Russian Twitch streamer YokoBovich (AKA Anna Bazhutova) has been sentenced to 5-and-a-half years in prison after hosting a stream highlighting the eyewitness testimonies of Bucha massacre survivors in Ukraine.
According to a report by the independent Russian media outlet The Moscow Times on May 5, Bazhutova was arrested in mid-2023 after pro-war bloggers reported her to authorities for her stream. It’s taken less than a year for the trial and sentencing to pass.
The official charge against Anna Bazhutova in Moscow court is for spreading fake information about the Russian military. There is no public video of the YokoBovich stream currently available, but the streamer reportedly spoke to residents of Bucha, a city in the wider Kyiv Oblast that experienced heavy fighting in the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about what they witnessed.
The official stance of the Kremlin is that all statements concerning the Bucha massacres are Western attempts to discredit the Russian offensive and that all evidence of civilian executions is staged by foreign actors.
Twitch has not issued a statement about the streamer, and at the time of writing, YokoBovich’s account is currently banned from the platform. The Russian human rights association Memorial Society considers Bazhutova a political prisoner and issued a statement on Oct. 19, 2023, demanding her immediate release from custody after her 2023 arrest.
Aside from YokoBovich’s eyewitness accounts on stream, many independent media organizations have documented the Bucha massacre, and evidence includes photos of restrained Ukrainian civilians executed en masse. Unfortunately, all anti-Kremlin Russian media, including The Moscow Times and the Memorial Society, must currently operate outside of the country to avoid persecution similar to what YokoBovich is facing.
