Former regional lawmaker serves nine-day jail sentence for attending memorial to Boris Nemtsov

Former regional lawmaker and opposition party leader Mikhail Borisov was released from jail on Friday, after serving a nine-day sentence for attending a memorial to assassinated Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, independent Russian news outlet Mediazona has reported.

The sentence was delivered by a court in Yekaterinburg, in the Russian Urals, but due to a “lack of available space” in the city’s jail cells, Borisov was held in a detention centre in the nearby city of Pervouralsk. According to his lawyer, Alexey Antonov, he spent his jail time in complete isolation, due to the lack of non-smoking communal cells.

Last week, a city court found Borisov guilty of “organising an unauthorised public event” and sentenced him to nine days of “administrative arrest”. The court considered evidence provided by Russian security forces, who photographed Borisov holding a bouquet of flowers at the memorial event on 27 February, and subsequently shared the photo with a local pro-Kremlin Telegram channel.

68-year-old Borisov and his co-defendant Alexey Mosin, head of a local branch of the human rights organisation Memorial, were also accused of leaving graffiti at the site, reading “Boris” in Ukrainian. They denied the accusation.

In court, Borisov and his lawyer argued that the memorial was not an unauthorised event but a “private meeting between two old men”, and questioned why nobody had been detained for leaving flowers at a memorial to playwright Nikolay Kolyada, who died on 2 March.

Borisov served as a member of the Sverdlovsk Regional Council from 1990 to 1993, and headed the Yekaterinburg branch of the liberal People’s Freedom Party from 2013 until it was outlawed in 2023. He regularly attended the annual memorial to Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, who was the national leader of the People’s Freedom Party at the time of his assassination in Moscow on 27 February 2015.