Not the blue part

The court dispelled rumors of prostitution among the St. Petersburg military

The public organization “Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg” and the editors of the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” will have to compensate military unit 37/27 of the North-Western Regional Command of Internal Troops for the damage caused by the information published in the above-mentioned publication. Such an unprecedented decision was made yesterday by the Kuibyshevsky District Court of the northern capital - for the first time in Russian legal practice, the military defended its business reputation.

As the Vremya Novostei newspaper has already reported , military unit 37/27 filed a lawsuit in court against the newspaper, which, at the instigation of human rights activists, published an article on its pages that in this unit of the North-Western Command of the Internal Troops of the Russian Federation, prostitution is flourishing among conscripts. The military demanded that the defendants officially refute the information discrediting them and compensate for the damage caused to the business reputation of the military unit in the amount of 2 million rubles. Yesterday, the Kuibyshevsky District Court partially satisfied the claim. According to the decision made by judge Anzhelika Panova, the newspaper and human rights activists will have to refute the rumors they spread within a month and pay the military a total of 22 thousand rubles, 15 thousand of which will fall on the shoulders of “soldiers’ mothers.”

As Colonel Gennady Marchenko, deputy commander of the North-Western District of Internal Troops for work with personnel, told Vremya Novostey, the leadership of the unit and the district are satisfied with this decision. “The fact that the financial requirements were not fully satisfied is not so important. The main thing is that the court made a fair legal assessment of this entire scandalous situation,” he said.

Opponents of the military consider the court decision to be unfair and subject to cancellation. As Viktor Andreev, a lawyer for the public organization “Soldiers’ Mothers of St. Petersburg,” explained to Vremya Novostey, procedural norms were violated during the hearings: “Judge Anzhelika Panova refused to attach to the case a video recording in which a soldier talks about how he allegedly worked in unit 37 /27 “conscripts on call,” and the written testimony of another soldier confirming the words of his colleague.”

Also, according to human rights activists, the lawsuit itself is initially illegal. A military unit, from the point of view of “soldiers’ mothers,” cannot have a business reputation, because it does not conduct business. And the military unit did not have the right to initiate such a civil process, but had to write a statement to law enforcement agencies to initiate a criminal case for libel. In this regard, human rights activists and the newspaper intend to appeal this decision to a higher authority.

Mikhail TELEKHOV, St. Petersburg