Leningrad Front

Riot police prevented interethnic clashes in the capital

At about 8 o'clock on Tuesday evening, a group of young people (about 1,000 people, according to law enforcement) blocked Leningradsky Prospekt in the Airport metro area for about half an hour. The protesters, mostly football fans, burned fires and shouted: “Russians, forward!” and even, according to some reports, they fired into the air. The highway stopped working, but in the end the riot police managed to persuade the young people to clear the roadway. The protesters demanded a fair investigation into the murder of Yegor Sviridov, a 28-year-old member of the Fratriya movement of Spartak fans. On the night of December 6-7, Yegor died in a fight, in which, on one side, five residents of the capital, including himself, and from eight to ten visitors from the North Caucasus, participated on one side.

The two groups did not get along at the bus stop on Kronstadt Boulevard. A fight began, in which the visitors quickly gained the upper hand due to their numerical superiority and the fact that their opponents, according to available data, were not entirely sober. They began to finish shooting the fallen with a traumatic pistol until the shooter ran out of ammunition. As a result, Yegor Sviridov was killed and at least one of his companions was injured. The shooter, a native of Kabardino-Balkaria Aslan Cherkesov, was detained.

President of the Russian Football Union Sergei Fursenko expressed condolences to the family of the deceased and called on law enforcement agencies to conduct a thorough and unbiased investigation of the crime. Participants in yesterday's mass action who gathered at the Golovinsky prosecutor's office, which was supposed to bring charges against Aslan Cherkesov, planned to demand the same thing.

It is no secret that more and more people in Moscow are irritated by the behavior of visitors from the North Caucasus republics, who often become instigators of conflicts and regularly resort to traumatic weapons. On the other hand, the victims in such situations are often members of fan associations with a strong nationalist aura. To a certain extent, this turns the war going on in the streets into the work of its participants, and for the rest of society it does not seem to exist, although the victims are by no means always associated with football or skinheads.

One of the fans was Yuri Volkov, who was killed in a fight with Chechens on Chistye Prudy on July 10 of this year. Then a native of Chechnya, Magomed Suleymanov, gave the police the knife with which he allegedly killed Volkov and confessed to the crime, but was released due to lack of evidence. In this regard, yesterday, before going out into the streets, fans published an open letter to the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, asking him to take the case under personal control. “This will allow the public, concerned about the tendency of Russian citizens born in the North Caucasus republics to flee and hide from investigation, to believe that no mistakes will be made in the investigative process in the case of the murder of Yegor Sviridov. At the same time, your personal control will minimize the possibility of investigative or judicial authorities entering into illegal relations with relatives of the accused, which could lead to an inadequate and unfair judicial decision,” the appeal says.

From the point of view of the law, which does not distinguish between citizens based on their region of origin, the murder on Kronstadt Boulevard is truly an everyday criminal episode. But the social atmosphere in the city becomes more and more tense after each such “everyday incident”. If several years ago such episodes occurred mainly only on the periphery of the country, for example in Kondopoga and Stavropol, then recently there has been a clear shift towards the center.

Ivan SUKHOV