A participant in the Walks of Free People from Cheboksary is being held at the police station

In Cheboksary, the police detained Sergei Zakharov, a participant in local Walks of Free People. He has been held in police department No. 1 for more than four hours, Alena Blinova said.

Zakharov is accused of violating the procedure for holding a public event (Article 20.2 of the Administrative Code) due to the action on October 29. On that day, Artpodgotovka activist Vyacheslav Rybakov held a single picket. A few meters away from him were participants in the Walks of Free People. The police mistook a single action for a mass one and detained the activists.

Then Zakharov was fined 500 rubles for allegedly crossing the road in the wrong place. It is important to note that he participated in the protest on October 7th. Law enforcement officials believe that that day he made an indecent gesture to the camera of a police operator.

Those detained on October 29 claim that they had nothing to do with the single picket. Despite this, after this action a series of trials of activists took place. Vyacheslav Rybakov himself was sentenced to 190 hours of compulsory work and arrested for 15 days for the action on October 7. The organizer of local Walks of Free People, Alena Blinova, was fined 200 thousand rubles. Vyacheslav Maltsev’s colleague Elena Voevodina, who was also detained that day, was sentenced by the court to 32 hours of compulsory labor. Walking participants Mikhail Budarin and Anatoly Sidorov were given 28 and 32 hours of compulsory work.

“The activists were charged with group picketing only on the grounds that, according to the police, they closely and demonstratively observed the single picket of their ally Rybakov. During the hearing, I even received a remark from the judge when a representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs said that the purpose of this picket was the picket itself. Now, thanks to these decisions of the Leninsky District Court of Cheboksary, any passer-by who gazed at the poster could end up in the dock,” says Yuri Sidorov, a lawyer at the regional branch of the public organization Open Russia.