A Russian court unexpectedly freed a prominent student protester on Friday after handing him a three-year suspended jail sentence on extremism charges in a case that has sparked an outcry among the Kremlin’s critics. Yegor Zhukov, a 21-year-old student and politics blogger on YouTube, was among more than 1,000 people detained in Moscow on July 27 in one of the biggest crackdowns of recent years. The court on Friday found him guilty of inciting extremism on his YouTube channel and banned him from using the Internet for two years.
