In April, Jacques Tilly, the Düsseldorf carnival float builder, was sentenced in absentia to eight-and-a-half years in prison in Moscow — and now a retrial, or appeal, appears to be on the horizon. The German Foreign Office informed him that a hearing had been scheduled for Tuesday, he told the German press agency. He did not know whether it was the prosecutors or the defense that had filed the appeal. The Rheinische Post had reported.
The Moscow court had ruled in April that Tilly’s depictions during Düsseldorf’s Rosenmontag parade violated religious feelings and disseminated false information about the Russian armed forces. Tilly had repeatedly used satire to call out Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war he ordered in Ukraine. He also poked fun at the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill.
Tilly said he had actually assumed the issue would be resolved with the verdict. Now he is curious about what will happen on Tuesday. He has not been informed by the Moscow court to date and has had no contact with the defense. He will have to live with the conviction, and he says he’s managing it fairly well. “What I cannot influence, I don’t care very much about,” Tilly said. “I have no course of action.” It belongs to the job of a satirist to receive occasionally very harsh reactions. “That’s priced in. I take it fairly calmly — how else should I take it?”
