The Kremlin has criticized a decision by a U.S. court to sentence Russian citizen Maria Butina to 18 months in prison after she pleaded guilty to trying to infiltrate conservative U.S. political circles and promote the interests of the Russian state before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Speaking on April 27, a day after the U.S. court issued the sentence against Butina, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “The fact that she has been jailed for a long time is unacceptable.”
“We believe that the Russian national was not, and could not, be involved in what she is accused of,” Peskov said.
Butina has been jailed since her arrest in July 2018 and will receive credit for the nine months she already has served. The U.S. court ruled that after completing her prison sentence in January 2020, she will be immediately deported back to Russia. Butina pleaded guilty to charges of not registering as an agent of the Russian government and carrying out espionage activities while she was a university student in the United States.
Defense lawyers had argued that Butina was merely eager to build connections with U.S. political activists, particularly conservatives, and that her failure to register with the Justice Department was an oversight on her part. But U.S. Jude Tanya Chutkan rejected those arguments on April 26.
“This was not a simple misunderstanding by an overeager foreign student,” Chutkan said.
The case against Butina was separate from the now-concluded investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But it touched on many of the same issues related to how and why Russia sought to interfere in U.S. politics ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Prosecutors say that before and during her studies at American University in Washington, she sought to build relationships with conservative groups like the National Rifle Association on behalf of at least one powerful Kremlin-connected lawmaker. The Kremlin has called the charges against Butina “groundless,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin has insisted that Butina pleaded guilty “under pressure.”
“Maria Butina is a political prisoner, a victim of provocations by intelligence agencies and the arbitrary application of repressive U.S. laws. Under the current conditions of paranoid Russophobia, common sense has not prevailed,” the Russian Embassy in Washington said in a Twitter post after the sentence was handed down. “We demand her immediate release.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry asserted that Butina changed her plea to guilty as part of plea-bargain agreement last December because she otherwise would have faced the potential for an even lengthier prison sentence.
“Our compatriot was convicted only for being a citizen of Russia,” it said in a statement. “This sentence is a shameful stain on the American judicial system, which was made as the result of a blatant political order.”