On 21 September 2009 journalist Anton Krivenyuk was sentenced by the Sukhumi city court to a three-year suspended prison sentence for libel of president Sergei Bagapsh. On 8 June Krivenyuk had written an article for a Russian website which was widely republished in Abkhazian newspapers in which he criticised Bagapsh's decision to hand over control of the Abkhazian railway to Russia. Krivenyuk was the first journalist to be prosecuted in Abkhazia since the fall of the Soviet Union, and his conviction was seen by some other journalists as part of a government crack-down on independent media in the run-up to the December 2009 Abkhazian presidential election.[5]