MOSCOW \u2014 A German artist who created carnival displays mocking Russian President Vladimir Putin was sentenced in absentia on Thursday to 8 1\/2 years in prison by a court In Moscow.<\/p>\n
Jacques Tilly was convicted on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military and insulting religious feelings.<\/p>\n
Carnival parades in Germany are famed for their floats mocking a wide variety of domestic and global political figures, and Putin has frequently been a target.<\/p>\n
Tilly, 62, has been designing and building floats for D\u00fcsseldorf\u2019s Carnival parade \u2014 one of Germany\u2019s best-known \u2014 since 1984.<\/p>\n
In recent years, his designs have depicted Putin scrubbing himself in a bathtub filled with blood and painted in the colors of the Ukraine flag, while another featured a red-faced Putin biting into Ukraine, which was decorated with the words \u201cChoke on it!\u201d<\/p>\n
Tilly had previously told the German dpa news agency that the Russian criminal proceedings against him were \u201can authoritarian regime\u2019s propaganda trial.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very likely that the verdict against me has already been determined. I assume it will be many, many years of prison camp,\u201d Tilly said. \u201cIt is an attack on our freedoms. On freedom of opinion, on freedom of the press, on freedom of satire, on jesters\u2019 freedom. And that is how it is understood here in Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MOSCOW \u2014 A German artist who created carnival displays mocking Russian President Vladimir Putin was sentenced in absentia…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1773,5,1774],"class_list":["post-1795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-ap-a-wire","tag-germany","tag-wires-bot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}