MOSCOW (Reuters) – A court in St Petersburg on Wednesday sentenced a dual U.S.-Russian national to three-and-a-half years in prison on charges of “rehabilitating” Nazism, the court’s press service said.

Yuri Malev was arrested last December and charged over posts in which he was alleged to have denigrated the St George’s ribbon, a symbol of Russian military valour. One contained obscene language and the other showed a picture of a corpse wearing the ribbon.

The court service had said this showed disrespect for society and insulted the memory of the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to World War Two.

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