A court on Wednesday rejected the appeal of Kremlin opposition politician Ilya Yashin for his 8.5-year prison sentence on convictions for criticizing the Russian military. 

"The verdict of the Moscow Meshchansky Court should be left unchanged," ruled a judge during the Wednesday hearing.

Yashin said that he was convicted for "speaking the truth" over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"In prison, I met murderers, rapists, and robbers who have received lesser sentences for their crimes," said Yashin.

In court, Yashin predicted that Russia will look differently in the future, with "thieves and murderers" removed from power.

"I realise that, once free, I will become one of those who will have to clean up this bloody mess," he said.

Why was Yashin sentenced?

Yashin was sentenced in December last year over a livestreamed YouTube video in which he talked about atrocities in Bucha near Kyiv, where civilians were found dead in the streets after Russian troops withdrew from the area.

In the video, Yashin discussed reports by Western journalists of atrocities and was doubtful of Moscow's claim that such reports are staged as a "provocation" against Russia.

Before his sentence, Yashin urged Russian President Putin to "immediately stop this madness, recognize that the policy on Ukraine was wrong, pull back troops from its territory and switch to a diplomatic settlement of the conflict."

When Putin was asked about the case during a news conference after Yashin's sentence in December, he asked who Yashin was.

Crackdown on freedoms in Russia

Courts across Russia have increasingly handed out sentences to critics of Moscow's actions in Ukraine. 

Discrediting the military can be punished with a maximum of five years in prison, while a conviction of "spreading deliberately false information" about it, which is Yashin's charge, carries a sentence of up to 15 years.

On Monday, another Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was jailed for 25 years and found guilty on charges of treason and discrediting the Russian army.

Last month, Russia's security service arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and accused him of spying. It was the first espionage case against a foreign journalist since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The strategy of the Russian authorities to threaten opponents has been successful, according to Oleg Orlov from Russia's human rights organization Memorial.

"Society is intimidated and prefers to remain silent," he told AFP news agency .

vh/jcg (Reuters, AFP, AP)