The head of the Karelian Memorial, Yuri Dmitriev, had his arrest extended for three months.

The Petrozavodsk City Court extended the arrest of the historian and head of the Karelian "Memorial" Yuri Dmitriev for three months. This is reported by the International Society "Memorial".

Dmitriev will remain in custody until June 25. The historian was arrested on June 28, 2018. The investigation believes that from 2012 to 2016 he committed sexual acts of violence against his minor adopted daughter (clause “b” part 4 of article 132 of the Criminal Code).

The prosecution builds this version on the basis of conversations between his grandmother, a psychologist and an investigator, with Dmitriev's adopted daughter, who told “defamatory” information about him. The historian's lawyer Viktor Anufriev believes that the psychologist is connected with the investigator and could become a mechanism of pressure on the child.

The persecution of Yuri Dmitriev began in December 2016, when he was detained in connection with the production of child pornography. The case was opened because of the pictures of the naked daughter - the historian himself claims that with their help he simply recorded the physical development of the child for reporting to the guardianship authorities.

In April 2018, the court acquitted the historian, but two months later the Supreme Court of Karelia overturned this decision and sent the case back for a new trial. The verdict was canceled after a complaint from the native grandmother of the historian's adopted daughter.

• In September, the arrest of Yuri Dmitriev was extended until December 25, 2019. Later, the court rejected the lawyer's request for a re-examination of the Dmitriev case.
• Yuri Dmitriev is one of the pioneers of the execution pits of the victims of Stalinist repressions in the Sandormokh forest. In August 2018, excavations were carried out there by the Russian Military Historical Society, headed by the then Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky. The purpose of these excavations was to confirm the hypothesis that Soviet prisoners of war who were in Finnish camps were buried in Sandarmokh.
• Historian Anatoly Razumov, in an interview with Novaya Gazeta, suggested that the main task of the excavations of the RVIO is to ““dilute” the crimes of the Stalin era with the same crimes allegedly committed by“ others ”- here, in the same place.”