They don't take people like that up

The response of the Moscow Central Internal Affairs Directorate to the speech of police sergeant Artem Charukhin in the Tverskoy court, where he stated that he wrote a report on the detention of Solidarity activist Ilya Yashin under dictation, was not long in coming. ITAR-TASS, citing official representative of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate Viktor Biryukov, reported that Charukhin was fired. True, at the trial, Charukhin already stated that he was going to quit because he was tired of the pickets, which he constantly had to attend.

Biryukov said that during the cassation hearing of the case of Yashin, who was arrested for 5 days after his arrest on December 31, Charukhin expressed “contradictory testimony that caused bewilderment among his colleagues.” In this regard, “and also in connection with his current avoidance of contacts with his superiors, the head of the Internal Affairs Directorate for the Central Administrative District, police colonel Viktor Paukov, made a decision to dismiss Charukhin from the internal affairs bodies,” announced the official representative of the Central Administrative Department.

Charukhin’s colleagues, according to Biryukov, “admit that he could simply be bribed, and make a proposal to bring him to justice in the manner prescribed by law.”

Representatives of Solidarity, having learned about this, offered the now former sergeant the help of their lawyer if Charukhin wanted to appeal his dismissal in court.

At the trial, Charukhin stated that during Yashin’s arrest on December 31, he was near a police bus. He added that he did not see one of the leaders of Solidarity, Boris Nemtsov, who was detained at the same time. At the same time, his report says that Yashin pushed the police away from Nemtsov. When Charukhin was pointed out to the obvious contradiction between his answer at the trial and his own report, he admitted that he wrote the report from dictation. At the same time, he reported that during December 31 he had to come to the Basmanny police station three times and rewrite the report. He actually admitted that the order came from the educational work officer of the internal affairs department Burtsev. On February 10, Burtsev, as well as police sergeant Kondrashev, who wrote the same report as Charukhin, and district police officer Dmitry Popsuev, who filed the administrative case (under whose dictation, according to Yashin, Charukhin wrote the report), will appear in the Tverskoy court as witnesses in the Yashin case.

Later, information appeared that the Moscow Main Department of Internal Affairs had a video recording in which Charukhin stated that he changed his testimony under pressure from Yashin’s lawyers. Anton Tsvetkov, a member of the Public Council at the Moscow City Internal Affairs Directorate, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the All-Russian Officers of Russia Foundation, reported this to Interfax. According to him, Charukhin admitted to management and his friends that he was under pressure. This, however, is somewhat at odds with Biryukov’s words that Charukhin avoids contacts with the leadership. Perhaps the words of the official representative of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate prompted the former sergeant to repent. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a fact of bribery,” Tsvetkov said. A video recording of Charukhin’s revelations about how the terrible Yashin read him quotes from the Bible and the Criminal Code (it’s terrible to scare a policeman with the Criminal Code!), and then at the trial Yashin and the lawyer asked him a lot of incomprehensible questions with some kind of trick, posted on the website "Petrovka, 38".

It should be noted that Anton Tsvetkov is also one of the newly elected members of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission, who got there in the company of other representatives of organizations related not to human rights protection, but to the security forces. It is known that he applied for the post of chairman of the commission. On January 31, after the arrests on Triumfalnaya Square, Tsvetkov and other representatives of the same set of POCs went around the police department not to monitor the condition of the detainees, but to ensure that they did not lie to law enforcement officers.