Six Tomsk volunteers were detained for publishing memos to election observers by the Golos association

In Tomsk, police detained six volunteers who were participating in a seminar on training election observers. The reason for the detention was the brochures for observers that the Golos association published even before she was recognized as a foreign agent, one of the volunteers, Galina Sakharevich, told Mediazona. “I went to participate as an election observer as a journalist, that is, not from any party, but as a volunteer. As part of the training, a seminar was held in the building of the TV2 television company, where we were told how to behave in elections, how to assess violations, and so on. As part of this seminar, we were given a brochure that told us how volunteers should behave. It was published by the Golos association in 2014, but before it was recognized as a foreign agent,” said Mediazona’s interlocutor. “When our seminar ended, volunteers began to go out into the streets, and some of them were detained by police officers, who began to say that they were distributing propaganda literature of a foreign agent. By propaganda literature they meant these brochures that the volunteers had in their bags. Now they have been taken to the department, they have been there for about two hours already. Other volunteers stayed in the building where the seminar took place,” says Sakharevich. According to her, there are six volunteers in the department.