MOSCOW (Reuters) – A Russian prosecutor requested a prison term of two years and 11 months on Monday for veteran human rights activist Oleg Orlov, who is on trial for discrediting Russia’s armed forces, the Memorial human rights organisation said.

Orlov, 70, has served for more than two decades as one of the leaders of Memorial, which won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 a year after being banned and dissolved in Russia.

A district court last year fined Orlov 150,000 roubles ($1,616) – a relatively light sentence for a critic of the Ukraine war, due to his age and health – after he penned an article saying that Russia under President Vladimir Putin had descended into fascism.

A retrial was ordered after Orlov appealed that verdict and prosecutors then sought a three-year jail sentence, accusing him of “political hatred of Russia”, which he denied.

A final verdict on the case and sentencing will be announced on Tuesday, Memorial said.

Russia has intensified a long-running clampdown on all forms of political dissent and criminalised any deviation from the government line on what Moscow calls its special military operation in Ukraine.

“Russia is going backwards,” Orlov told Reuters in an interview in Moscow last year. “We left Communist totalitarianism but now have returned to a different kind of totalitarianism. I call it fascism.”

($1 = 92.8025 roubles)

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)