On 17 January 2025, Russian independent media reported that a court in Petrozavodsk had fined journalist Denis Pogrebnoy 30 thousand rubles on charges of “discrediting” the Russian army.
The journalist was reportedly fined for a series of posts and anti-war poems which he published on his page on Russian social media network Vkontakte in 2023 and 2024.
One of the posts allegedly concerned local exiled journalist Natalia Sevets-Yermolina, who is designated as a “foreign agent”, however this post was reportedly not related to the war in Ukraine.
Similarly to Sevets-Yermolina, Pogrebnoy left Russia following the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.