Putin signs law allowing seizure of property for ‘spreading false information’ about military

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed new legislation into law on Wednesday that allows the state to confiscate property belonging to anyone convicted of “spreading false information about the Russian army”.

The law amends existing legislation outlawing “discrediting” and “spreading false information about the Russian army”, which was adopted shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The law has been used to imprison war critics such as St. Petersburg artist Sasha Skochilenko and carries a maximum sentence of 15 years.

Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, passed the bill on 22 January, with speaker Vyacheslav Volodin welcoming it as a measure against what he called “scoundrels and traitors”.

The law empowers the state to seize “money, valuables and other assets” used or intended for us in “activity endangering the safety of the Russian Federation”. The law also allows for the confiscation of assets received as the “result of public calls to carry out activities that jeopardize state security”.

Maxim Olenichev, a lawyer for human rights NGO First Department, told Novaya Europe that the bill would “unreasonably interfere with the right to freedom of expression” in violation of article 29 of the Russian Constitution.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov rejected comparisons between the new law and the Soviet Union’s article 58, a notorious tool of political persecution that also provided for the state confiscation of assets, by saying it had “clearly nothing to do” with the Soviet-era law.