A court hearing in the case of blogger and journalist Ruslan Kotsaba accused of treason was to be held in Kolomyia, Ivano-Frankivsk region. However, the court session did not take place, and the accused himself flew to the United States..

According to Suspіlna, none of the parties appeared in court. According to the chairman of the Kolomyia City District Court Viktor Vasilkovsky, on January 16, Ruslan Kotsaba's lawyer filed a motion asking to postpone the trial due to the fact that the accused is abroad.

Ruslan Kotsaba himself published a video two weeks ago from the center of New York, where he walks around the city and talks about controversial statements about Ukraine, in particular that there are supposedly big problems with freedom of speech in Ukraine now and journalists can only speak positively about the current.

After that, Kotsaba turned to the topic of war and began broadcasting Russian propaganda narratives that Ukraine is not a party to the conflict and that Ukrainians do not need to fight..

“He (Vladimir Zelensky, - ed.. ) at heart a pacifist is the same as me. That is, he was not going to die for the interests of the oligarchs or for the ephemeral state of Ukraine, which, in fact, now utilizes Ukrainians on its land only in the interests of a geopolitical war between the United States and Russia,” he said..

The blogger also accused Zelensky of "

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Recall that in February 2015, the SBU detained Kotsaba on suspicion of treason, as he criticized the conduct of another wave of mobilization in Ukraine.. On May 12, 2016, the Ivano-Frankivsk city court sentenced Ruslan Kotsaba to 3.5 years in prison for obstructing the activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and recovered from him more than 4,000. hryvnia for conducting an examination, but acquitted on charges of high treason. While it was due, he spent a year and three months in prison, which, according to the “Savchenko law”, was counted as 2 years and 6 months of serving a sentence.

On July 14, 2016, the Court of Appeal of the Ivano-Frankivsk region acquitted Kotsaba. In June 2017, the prosecutor's office appealed against the acquittal and a new trial of the criminal proceedings was scheduled in the court of appeal.

However, he did not stop his anti-Ukrainian rhetoric there, and already in 2020, the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting fined the NewsOne TV channel for more than 100,000 rubles.. UAH for Kotsaba's statement on the air of the program “I think so!