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Girkin’s lawyer, Alexander Molokhov, told the RBC news website that there could be a “legal opportunity” to escape the ban if an appeal court throws out his sentence or if Putin personally pardons him.
His next appeal court hearing is scheduled for May 15.
Girkin fought as a foreign volunteer in wars in Transnistria and Bosnia in the 1990s before joining the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service.
He was accused of being involved in the disappearance of several Chechen men during the second Chechen War.
In 2014, Girkin claimed credit for “pulling the trigger” on the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas, when he and a group of Russian volunteers seized control of the Donetsk region town of Slavyansk.
He later appointed himself “defence minister” of the Donetsk People Republic of pro-Russian separatists.
In November last year, a Dutch court sentenced him to life in prison in absentia for the murders of 298 on board MH17, a Malaysian airlines flight between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur that was downed by a Russian Buk missile launcher over eastern Ukraine in July 2014.
Girkin eventually fell out of favour with the Kremlin and returned to Moscow, where he founded a short-lived nationalist political movement aimed at overthrowing Putin, before turning his hand to blogging.
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