MOSCOW -- Four former editors of the Doxa student magazine in Moscow have been sentenced to two years of correctional labor each over a video questioning whether it was right for teachers to discourage students from attending rallies protesting opposition leader Aleksei Navalny's incarceration.
The Dorogomilovsky district court sentenced Armen Aramyan, Natalya Tyshkevich, Alla Gutnikova, and Vladimir Metyolkin on April 12 after finding them guilty of engaging minors in activities that might be "dangerous."
According to Russian legislation, those handed correctional labor sentences must pay the State Treasury a portion of their wages if they are employed. If they are unemployed, they must work at jobs assigned by the Federal Penitentiary Service during the term of their sentence.
The four journalists were detained in mid-April 2021 for questioning at the Investigation Committee after their homes and the magazine's offices were searched after the video was posted online in January 2021.
The video questioned teachers' motives for warning students about the repercussions they could face for participating in two unsanctioned rallies in January 2021 in protest of Navalny's arrest.
Doxa editors say the video was deleted from the magazine's website following a demand from Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor to remove it.
More than 10,000 Navalny supporters were detained across Russia during and after the January rallies.
Many of those detained were either fined or handed jail terms of several days. At least 90 were charged with criminal offenses, and several have been fired by their employers.
Human rights groups have called on Moscow repeatedly to stop targeting journalists because they cover protests or express solidarity with protesters, since both are protected under the right to freedom of expression.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport on January 17, 2021, upon his arrival from Germany, where he had recovered from a poisoning in August 2020 that several European laboratories concluded was from a military-grade chemical nerve agent.
Navalny has insisted that his poisoning was ordered directly by President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of his parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
Navalny's 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from that case was converted into a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given the amount of time he had been held in detention.
Last month, a court sentenced Navalny to nine years in prison after finding him guilty of embezzlement and contempt charges in a separate case that Navalny and his supporters also rejected as politically motivated.