The Ministry of the Interior has placed the economist Konstanty Sonin on the wanted list

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia has placed on the wanted list professor of the University of Chicago, former lecturer at the Higher School of Economics, economist Konstantin Sonin. His card was found in the faculty database by Mediazona.

Earlier, the Investigative Committee initiated criminal proceedings against Sonin in the case of “fake news” about the Russian army (part 1 of art. 207 § 3 of the penal code). The reason was three posts on the economist’s telegram channel, the Moscow agency wrote. The representative of the Investigative Committee also said that “experts” found in the professor’s publications “linguistic and psychological signs of incitement to hatred and hostility towards Russian soldiers.”

Sonin himself assumed that it was about the posts about the murder of civilians in Bucha and the shelling of the drama theater in Mariupol, and his lecture trip to Kiev became the impulse to start the case.

“What they are accusing me of is a completely false accusation. Of course, I have not published any fakes, only facts that are well documented. And there is no point in explaining – the trial will be fictitious, and the verdict will be passed, ”he said.

Sonin left Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine. Since September 2015, he has been working at the School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. “One of the reasons I interrupted my year-long stay in Russia in March 2022 and returned to Chicago is because various things have been retroactively criminalized in Russia. It is clear that these laws, which allowed Facebook posts from five years ago to be punished, are completely unconstitutional. These are just some of Putin’s measures to stay in power. However, this created a threat that at any moment I could be accused of being anti-war or anti-Putin five years ago,” noted the economist.