In Irkutsk, a court found an anarchist guilty of insulting the feelings of believers

The magistrate of court district No. 8 of Irkutsk, Maxim Kuchugur, found local anarchist Dmitry Litvin guilty of insulting the feelings of believers (Part 1 of Article 148 of the Criminal Code). Mediazona reports this.

The court sentenced the young man to 100 hours of compulsory labor for publishing a photograph on VKontakte showing a middle finger against the background of a church and the caption “Orthodoxy is our strength.” Lytvyn was released from punishment due to the expiration of the statute of limitations for bringing to justice.

Initially, the anarchist was charged with 15 counts of crime, but the investigation left only four of them in the final version of the charges. During the consideration of the case, the court excluded three more episodes, seeing a crime only in the publication of a photograph with a middle finger against the backdrop of a church.

The pictures were published on a page on VKontakte with the nickname “Dmitry Bakunin” in 2015. Litvin connects his persecution with his participation in local and all-Russian anarchist movements. He claims that he did not publish these images, and the “Dmitry Bakunin” page itself does not belong to him, and several other people had access to it.

• On April 8, 2017, searches took place in Irkutsk with the participation of the SOBR unit and employees of Center “E”. After this, nine people were detained: Dmitry Litvin, anarchist Igor Martynenko, his girlfriend and mother, anarchist Valeria Altareva, as well as several activists of the Solidarity Network initiative. Later it became known that a criminal case was opened against Lytvyn under Article 148 of the Criminal Code. The remaining detainees were interrogated as witnesses in this case.
• In court on October 6, 2018, Lytvyn was asked to dismiss the case due to the expiration of the statute of limitations for prosecution, but the anarchist refused .