Russian politician who called for Ukraine ceasefire is charged with telling lies about the army

By Andrew Osborn

MOSCOW (Reuters) -The deputy leader of Russia's liberal Yabloko party, which opposes the war in Ukraine, has been charged with spreading lies about the Russian army, and could face up to 10 years in jail if found guilty.

Maxim Kruglov, 38, a former lawmaker in Moscow's city legislature, told a Moscow court hearing on Thursday from a glass courtroom cage that the accusation against him was "absurd" and that he posed no danger to society.

The court disregarded his statement, however, and ordered he be held in a detention facility for just under two months until November 29 at state investigators' request.

Natalya Tikhonova, a lawyer for Kruglov, said her client had been charged over two posts he had made on the Telegram social media network in 2022. She said he had been harshly interrogated in the middle of the night, and that his home had been searched.

She said one post had referred to U.N. data about the number of people killed in the port city of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine which Russia took control of in May 2022, and another to events in Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, in March 2022.

Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russian forces of killing civilians in Bucha; Moscow says killings there were staged to discredit its troops. In Mariupol, Ukraine says Russia was responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians during a long siege; Moscow blames deaths there on Ukrainian forces who held out before Russia captured the city.

YABLOKO URGED PUTIN TO REVERSE COURSE ON UKRAINE

Yabloko, one of Russia's main liberal groups in the early post-Soviet years, now has only a handful of seats in regional parliaments and no seats in the national parliament. It condemned President Vladimir Putin's decision to send tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

One of its other senior figures, Lev Shlosberg, was placed under house arrest in June after being charged with discrediting the Russian army, and another, Boris Vishnevsky, ran into problems on Tuesday when a court said it would consider a request from state prosecutors to designate his book extremist.

Shlosberg and Vishnevsky have both been designated as "foreign agents" by the authorities as well.

Nikolai Rybakov, the head of Yabloko, said in a statement that Kruglov had publicly called, among other things, for a ceasefire agreement to be negotiated in Ukraine. 

The Kremlin has said it is open to peace talks, but needs to achieve its original aims and has set out demands which Kyiv has rejected as tantamount to surrender.  

Rybakov said he believed that laws brought in to punish anyone deemed to be spreading fake news or discrediting the army, such as those being used against Kruglov and Shlosberg, could be used to jail anyone who wants peace. 

"We... continue to believe that all repressive laws should be repealed," he added.

Russia holds elections for the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, next year.

(Reporting by Andrew OsbornEditing by Gareth Jones)