Sergei Mingazov, a journalist working for the Russian edition of Forbes, has been arrested on suspicion of spreading false news about the Russian military, the magazine reported today.

Mingazov’s lawyer, Konstantin Boubon, said on Facebook that his client is in a detention center in the city of Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, where he lives.

The Russian edition of Forbes reported that it has not been able to contact the journalist.

Laws, passed shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, provide long prison terms for people found guilty of deliberately spreading false news about the armed forces.

The lawyer said Mingazov was arrested for reproducing on his social media accounts reports about alleged Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Buka, near Kiev, where Reuters and other news organizations had reported killings of Ukrainian civilians in the first weeks. war’s.

The Kremlin denied that its troops had executed people and said it was a “vile forgery”.

Mingazov’s Telegram channel includes dozens of posts referring to Bucha. It is not clear which of these were the cause for him to be investigated.

The human rights website OVD-Info reported that the Khabarovsk court will decide whether to formally detain the journalist tomorrow, Saturday.