The Shevchenkivsky District Court of Kyiv sentenced in absentia Putinʼs aide, Russian negotiator, and one of the authors of an anti-Ukrainian history textbook Volodymyr Medinsky to 10 years in prison.
This was reported by the press service of the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office.
The court imposed the same punishment on another editor of this publication Anatoly Torkunov, who has been the rector of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations since 1992.
This is a history textbook for grade 11 "History. History of Russia. 1945 — the beginning of the 21st century", published in 2023. It contains public calls to change the boundaries of the territory and state border of Ukraine, it justifies the armed aggression of the Russian Federation, the temporary occupation of Ukrainian territories, and forms in students a distorted, ideologically biased idea of the events of modern history.
In addition, through the textbook, students were forced to adopt theses about "fraternal peoples", denial of Ukraineʼs independence as a state, "liberation" through the so-called SVO, and the Russian version of the war against Ukraine.
Kyiv Independent wrote that this textbook describes Ukraine as an “aggressive anti-Russian bridgehead”, calls the invasion in 2022 “forced”, and the Revolution of Dignity a “coup d’état financed by the West”.
Since September 1, 2023, this textbook has already been used to teach history in the occupied territories — in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson regions, and Crimea. It has also been distributed in the territory of the Russian Federation.
Medinsky and Torkunov were convicted under Part 2 of Article 110 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (encroachment on the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine) and Part 3 of Article 436-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (justification, recognition of the Russian Federationʼs armed aggression against Ukraine as legitimate and glorification of its participants).
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