June 2008. Results of the month

In June 2008, at least 7 attacks of a racist and neo-Nazi nature were recorded, as a result of which at least 13 people were injured. As in May, we note that most likely we are not dealing with a real decrease in the activity of skinheads, but with a lack of information. In June, incidents were recorded in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Lipetsk, Nizhny Novgorod and Yaroslavl.

In total, during the 6 months of 2008, at least 255 people suffered from such attacks, 58 of whom died. Incidents were registered in 27 regions of Russia. During the same period in 2007, 351 people were injured, 49 of whom died. Those. we see that after the surge in violence at the beginning of the year, the number of reported victims has dropped dramatically.

The main centers of violence continue to be Moscow (35 killed and 96 wounded) and St. Petersburg (12 killed and 19 wounded).

A new phenomenon that became apparent in June was the actions of groups of Caucasian youth, either deliberately provoking fights with adherents of ultra-right ideas, or willingly accepting the provocative challenge of the latter. In June, at least one such fight took place - in Mitino (reports of several more incidents look more like a conscious attempt to present a domestic conflict as nationalistically motivated). In principle, such groups of Caucasian youth were recorded as early as 2007 (suffice it to recall the fight on Slavyanskaya Square on June 22 last year). Provocative reports of impending fights could also be seen this spring. However, in most cases it is difficult to identify what in such statements is a provocation, what is fiction, what is a deliberate distortion of information. However, now we can say with confidence that the long-standing fears of experts that the inaction of law enforcement agencies in countering xenophobia and racist violence will lead to the radicalization of some of the potential or real victims of Nazi skinheads, the growth of nationalistically motivated aggression on their part, have come true. Now we can say with confidence that there are such groups, and they are united according to regional and phenotypic principles (region - Caucasus, "Caucasian appearance") - i.e. on the same principles by which Nazi skinheads identify them. At the same time, in their behavior, these groups often copy the behavior of neo-Nazis (provoking a conflict, filming it on a mobile phone video camera, posting videos on the Internet).

In June, 1 guilty verdict was issued against 7 people on charges of gang murder motivated by ethnic hatred: on June 30, in Yekaterinburg, members of the Zig-88 group were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment (from 6 to 10 years).

In total, since the beginning of 2008, at least 13 sentences were passed against 39 people in 12 regions of the country for violent crimes classified as hate crimes.

In June 2008, at least 2 guilty verdicts were issued in cases related to hate propaganda (in the Astrakhan region and Blagoveshchensk) against 4 people

In June 2008, the Federal List of Extremist Materials was added to again. By the end of June 2008, it already included 151 items of materials recognized by the courts as extremist. Among the materials included in the latest update of the list, we note the video of the neo-Nazi murder of natives of Tajikistan and Dagestan, which appeared on the Internet in August 2007. In June 2008, law enforcement authorities acknowledged the murder and identified one of the victims.