Volodymyr Zelensky calls for “ensuring full implementation of sanctions against Russia”

Russian prosecutors on Thursday requested a nearly five-year prison sentence for Igor Girkin, an ardent Russian nationalist and combat veteran in Ukraine in 2014 who became a critic of the Kremlin and was tried on charges of “extremism.”

This former leader of pro-Russian separatists in Donbass, known by the pseudonym “Strelkov”, has for several months denounced the incompetence of the Russian authorities through his widely followed Telegram account. He went further than other Russian nationalists by questioning President Vladimir Putin himself.

“The prosecutor requested that Igor Strelkov be imprisoned for four years and eleven months.”, his supporters announced on Telegram. The entire trial was held behind closed doors.

Igor Girkin was arrested in July, a month after the failed rebellion by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, another critic of the Russian General Staff, who was killed in August in what the Kremlin described as a plane crash.

In one of his last letters before his arrest, Mr. Gerkin wrote that A “shabby” She ruled Russia and she would not tolerate this ” coward “ He spends another six years in power. Under investigation for “extremism”However, at the end of last August, he announced his candidacy for the presidential elections scheduled for next March.

He is 53 years old and became known in the spring of 2014 after becoming the best-known and one of the most influential military commanders of the pro-Russian separatists who took up arms in eastern Ukraine.

A former colonel in Russia's FSB intelligence service, he organized the first armed militias and ruled the separatist stronghold of Slovyansk with an iron fist, then served as defense minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republic.