A resident of the Astrakhan region received a prison sentence for his comments.
A military court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced Valery Ledovsky to three years in prison, finding his comments to include calls for violence against Russian military personnel and the president.
Courts in southern Russia regularly sentence local residents to prison terms for social media posts. It is impossible to determine the actual number of such sentences, as not all terrorism justification cases are included in public court records.
According to the court, Ledovsky, while in the village of Novogeorgievskoye in the Limansky District of the Astrakhan Region, posted comments calling for violence several times in a publicly accessible messenger channel. Specifically, he wrote comments on October 9 and 11, 2023, July 8, November 25, and December 8, 2024.
In his posts, the defendant called for violence against members of the Armed Forces and Russian citizens who support the implementation of the SVO. Such publications appeared in October 2023 and July 2024. In addition, in November and December 2024, he made similar calls against the Russian president, the press service of the Southern District Military Court reported on its website on May 5. The court found Ledovsky guilty of public calls for extremist activity and public justification of terrorism or propaganda of terrorism. He was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in a general regime penal colony. The verdict has not yet entered into legal force; the parties have the right to appeal it to the military appellate court.
Valery Ledovsky, 52, was born in the village of Zarechnoye in the Limansky District, according to his entry in the Rosfinmonitoring register of terrorists and extremists. According to a bot that tracks updates to this list, Ledovsky's information, marked as involvement in terrorism and extremism, was added long before the verdict, on July 21, 2025.
"Caucasian Knot" also reported that an Astrakhan court sentenced a local resident to eighteen months in a penal colony for publishing online calls for extremist activity.