"Bolotnaya case": day five

The Moscow City Court found out what the riot policeman suffered from

Even at the preliminary hearings, lawyer Vadim Klyuvgant filed motions to exclude victims who were not related to the accused from the case. The judge then considered such a petition premature. Sixty-six law enforcement officers recognized as victims in the singled out "case of the twelve" are not even mentioned in the indictment...

The “Bolotnoye case” moved to the stage of litigation: on Thursday, the Moscow City Court heard the testimony of one of the injured riot police. Eight of the twelve defendants, in addition to participating in "mass riots", are accused of using violence against a law enforcement officer. The alleged punishment for this crime is a fine of 200 thousand rubles, or up to five years of forced labor, or arrest up to six months, or imprisonment up to five years. According to the indictment, 77 people were recognized as victims, 76 of them are law enforcement officers. Moreover, only ten of them were “physically hurt” by the defendants.

The case file contains testimonies of all the victims, and if one of them does not appear, the testimonies will be read out by agreement of the parties. Only in the event of death, serious illness or natural disaster, the judge may read them out on his own initiative. However, the defendants' lawyers explain that in practice the norms of the Code of Criminal Procedure are not always observed. “Falsifying technology is widely known: they bring some papers about the impossibility of the victim to appear in court, and prosecutors push through the need to read their testimony from the case,” says Vadim Klyuvgant, Nikolay Kavkazsky’s lawyer.

So far, only three injured OMON officers have appeared in the courtroom - Dmitry Alekhin, Alexander Algunov and Andrey Arkhipov. Lawyers suggested that the victims began to walk alphabetically. By the middle of the last meeting, only one of them remained in the hall - Arkhipov, an OMON officer for servicing facilities in air and water transport of the Transport Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Central Federal District.

Arkhipov, a 29-year-old tall man with a shaved head, was the first to be interrogated as part of the judicial investigation. And, according to lawyers, this procedure was indicative and created a precedent. Arkhipov suffered from an unknown person who threw a stone in his direction. The stone (“most likely a piece of asphalt”) touched the glass of the Jetta helmet, which was lowered at the level of the lips, and the chin. According to the case file, Arkhipov received "injuries in the form of a bruised wound of the chin area, a bruise, abrasion of the lower lip", and turned to doctors immediately on the square for help. In the evening in the hospital, as he himself said, he received stitches. When asked how abrasions can be sutured, Arkhipov replied: “This is not for me, but for the doctors, they decided.”

Even at the preliminary hearings, lawyer Vadim Klyuvgant filed motions to exclude victims who were not related to the accused from the case. The judge then considered such a petition premature. The sixty-six law enforcement officers found to be victims in the singled-out "Case of the Twelve" are not even mentioned in the indictment. However, the status of victims gives them many opportunities: to testify, to participate in debates, to propose a term of arrest, to claim compensation.

At the meeting, the prosecutor asked if Arkhipov felt affected by the events. He replied: “Yes, I feel from the events.” Lawyers for the accused believe that the prosecutors even helped the defense side with this. “We don’t have a defendant with the last name “Events,” Klyuvgant ironically. “That is, Arkhipov suffered not from these guys specifically, who have been behind bars for a year now.” Prior to this, in response to the question of the accused Leonid Kovyazin, Arkhipov replied that he felt “rather hostility towards the events”, but he did not know the people in the “aquarium”, he saw them for the first time and did not treat them badly.

“It is impossible to honestly prove something that did not exist. So, you need to create the illusion that something is being proved. How to pretend? Mass character! explains Vadim Klyuvgant. - So that quality, concreteness, thoroughness are replaced by quantity. So that an riot policeman would come to the podium and say that he "went to protect people from themselves."

Another riot policeman who is likely to be interrogated at the next meeting is Alekhin. He also did not see who threw the stone that hit him in the Jetta helmet. According to the materials of the case, his detachment arrived "to detain active offenders" and sat in vehicles until 20:00. “Neither me nor my colleagues were injured,” he said during interrogation on May 21, 2012, still as a witness. And in October of the same year, investigator Sereda issued a decision recognizing Alekhin as a victim. Sereda considered that the stone that hit the helmet caused physical harm to Alekhine, which makes him the victim. The document states that calls for mass riots and disobedience to the police were carried out from approximately 16.20 to 20 hours (when Alekhine probably did not go to the square yet). On the same day, Alekhin supplemented his testimony: he realized that "illegal acts" had been committed against him, namely, "and if not for the helmet, I could have been seriously injured."

These are only the first two victims, who have nothing to do with the people who are now being tried in the Moscow City Court. Andrei Arkhipov said at the meeting that he did not remember whether he had even written a statement about recognizing him as a victim. And he left the issue of transferring him from the status of a victim to a witness "to the discretion of the court." The question of lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky, how Arkhipov was recognized as a victim - on someone's initiative or outside the law, was cut off by the judge, calling it "rhetorical".

The defense side believes that each such interrogation more and more clearly proves the groundlessness of the status of "victims".