A court in St. Petersburg convicted and sentenced dual US-Russian Yuri Malev citizen to three and a half years in prison Wednesday on charges of “rehabilitating Nazism” for social media posts which were allegedly disrespectful towards the military.

Malev was detained on December 9 of last year for his posts made in June 2022 on Russian website Odnoklassniki. The posts allegedly disrespected Saint George’s ribbon, a symbol used to indicate valour in Russian military service. This alleged denigration involved an image of the ribbon captioned with obscene language.

On May 8, 2023, right before Russia’s Victory Day, Malev again posted. This time, it was an image of the ribbon on a corpse, captioned “How to wear the St. George’s ribbon correctly.”

This is an incident in a recent series of cases where individuals have been accused of being disrespectful to the military. In March, an independent newspaper was fined for “discrediting the armed forces” by publishing an article exploring military recruitment of orphans. Before that, in February, human rights activist Oleg Orlov was sentenced to two years in a penal colony for the same charge of discrediting the military.

Malev was sentenced after allegedly admitting to the offence. The crime of “rehabilitating Nazism” is punishable by up to five years in jail. Additionally, he is not allowed to post content online for an year and a half.

This conviction follows a string of arrests of dual US-Russia nationals in the past few months. This includes journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who was apprehended on charges of failure to register as a foreign agent. She was also apprehended for distributing a book titled “No to War. 40 Stories of Russians Opposing the Invasion of Ukraine”.  Wall Street reporter Evan Gershkovich was also accused of trying to obtain state secrets, and has continued to be in detention for an year, with his release being requested by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The US State Department has said that they are aware of Malev’s detention in Russia. Further, a State Department spokesperson told Russian state news agency TASS, “The Department works to provide all appropriate assistance” in case of a US citizen being detained overseas.