Moscow court issues arrest warrants for Leonid Gozman and Konstantin Sonin

Arrest warrants were issued for politician Leonid Gozman and economist Konstantin Sonin on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military, Mediazona reported on Tuesday.

A criminal case was launched against Gozman on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military in December. According to state-owned news agency TASS, Gozman’s social media posts had undergone psychological and linguistic analysis, which, it said, found evidence of his deliberate distortion of information about the war in Ukraine.

Gozman, who was the president of the now dissolved liberal-conservative Union of Right Forces, left Russia in September 2022 after being placed in detention for equating the actions of the USSR and Nazi Germany. A second case against Gozman for failing to declare his dual citizenship is ongoing. On 25 July, the Interior Ministry placed Gozman on the federal wanted list. He has also been declared a “foreign agent”.

Sonin was put on the wanted list in Russia in May, and criminal charges for spreading false information about the Russian military were brought against him in March for three Telegram posts he wrote between April and July 2022. Sonin was fired from his post at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in 2022 and now lives in the US where he is a professor at the University of Chicago.

Both Gozman and Sonin are contributors to Novaya Gazeta Europe.