Global Courant
By Mark Trevelyan
(Reuters) – A Russian man who was under investigation by police after his daughter took an anti-war photo at school said before a court in the regional capital Tula on Monday that he would rather face the death penalty than be separated from her.
Alexei Moskalyov was sentenced to two years in prison in March for discrediting the Russian military. Fleeing house arrest in the town of Yefremov, in the Tula region south of Moscow, he escaped to Belarus, but was quickly re-arrested and returned to Russia.
At an appeals hearing on Monday, Moskalyov gave an emotional speech in which he said “my heart bleeds every day” at the divorce from his teenage daughter Masha, and said he prefers the death penalty.
The court upheld the two-year sentence and additionally imposed a two-year internet ban on Moskalyov, his lawyer Vladimir Biliyenko told Reuters.
“He spoke from the heart … He has been without his daughter for a long time, he said that the child is his reason for living,” said Biliyenko. “He tried to appeal to the court’s humanity, but it didn’t work.”
Moskalyov was convicted of comments he allegedly posted online about Russia’s war in Ukraine. But the investigation began after Masha, then 12, took a photo last year showing Russian missiles raining down on a Ukrainian mother and child, prompting the principal of her school to call the police.
The case caught the world’s attention when Masha was taken away from her father before his trial and placed in a children’s home. She now lives with her mother, who is estranged from Moskalyov, but father and daughter can still write to each other.
A family support group said some people in the courtroom cried when Moskalyov read a letter from Masha calling him the world’s best father and telling him, “We will be together no matter what.”
Biliyenko said Moskalyov could now be transferred from investigative detention to a penal colony at any time, but he will continue to challenge the case through two higher courts. “We will fight to the end,” he said.
(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Kevin Liffey)
