MOSCOW (AP) — A German artist who created carnival displays mocking Russian President Vladimir Putin was sentenced in absentia on Thursday to 8 1/2 years in prison by a court In Moscow.

Jacques Tilly was convicted on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military and insulting religious feelings.

Carnival parades in Germany are famed for their floats mocking a wide variety of domestic and global political figures, and Putin has frequently been a target.

Tilly, 62, has been designing and building floats for Düsseldorf’s Carnival parade — one of Germany’s best-known — since 1984.

In recent years, his designs have depicted Putin scrubbing himself in a bathtub filled with blood and painted in the colors of the Ukraine flag, while another featured a red-faced Putin biting into Ukraine, which was decorated with the words “Choke on it!”

Tilly had previously told the German dpa news agency that the Russian criminal proceedings against him were “an authoritarian regime’s propaganda trial.”

“It’s very likely that the verdict against me has already been determined. I assume it will be many, many years of prison camp,” Tilly said. “It is an attack on our freedoms. On freedom of opinion, on freedom of the press, on freedom of satire, on jesters’ freedom. And that is how it is understood here in Germany.”

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Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.