[danjac]

Russia does not have a "justice system" in the way that we would understand it in the West. Instead it has (and indeed, always had) a system of patronage and bribery, where your status within the system determines your sentence. If you are an oligarch, or the son of an oligarch, you will walk free, unless you cross Putin. If you are a nobody, you pay off the right people or you go to prison or end up freezing to death in a foxhole in the Donbass (Wagner recruits directly from prison, just as Stalin emptied the gulags for his cannon-fodder in WWII).

That's just how Russia is and always has been, and unfortunately, very likely always will be.

Is Denis guilty? Perhaps, but he will not have had a fair trial by any Western standard, and so we have to presume innocence.