“My darling, if there hadn’t been a war,” Mikhail Simonov, the son of a war veteran and a victim of the siege of Leningrad cited a well-known Soviet-time song, adding: “My mom said so too.” The 63-year-old rail worker has been sentenced to seven years in a correctional facility after being charged under the article about “fakes” due to two anti-war posts. 

LastNovember, Mikhail Simonov was arrested in Moscow for a criminal case regarding “fakes”, with two posts in VKontakte about the bombing of Kyiv and the Drama Theater in Mariupol serving as the basis for prosecution.

On 30 March 2023, the court sentenced Mikhail to seven years in a correctional facility. Mikhail Simonov has health problems, including several diseases and hearing and speaking impairment. His father was a military man, and a WWII veteran and his mother grew up in the besieged Leningrad. She told Mikhail how she had carried her parents on a sled to bury them.

The denunciation against him was written by “active social media users”. The investigator twice tried to terminate the proceedings due to the absence of the elements of a crime, but management returned the case to her. Mikhail changed several appointed counsels over the time of the trial: one of them dictated to him a statement of repentance to be presented to the investigator, while another insisted that he admit guilt. Later, his defense was assumed by a lawyer from Network Freedoms. Below is an excerpt from his final speech in court:

“I have always believed and do believe now that human life is an unconditional value that must become the top priority, although it is not believed so in our country. But I was brought up in this way.

I’ll give you a small example from my childhood, which I have always remembered. My mother was a little girl during the siege of Leningrad. She told me how she had carried her dead parents on a sled over the Neva to bury them, how she later felt deeply about this terrible GreatPatriotic, world war, and hoped that that war would be the last one. Also, the following words – I guess, from a song– are spinning in my head: ‘My darling, if there hadn’t been a war’. My mom said so too.”