A court in Kazakhstan has sentenced a couple to five years in prison each for calls that North Kazakhstan become part of Russia.
The Petropavl city court in the North Kazakhstan region said on August 3 that an appeals court upheld the verdicts and sentences of the man and woman, who have not been publicly identified.
According to the court, the couple called for the North Kazakhstan region to separate and join Russia in a Chatroulette message in December 2021. They were first sentenced on the charges in May.
No official statements or reports about the case had been made until August 3.
The court's announcement came one day after a nationalist, pro-imperial post calling Kazakhstan and Georgia "artificial" creations briefly appeared on the VKontakte social network account of former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev before being taken down and attributed to hackers.
The post caused a harsh online reaction in Kazakhstan, but Medvedev aide Oleg Osipov denied on August 2 that the ex-president had written the post, adding that it appeared on the account after it had been hacked.
The controversial text in the post on VK said that Georgia never existed as a country, while it calls Kazakhstan an artificial country and accuses the Central Asian nation's authorities of genocide against Russians. The territories of the two countries must be returned to Russia, it added.
