The Supreme Court commuted the punishment for ABTO participants

On December 11, 2013, the Presidium of the Supreme Court commuted the punishment of Ivan Astashin and Bogdan Golonkov, members of the Autonomous Combat Terrorist Organization (ABTO), who were convicted in 2012 of a series of arsons. The Presidium of the Supreme Court lifted the restriction of freedom for both of them after serving their sentences, and reduced the sentence for Ivan Astashin from 12.5 years to 9 years and nine months in a strict regime colony.

Astashin and Golonkov are in a pre-trial detention center, they participated in the presidium meeting via video link. At the very beginning, Astashin again asked to postpone the meeting, but the presidium almost unanimously decided to reject this request.

The Presidium of the Supreme Court met on the complaint of the Prosecutor General's Office. Having considered the court decisions in the ABTO case, the prosecutors came to the conclusion that the court should not have imposed a restriction of freedom on Astashin and Golonkov after serving a real term, since at the time of the crimes they were minors. The prosecutor's office also proposed to remove from Astashin Art. 280 (public calls for extremist activities) and Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (incitement to national hatred), for which the statute of limitations expired, as well as to reduce his term of imprisonment under Article 205 (terrorism) - when passing the sentence, the court had to take into account the surrender, but this was not done.

Ivan Astashin stated that he, Maxim Ivanov, Grigory Lebedev, Andrei Markhai, Ksenia Povazhnaya took part in only one "non-violent action of direct action against the FSB." On the night of December 20, 2009, on the eve of the Day of security forces, they threw Molotov cocktails at the windows of the FSB department for the South-Western District of Moscow. Then a video appeared on the network with a recording of this arson and the caption “Happy Chekist Day, bastards!”. Astashin denies his involvement in the publication of this video on the Internet. He claims that they did not have any stable group: he had been friends with Lebedev for a long time, he lived in a civil marriage with Povazhnaya, and went on hikes with Ivanov.

He insisted that he did not take part in any of the actions of Kirill Krasavchikov, Bogdan Golonkov, Alexander Bokarev and Yaroslav Rudny, who committed a series of arson attacks belonging to "non-Russian" outlets.

Bogdan Golonkov said that he came up with the name ABTO. He said that on the Internet he came across information about the activities of the "Combat Terrorist Organization" in St. Petersburg and decided to take a similar name. According to Golonkov, during the search, a laptop was confiscated from him, on which were the originals of the video recordings from which the ABTO videos with arson of stalls and police stations were made.

The lawyers of both defendants said that the actions of the clients did not contain the content of Article 205: the arson of trade stalls was not committed to intimidate the population and did not cause physical harm to anyone, no demands were made against the state authorities. Ivan Astashin asked to reclassify his accusation to Article 167 of the Criminal Code (deliberate destruction of property), and Bogdan Golonkov to Article 213 (hooliganism).

The Presidium of the Supreme Court decided to remove the restriction of freedom from both young people after serving their sentences, and also to remove Art. Art. from Astashin. 280 and 282 of the Criminal Code. Golonkov's sentence remained the same - 9.5 years in a penal colony. Astashin, the presidium reduced the term of imprisonment from 12 years and 6 months to 9 years and nine months in a strict regime colony.

Recall that 10 people were involved in the ABTO case - Ivan Astashin (Spider), Bogdan Golonkov (Sapper), Alexander Bokarev (Pushkin), Kirill Krasavchikov, Maxim Ivanov, Andrei Markhai, Igor Zaitsev, Yaroslav Rudny, Grigory Lebedev and Ksenia Povazhnaya (Wolf). By the time they were detained, they were between 16 and 22 years old, all of them, except Grigory Lebedev, studied at universities and colleges. Lebedev went to school and he finished the 11th grade in a pre-trial detention center. On April 12, 2012, the members of the ABTO were sentenced (for more details, see here ). In July of the same year, the Supreme Court commuted the sentences of 4 out of 10 members of the organization.

By decision of the cassation instance, the leader of the ABTO, Ivan Astashin, was sentenced to 13 years in prison, the appeal commuted this sentence by six months. Ksenia Povazhnaya and Andrei Markhai  received four years in prison instead of eight and ten respectively. For two years - from ten to eight years in prison - was the verdict for Maxim Ivanov was changed. The punishment of other defendants in the case was left unchanged, volume including Yaroslav Rudny, who received six years in prison, although during the investigation he was under house arrest, and The prosecutor asked for a suspended sentence for him. Conditional punishment of Igor Zaitseva - three years of imprisonment on probation with a probationary period of four year - was also recognized by the court as legal.

According to the indictment in the case, two groups operated in the ABTO, the members of which practically did not intersect during the commission of crimes. During interrogations and in court, almost all the defendants unanimously declared that such a "terrorist organization" does not exist.

All those convicted in the case, except for Igor Zaitsev, were included in the list of terrorists and extremists compiled by Rosfinmonitoring. The ABTO was banned by the court as a terrorist organization, the decision came into force at the end of November this year.

Sources

• "Non-violent action of direct action against the FSB" // Russian planet. 2013. December 11.