in support of the leader of the St. Petersburg branch

Protests took place in St. Petersburg and Moscow over the weekend against the prosecution of the leader of the St. Petersburg branch of the Yabloko party, Maxim Reznik. The oppositionist was detained on suspicion of a fight with a policeman on the eve of the “March of Dissent” on March 3, and on Friday he was charged with insulting and using violence against government officials. The arrest of Mr. Reznik has already caused an international outcry: parliamentarians from Germany and Sweden stood up for him, not ruling out that the persecution of one of the opposition leaders “has a political background.”

In St. Petersburg, opposition representatives have been holding single pickets over the past few days. The leader of the city branch of the UCF Olga Kurnosova, member of the political council of the St. Petersburg Union of Right Forces Igor Soshnikov, human rights activists Yuri Vdovin and Mikhail Amosov have already taken part in the action. The Yabloko branch assured Kommersant that the pickets will not stop until Mr. Reznik is released. “We have a queue of people who want to picket the prosecutor’s office,” the party assured Kommersant. And on Sunday, a flash mob took place in front of the prosecutor’s office building on St. Isaac’s Square: there, at the same time, about a hundred people silently read newspapers with notes about the arrest of Mr. Reznik for several minutes. Picketing of the Prosecutor General's Office began yesterday in Moscow. The first to come out with a poster “Freedom for Maxim Reznik” was the youth leader of Yabloko, Ilya Yashin, who promised that single pickets would be held daily and “many famous people would take part in them.”

As Kommersant reported, Maxim Reznik was detained on the night of March 3 on suspicion of insulting police officers and fighting with them. On March 5, the court found that the leader of the St. Petersburg Yabloko, “being in a state of alcoholic intoxication, acting deliberately, illegally, publicly,” insulted three police officers, and one of them, senior sergeant Krukovsky, “inflicted at least one blow to the face and at least one kick to the leg,” and also “grabbed D. Krukovsky by the finger of his right hand.” On Friday, Mr. Reznik was officially charged under Articles 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (insult and use of violence against government officials), for which he faces up to five years in prison.

Maxim Reznik is in a pre-trial detention center, from a general cell, according to lawyers, he was transferred to a cell designed for three people, and did not complain about the conditions of detention. Immediately after his arrest, he went on a hunger strike, but stopped it at the request of Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky, who arrived in St. Petersburg, who said that he was ready to vouch for the leader of the St. Petersburg branch of the party and pay bail for his release.

The arrest of Maxim Reznik provoked harsh statements from European parliamentarians. Thus, the Green faction of the Hamburg parliament (a sister city of St. Petersburg) announced “concerns that the imprisonment of the main opposition leader may be explained by his political background.” A similar statement was made by a group of deputies of the Liberal Party of the Swedish Parliament. They also did not rule out “political motives” for the arrest of Maxim Reznik. And at Mr. Yavlinsky’s press conference dedicated to the Reznik case, the consuls of the United States, Germany, and Great Britain were present. According to a Kommersant source in the party who asked not to be named, information about the incident was brought to the attention of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met on March 8 with President Vladimir Putin and First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (see page 1).

Mikhail Kommersant-Shevchuk, St. Petersburg; Andrey Kozenko

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