The Syktyvkar Town Court imposed 140 hours of community service on 57-year-old former employee of the Federal Penal Correction Service and pensioner Fyodor Kobzev. The police drew up two reports against him on repeated violations of the procedure for arranging or conducting a rally (Part 8 of Article 20.2 of the Administrative Code) because he participated in the actions on January 23 and 31. In the summer of 2020, he was already held administratively liable for a picket in the central square of the town.
Fyodor Kobzev said that on January 31, he was going to go skiing. As he was crossing the Theater Square of Syktyvkar, he saw a rally take place there. He tried to record how the police harshly detained two elderly women who were holding one-person pickets. After that, Kobzev went to the bus stop, the police approached him and asked him to go to the bus for some "administrative actions". In the bus, he noticed one of the detained elderly women, who complained that the police had torn her coat.
The pensioner reported that he had been taken to the police department, where two administrative reports had been drawn up on repeated violations of the procedure for arranging or conducting a rally (Part 8 of Article 20.2 of the Administrative Code) because he participated in the actions on January 23 and 31 (in the summer, Kobzev was tasered and detained during a one-person picket in Stefanovskaya Square of the town and fined). Five hours later, Kobzev was taken from the police department to the court. He tried to explain that on January 31, he was at the place of the rally by chance. But in the end, the court imposed a total of 140 hours of community service on him: 40 — for January 23, 100 — for January 31.
“I was warned by the police that my next appearance at a rally could turn into a criminal case under „Dadin’s“ article. But no one should intimidate me. I am an adult, I am 57 years old. My grandfather attacked German machine guns and lay down under tanks with grenades during the war, and they expect me to be afraid of someone? No, I am not afraid. What should I be afraid of? I am fighting for the truth. I am a freeman, I have the right to speak freely and express my opinion,” said Kobzev.
He added that on January 23, he had participated in an unagreed rally and the police had visited him twice thereafter. The first time they said they wanted to talk to him, but the activist advised them to subpoena him. The second time the police visited him when only his daughter was in the apartment, Kobzev said. According to the pensioner, law enforcement officers threatened to break open the door if the woman did not open it. The pensioner added that he had tried to find out in the police who had intimidated his daughter, but nobody had answered the question so far. He stressed that he was seeking to punish the police through the prosecutor's office or in court.
Unagreed protests in support of jailed politician Alexei Navalny were held for two weekends in a row. According to the estimates of the observers from the Joint Group of Public Oversight, about 300 people joined the rally and demonstration in Syktyvkar on January 31 (almost four times less than the rally on January 23). The police detained about 70 people, including Valery Chernitsyn, a journalist of the Krasnoe Znamya Newspaper, and Vlad Petrov, a correspondent of SOTA, although he was wearing a yellow “Press” vest. The detainees were taken to court, more than 30 of them being fined for 10 thousand rubles for their participation in the rally.
According to OVD-Info, the police have detained more than 5,4 thousand people across Russia, which is a record in terms of the number of detainees in the recent history of Russia. Learn how the detentions and trials of the participants of the rallies are going on from the 7x7’s timeline.