Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who faces a 10-year prison sentence for denouncing President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, was tried in Moscow on Wednesday.

The 39-year-old Moscow City Councilman is in the dock in an unprecedented crackdown on dissidents in Russia, with most opposition activists either in prison or in exile.

Yashin refused to leave after Putin sent troops to Ukraine on February 24 and regularly condemned the Kremlin’s offensive on his YouTube channel, which has 1.3 million subscribers.

He is an ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and was close to Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician who was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.

Yashin tried to put on a brave face for the opening of the trial, laughing, giving a thumbs-up and stretching in the defendant’s glass box, an AFP correspondent said.

Dressed in a dark green hoodie and jeans, he also smiled at his parents in the front row.

He insisted in court he would not leave the country after the prosecutor asked the judge to extend his detention by six months.

“I love my country and to live here I am willing to pay with my freedom,” he said.

“I am a Russian patriot,” he said.

Yashin was arrested in the summer while walking through a Moscow park.

He faces up to 10 years in prison on charges of spreading “false” information about the Russian army under laws introduced after Putin launched the operation in Ukraine.

In a YouTube stream in April, Yashin spoke about the “murder of civilians” in the Kiev suburb of Bucha, where the Russian army is accused of war crimes.

He called it a “massacre.”

His supporters in court said authorities are using draconian legislation to muzzle critics of the military campaign in Ukraine.

“This law is absolutely illegal,” said Anastasia Leonova, 48.

“It’s just there to shut people up.”

Her 20-year-old daughter Olga said her family liked Yashin’s YouTube streams.

“We used to gather in the kitchen every Thursday to watch,” she said. “Me, mom and my 87-year-old grandmother.”

Since the beginning of Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine, independent media have been closed or their activities in Russia have been suspended. Tens of thousands of Russians – including many independent journalists – have fled the country.

Yashin has not minced his words during his detention.

At a court hearing earlier this month, Yashin questioned why the authorities tolerate criticism of Russia’s military leadership by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the notorious Wagner mercenary group.

Both have slammed generals after a string of defeats on the battlefield.

“They put me in jail for questioning the truth behind the Defense Ministry’s statements about the war in Ukraine,” Yashin told the court, according to a transcript of his speech published by his team on Telegram.

“But for some reason you have no complaints about Prigozhin and Kadyrov, who so far only stop forcing the generals to clean toilets with toothbrushes.”

Another Moscow city councilman, Alexei Gorinov, was sentenced to seven years in prison in July for denouncing the offensive in Ukraine.

The 61-year-old had questioned plans for an art competition for children in his constituency at a time when “kids are dying every day” in Ukraine.

Almost all of Putin’s known political opponents have either fled the country or are in prison.

Navalny, 46, is serving a nine-year sentence on embezzlement charges, widely believed to be political. Its political organizations were banned.

A Russian court also banned the country’s most prominent human rights group, Memorial, ahead of the military campaign in Ukraine.