Chronicle of current events

October 14–18

Clashes in West Biryulyovo in October 2013
October 14, Monday
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation conducts an audit on the attack on OMON employees in the Moscow microdistrict of West Biryulyovo, where on October 13, hundreds of people gathered for a spontaneous "people's gathering", protesting about the murder of 25-year-old Yegor Shcherbakov. The criminal case was instituted under Article 213 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Hooliganism”).
October 16, Wednesday
The organization Human Rights Watch demanded that the Russian authorities immediately free all the defendants in the “swamp business” from the guard. The statement of the human rights organization appeared shortly after the messages about the beatings of the escorts Vladimir Akimenkov and Sergey Krivov in the Nikulinsky District Court of Moscow, as well as about the health problems of Andrei Barabanov, due to the illness of which the court hearings were postponed for two weeks.
October 17, Thursday
The eleven Nobel Prize winners asked President Putin to remove the Greenpeace activists in the Murmansk of Piracy. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Nobel laureates were mistaken in the addressee: only the investigation and the court solve such issues.
October 18, Friday
The Council on Human Rights under the President of Russia and the Public Chamber prepared the bill “On the Fundamentals of Public Control”, which will grant public organizations broad powers to examine and evaluate the activities of state bodies and legislative bodies.
The defendant of the Pussy Riot case, Maria Alekhina, at a meeting of the Avtozavodsky court of Nizhny Novgorod, withdrew her request to change her a type of punishment from a colony of general regime for correctional labor. Alekhina said that “has no ethical right” to be released while her friend Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is held in a prison hospital after a hunger strike.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova resumed a hunger strike in IK-14, where she was transferred from the LIU-21 prison hospital. Tolokonnikova protests against the fact that she was returned to the same colony where her safety is at risk.
A few hours later, the press service of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia said that Tolokonnikova will be transferred to serve his sentence to another colony.

Photo: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters