Rostov journalist asked to give three years

On November 26, the Pervomaisky Court of Rostov-on-Don will announce the verdict in the case of local opposition journalist and blogger Sergei Reznik. He is charged with commercial bribery (Article 204 of the Criminal Code), false denunciation (Article 306) and insulting a government official (Article 319), all episodes combined into one case. The prosecutor asked that Reznik be sentenced to three years in prison.

Reznik is convinced that the case against him is falsified and this is explained by his oppositional journalistic activity, and in recent years he has been engaged in it exclusively on a blog - after, in his words, “the sixth or seventh newspaper in which I worked in Rostov closed down.” . Reznik told OVD-Info that an operational case was opened against him after in 2011, when “there was a big war of local officials” against the now former prosecutor of the Rostov region Valery Kuznetsov , “who took a principled position on many positions,” the journalist “was one of the few who spoke out for the prosecutor.” Reznik’s phone began to be tapped, and at the beginning of 2012, threatening calls were made. Among those who called Reznik is Andrei Solodovnikov - according to the activist of the regional branch of the December 5 Party Boris Batu, he is “a provocateur who always rubs shoulders with all opposition movements, everyone knows him and has been persecuting him for a long time.”

The commercial bribery that Reznik is charged with, according to investigators, is that he allegedly tried to bribe an employee of a technical inspection station in order to undergo a technical inspection without presenting the car. According to Reznik, in court it was possible to prove that it was not he who bribed the person, but he himself was offered to pay two thousand rubles and not undergo a technical inspection - they say that a diagnostic card would be brought home to him. A man named Denis Grishanov, with whom Reznik spoke, is named in the case as the administrator of the technical inspection point, despite the fact that in fact he works for an individual entrepreneur, “the administrative functions and official responsibilities of this boy are not specified anywhere.” Reznik eventually arrived at the inspection station himself, received a card from Grishanov and was about to leave the station, when suddenly his car was blocked by three police cars. This happened on August 21 last year, when Reznik was still working at Novaya Gazeta in the Southern Federal. Reznik is sure that all this was staged. As Boris Batu notes, the file contains photographs of two banknotes worth one thousand rubles each, but one of them has numbers that do not match those written in the protocols. In addition, the expert who photographed the scene of the alleged crime signed the protocol under someone else’s last name - only the initials are the same. The notorious diagnostic card is photographed only from one side, so, according to Batu, “it is unknown whether the colossus passed the technical inspection or not, whether it is in working order or not, it just appears in the case some kind of card, and it’s not clear whether it’s the right one or not.” Observers are also suspicious because Reznik was blocked at the moment when he was just about to leave, and not at the exit from the station.

After Reznik wrote complaints to the Investigative Committee, the prosecutor's office and the FSB regarding telephone threats, but no one responded, he himself began to investigate who was doing this. Then he was accused of false denunciation: Andrei Solodovnikov and a man named Skobelev stated that Reznik himself gave them money and SIM cards so that they would call him and threaten him, allegedly to increase his own rating. At the same time, as Batu says, Skobelev never showed up for trial - “the investigation was actively hiding him somewhere .” According to Reznik, in some cases, on the days when, according to the investigation, meetings with the victims took place, he has an alibi: for example, on one of the indicated days he was not in Rostov at all. Reznik's lawyer Yuri Kastrubin noted that the investigator incorrectly classified the episode. Reznik is accused of insulting a government official for writing in LiveJournal, where he called the chairman of the regional Arbitration Court Olga Solovyova mymra (currently the corresponding posting is from Reznik’s LiveJournal deleted). Reznik says that the evidence included printouts of Word files with texts copied from his LiveJournal.

This year, Reznik, in his words, “either the locks of the house will be filled with glue, or the car will be smashed.” On October 22, Reznik and his wife were attacked at the entrance by two people, one with a traumatic pistol, one with a bat. Reznik was injured. A criminal case has been opened on this fact. On November 24, Reznik, driving up with a friend to the entrance of his house, saw two people waiting for them: “One comes out - it’s clear that a fighter was coming to beat. And behind him is the second one, cover. We approached them, they scattered. We followed them, we counted about six operatives. And as soon as we go to them, they run away from us.” Shortly before the OVD-Info correspondent’s conversation with Reznik, a friend of the journalist told him that they called him from a certain Tyumen number and told him to forget the name Reznik.

The journalist, citing his own sources, claims that according to the investigators' plan, he should now be given a suspended sentence. But in addition to the cases in which a decision is now expected, two more cases have been filed against him. One again about insulting a government official: this time, Deputy Regional Prosecutor Roman Klimov, whom Reznik called a tractor driver, as well as a swindler, scoundrel and squire of Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Vorobyov, who previously worked in the Rostov region, to whom Klimov is a relative. The second is again a false denunciation : during operational search activities, Reznik told the investigator that he believed that one of the police officers had committed sexual acts with the boy. According to Reznik, also based on data obtained from his own sources, after the suspended sentence, another case of several episodes will be filed in order to present him as a repeat offender and bring him under a real sentence.

Recently, the official materials of the case were received by the Memorial Human Rights Center. As the head of the Memorial Human Rights Center’s Support Program for Political Prisoners, Sergei Davidis, told OVD-Info , “it is very likely that as a result of studying the materials, Reznik will be recognized either as a political prisoner, if he is imprisoned, or as a person subjected to illegal politically motivated persecution. "Everything that is known about this case leads us to believe that we will come to this conclusion, but we need to make an informed, formalized and reasoned judgment, and for this we need to study a large corpus of documents related to the case." Memorial expects to make a judgment on the Reznik case “in the foreseeable future”—perhaps “within a few days.”