MOSCOW (AP) — An impartial Russian journalist has been charged with funding an extremist group over donating a small amount of cash to a basis began by imprisoned Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny, Russian media reported Monday.

It’s the first publicly identified prison prosecution for donating to Navalny’s organizations since they have been declared extremist and outlawed final summer time — an apparently new tactic that Russian authorities have chosen to deepen their crackdown on dissent.

Radio Liberty cited Andrei Zayakin’s colleagues as saying he was arrested in his Moscow residence Sunday and introduced earlier than a courtroom Monday. If convicted, he faces as much as eight years in jail.

In keeping with the Mass Media Protection Middle, a rights group that’s serving to defend Zayakin, the investigators accuse the journalist of donating 1,000 rubles (about $16) to Navalny’s Basis for Combating Corruption.

Zayakin, who wrote for the impartial Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and different publications, spent the night time in a police holding cell. On Monday, a courtroom permitted investigators’ request to impose a curfew on him between eight p.m. and eight a.m., bar him from utilizing the web and telephone and from speaking with different folks implicated within the case, though it was not instantly clear if there have been any.

Russian authorities have more and more focused critics and opponents in the previous couple of years, particularly after the nation started what it calls its “particular army operation” in Ukraine on Feb. 24. Navalny is in jail on a wide range of fees that he calls politically motivated and continues to talk out through social media. A Russian courtroom final yr branded his Basis for Combating Corruption, in addition to his community of regional workplaces, as extremist and banned its work in Russia.

Zayakin, who holds a level in math and physics, co-founded a widely-known undertaking referred to as Dissernet, which seeks to show corruption and plagiarism in Russian science by finding out doctoral theses — particularly these written by authorities officers.

Additionally Monday, Russian authorities detained one other distinguished Kremlin critic, Leonid Gozman, on fees of publicly evaluating the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. Gozman faces a effective or a 15-day administrative arrest.