Translated material
The price of a word
The court ordered the police whistleblower to apologize to his former superiors
The Primorsky District Court of Novorossiysk yesterday made a decision on the civil suit of the leaders of the Novorossiysk police against their former employee Alexei Dymovsky, who became widely known after a video message to the country's leadership, in which he spoke about “police lawlessness” and accused his superiors of corruption and numerous violations. The court sided with the plaintiffs - the head of the city police department, Vladimir Chernositov, and the head of the police department for the Primorsky district, Valery Medvedev, and recognized the words of the ex-major as “untrue.” In this regard, Mr. Dymovsky was ordered to make a public apology to them and pay them 50 thousand rubles. to everyone.As the head of the Department of Internal Affairs for the Primorsky District of Novorossiysk, Valery Medvedev, told Vremya Novostey, he, together with the head of the city Department of Internal Affairs, Vladimir Chernositov, filed a lawsuit against former police major Alexei Dymovsky almost immediately after his video message appeared on the Internet in November. In it, in addition to general words about the corruption of the Novorossiysk police and systematic violations by the leadership of the Internal Affairs Directorate, Mr. Dymovsky also touched upon specific individuals.
In particular, speaking about his boss Vladimir Chernositov, he said that he awarded him the rank of major in exchange for a promise to imprison an innocent man. In addition, he accused his leaders of encouraging corruption. However, in this case he did not name specific names. Valery Medvedev, according to Alexei Dymovsky, “was convicted of a criminal offense.” “He was sentenced, but for some reason they changed his first and last name, and he turned out to be unconvicted,” the disgraced policeman asserted in his appeal.
Medvedev and Chernositov made the decision to defend their honor in court immediately, without waiting for checks at the city police department, which, after Dymovsky’s speech, were initiated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the prosecutor’s office of the Krasnodar region and the department of the Investigative Committee for the Southern Federal District. By the way, none of these checks found confirmation of the ex-major’s words. “We already knew that all this was not true, why should we wait for anything else?” - noted the head of the Primorsky District Department of Internal Affairs.
Valery Medvedev also spoke about his so-called criminal record, which Dymovsky mentioned. According to him, several years ago in Novorossiysk, a case of murder of a police officer was investigated, and operatives received a tip on a car that could belong to the criminals. “We started searching for this car and soon found it parked on the street, there were no passengers in it,” Mr. Medvedev said. — After examining it, we noticed that the car was missing a battery. As it turned out later, it was appropriated by a local police officer who came to inspect the car earlier. Having learned about this, I gathered the police and reprimanded this officer. In particular, he said that it is not customary for criminals to do this, let alone police officers.”
According to the head of the Primorsky District Department of Internal Affairs, the case of the theft of the battery soon went to court, then was sent for further investigation and was eventually dismissed due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. “And then this local police officer sued me for libel, for allegedly calling him a rat. However, when the trial began, he backed down, I had no desire to continue all this, nor to file a counterclaim, and this case against me was closed after reconciliation of the parties,” said Mr. Medvedev.
“Apparently, having heard about this somewhere, but not fully understanding it, Dymovsky, having organized this entire PR campaign (and I can’t call his speech anything else), decided to drag in here the fact that I was allegedly convicted,” - said Mr. Medvedev. “And what, the convicted chief of the police department is such a fried fact, so he, apparently, grabbed onto it, without bothering to find out if it was true.”
For the moral damage caused, the police chiefs demanded from Alexei Dymovsky a refutation of his words and 100 thousand rubles. to everyone. Yesterday, the Primorsky District Court of Novorossiysk partially satisfied their demands, admitting that “the information disseminated by Dymovsky does not correspond to reality,” and ordered the ex-major to make a public apology in the media and pay the plaintiffs 50 thousand rubles each. Neither Vladimir Chernositov nor Valery Medvedev were present at yesterday's meeting; their interests were represented by lawyers from the city police department.
According to Mr. Medvedev, they do not intend to appeal this decision. “We have no goal of making money from Dymovsky. We intend to give all this money to orphans. It was much more important to prove that he was not involved in what he said,” he said. It was not possible to find out the reaction to Mr. Chernositov’s decision yesterday - as the Internal Affairs Directorate reported, he is now on vacation. In turn, Dymovsky’s defense intends to appeal this decision and seek its cancellation.
Let us remind you that Alexey Dymovsky posted his video message on the Internet on November 7 last year. He complained about unfair treatment on the part of management, low wages, lack of days off and sick leave, and also stated about ineradicable corruption in the Novorossiysk police and that the management of the Internal Affairs Directorate forces employees to solve non-existent crimes in order to improve statistical indicators. After this, law enforcement agencies launched a large-scale campaign to discredit Dymovsky. He was called insane, accused of disclosing state secrets, having connections with foreign intelligence services, and they even talked about his possible involvement in the murder.
However, these accusations have not yet been confirmed, but a case was opened against the former major for fraud, accusing him of embezzling 27 thousand rubles allocated for operational-search activities. On January 22, Dymovsky was arrested and placed in a pre-trial detention center in Krasnodar, but on March 7 he was released on his own recognizance. Meanwhile, yesterday in the Primorsky District Court of Novorossiysk, preliminary hearings began on another civil lawsuit by Vladimir Chernositov, this time against human rights activist Vadim Karastelev, representing the interests of Dymovsky. The head of the city police department demands that a number of information disseminated by him be invalidated. In particular, Mr. Karastelev, according to Chernositov, expressed the opinion in the press that “his house cannot be bought even with the salary of the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.” He also, as stated in the statement of claim, does not agree with the opinion of the human rights activist that in Novorossiysk “there are massive violations of human rights, which he (Vladimir Chernositov) covers up, crimes are not investigated, unauthorized wiretapping occurs, no measures are taken to suppress violations against human rights defenders.”
However, as the representative of the disgraced policeman Mstislav Pomerantsev said, the head of the Internal Affairs Directorate refused some of the demands stated earlier in the statement of claim. “The plaintiff excluded his own demands to invalidate the information that his private house is expensive,” said Mr. Pomerantsev. The court took into account Chernositov’s petition and scheduled the next hearing for April 13.