The prosecutor had sought three years in prison under Part 2 of Article 280 of the Criminal Code, which covers public calls for extremism on the internet.
The case was opened in July over a video in which Morozov described attempts by local men to send residents to the war in Ukraine. He said that because of "arbitrariness" Russians could begin to resist "following the example of Ukrainian citizens." The Federal Security Service (FSB) deemed this a call for violence against military enlistment office staff.
After the verdict, Morozov recorded a video in front of the Pervomaisky Court building. He said he considered the punishment "fairly lenient," though he had hoped for an even lighter one. "Somewhere I will be doing labor, but it is still not a camp, not a strict regime," the blogger said.
In the summer, according to local residents, security forces in the Penza region carried out raids on men. The raids were conducted under the pretext of searching for draft evaders, unregistered migrants and servicemen who had gone missing from their units, but everyone was detained indiscriminately and threatened into signing contracts with the Defense Ministry. Morozov published videos in which local residents were presumably fighting off men from recruiters, and reported a new wave of forced mobilization. Against this backdrop, residents began forming people's militias to protect against recruiters.
Separately, the blogger was fined 80,000 rubles in a case of disrespect for authority (Part 3 of Article 20.1 of the Administrative Offenses Code). The reason was a video from the State Duma elections in which he spoiled his ballot by writing an insult against Vladimir Putin and crossing out the name of the United Russia party. Earlier, for the same video, Morozov spent two weeks under arrest under the petty hooliganism article. Before that, a protocol was drawn up against him for abuse of freedom of mass information (Part 9 of Article 13.15 of the Administrative Offenses Code) for calling the military enlistment office of the Oktyabrsky and Zheleznodorozhny districts of Penza a torture camp.