opposition politician Lev Shlosberg was arrested on Tuesday and charged with discrediting the Russian army after describing the Ukraine war as a game of "bloody chess", his party said.

Shlosberg, 61, made the comment in a video debate in January in which he urged an end to the war.

"We must first stop killing people," he said at the time. "If we achieve peace, we will regain freedom."

The liberal Yabloko party, of which Shlosberg is a senior member, said his arrest was linked to those remarks. He denies the charge, it said.

Shlosberg was detained after authorities searched his home and the Yabloko office in Pskov, a city near the Estonian border, the party said, adding that he was placed in pre-trial detention pending a court hearing on Wednesday.

He faces up to five years if convicted under a law passed shortly after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine that has been widely applied against dissenters. He and his wife have previously been fined under the same statute.

Shlosberg is one of relatively few opposition politicians remaining in the country. Scores of others who oppose the Kremlin have fled. Alexei Navalny, the most prominent domestic opponent of President Vladimir Putin, died suddenly in an Arctic penal colony in February last year.

A decade ago, Shlosberg was stripped of his post in the Pskov regional assembly after he published a newspaper article alleging that Russian paratroopers buried in a cemetery in his hometown had been killed in a clandestine operation in eastern Ukraine.

He separately faces another trial for failing to comply with the law on "foreign agents", a label applied by the authorities against people deemed to be involved in subversive foreign-funded political activity.

(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)