KYIV – When Soviet-era Ukrainian dissident Vasyl Stus died under mysterious circumstances in a high-security Russian labor camp near the Ural Mountains on September 4, 1985, it had been 20 years since his poems were last published in the USSR.

Now, a book about the last five years of his life is at risk of being pulled off store shelves and from online shopping carts after pro-Russian lawmaker Viktor Medvedchuk won a libel case against the author on October 19 in a Kyiv civil court.

Judge Maryna Zastavenko ruled to halt the further sale and distribution of “The Case of Vasyl Stus” until six of nine passages in the book that the plaintiff asked to be stricken had been removed.