Russian Doctor, Accused of Antiwar Stance, Is Jailed After Child’s Testimony

The mother of a 7-year-old boy accused the Moscow pediatrician, Nadezhda Buyanova, of telling him that his father’s death while fighting in Ukraine was justified.

A 68-year-old Russian doctor was convicted on Tuesday and sentenced to five and a half years in prison, according to her legal team, on accusations that she told a young boy during a medical appointment that his father, who was killed while fighting in Ukraine, deserved to die.

The conviction of the Moscow pediatrician, Nadezhda Buyanova, is one of a flurry of criminal cases punishing ordinary Russians for voicing opposition to the war. But it is unusual because it relied in part on the testimony of a 7-year-old boy, whose mother originally said he was not in the room to hear the doctor’s comments but then changed her account a month later and allowed her son to be interviewed for the case.

Ms. Buyanova was charged with “disseminating false information” about Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. She denied the accusation in court, saying that she did not discuss the war with the boy.

The court did not allow the boy to be questioned during the trial; instead, prosecutors submitted minutes of a pretrial interview. A lawyer for Ms. Buyanova questioned the veracity of the statement, saying that the notes read like a prepared narrative with words and syntax too complex for a 7-year-old.

“Those phrases like ‘legitimate target’ and ‘aggression’ — I very much doubt that a young child can say that, let alone remember and repeat it,” the lawyer, Leonid Solovyev, said in an interview.

The case has provoked condemnation among rights groups and health care workers, more than 1,000 of whom signed an open letter posted on social media this year in support of Ms. Buyanova. The case, they said in the letter, sends a “strong signal to young people: Don’t enter the medical profession, don’t help people — they can always speak against you, and you will land in jail.”

Some doctors also recorded a video protesting the charges, filming at their hospitals or clinics.

Ms. Buyanova’s legal troubles began at the end of January when a 34-year old divorced mother of two posted a teary-eyed video online as she was walking away from a doctor’s appointment on a snow-covered street in Moscow.

The woman, Anastasia Akinshina, said that when the doctor on duty asked why her 7-year old boy was misbehaving, she explained that her son had anxiety issues because his father had been killed in Ukraine. Ms. Akinshina said the doctor had replied that her husband was a “legitimate target” for Ukrainian troops.

“I won’t let them sweep it up under the carpet!” Ms. Akinshina, visibly distraught, yelled in the video.

“Where do I go to complain,” she asked, so that the doctor would get “kicked out of this country or sent to prison?”

The video was picked up by the pro-Kremlin news media, and soon Alexander I. Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which deals with high-profile crimes, took the case under his personal control.

“The fact that Bastrykin paid attention to it played a key role here,” Mr. Solovyev, the lawyer, said in the interview.

“I hear a lot from law enforcement officials that they receive a lot of denunciations: Neighbors complain about neighbors, spouses against spouses,” he said, adding, “but those complaints mostly die” at a lower level.

Mr. Bastrykin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Memorial, the Russian rights organization that received the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, has listed Ms. Buyanova as a political prisoner. It asserts that Mr. Bastrykin’s personal intervention likely sparked the prosecution of a crime that was never committed.

After such a high-placed intervention, Memorial said in a statement, “law enforcement officials typically have to react and launch criminal prosecution even with a glaring lack of criminal offense, often resorting to the falsification of evidence.”

Russia keeps nearly 800 political prisoners behind bars, most of them convicted or facing charges for opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Memorial.

The Kremlin has typically used a law banning “fake news” about the Russian army to go after high-profile political opponents. They include Ilya Yashin, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in late 2022 for speaking out against Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha (Mr. Yashin was released in a multicountry prisoner exchange in August); and Aleksei Gorinov, a Moscow lawmaker jailed for seven years for calling for a moment of silence for the victims in Ukraine.

But the Russian authorities have in recent months ramped up the prosecution of any expression of antiwar sentiment, and investigators have grown eager to handle those cases to improve their crime statistics. Often the prosecutions stem from Russians who report their fellow citizens’ supposed transgressions.

In April, a court in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk arrested a butcher from a local farmers market after a stall owner whose son was fighting in Ukraine denounced him for antiwar views. In southern Russia, a court in January sentenced a 72-year-old woman to five and a half years in prison for spreading “fake news” about the Russian army in two social media posts.

In Ms. Buyanova’s case, prosecutors presented no ironclad evidence that the doctor spoke out against the war.

There was no audio recording from inside the room, and CCTV footage showed the boy walking out the door alone before the mother and doctor came outside together, according to reporters who viewed the video in court.

A month after an investigation into the episode was launched, Ms Akinshina said she now remembered that her son was in the room when Dr. Buyanova was said to have made the antiwar comments.

The doctor’s defense believes Ms. Buyanova was targeted for her Ukrainian heritage.

Ms. Akinshina told the court last month that “pieces of the puzzle came together” when she found out that Dr. Buyanova, who has practiced medicine for almost four decades, was born in Lviv, western Ukraine. “Western Ukraine hates Russians,” Ms. Akinshina said in court. “They don’t even hide that.”

Ms. Buyanova, who broke into tears during a hearing last week, rejected the accusation. “I’m related to the three ethnicities: Russia, Ukrainian and Belarusian,” she said. “I don’t want to have to choose between the three of them.”

Nikolai Lyaskin, a rare Russian opposition figure still in Russia, last week described the doctor’s prosecution as an “extremely dangerous precedent: Any ‘patriot’ whose feelings were hurt can now write a complaint and send anyone to jail.”

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

• Blinken Heads to NATO: Secretary of State Antony Blinken will attend meetings in Brussels amid concerns that President-elect Donald Trump will slash U.S. support for Ukraine.
• Russian Doctor Is Jailed: A Russian doctor was sentenced to five and a half years in prison on accusations that she told a young boy that his father, who was killed while fighting in Ukraine, deserved to die.
• Amassing Troops: The Russian military has assembled a force of 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean troops, as it prepares for a counteroffensive to reclaim territory seized by Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region, according to U.S. officials.

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