The court placed blogger Katelevsky under house arrest

Judge Victoria Kopsergenova of the Lyubertsy City Court placed video blogger Yan Katelevsky under house arrest until August 21. This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom.

Previously, the same court arrested Katelevsky in a case of intentional destruction or damage to property (Part 2 of Article 167 of the Criminal Code). The higher authority saw a conflict of interest and sent the materials for new consideration.

Katelevsky was detained in connection with property damage at the end of July. Together with him, his colleague from the YouTube channel “Rosderzhava” Alexander Dorogov was detained. He was accused of extorting 1.3 million rubles from traffic police inspector Pavel Gorokhov for refusing to publish a video with him (clause “b” of part 3 of article 163 of the Criminal Code).

Friends of the bloggers said that Katelevsky was hit by Gorokhov’s friend in the spring, and after a traffic police inspector wrote a statement about extorting money, Katelevsky was charged with “denting the car.”

At the meeting, the investigator demanded that a document from the extortion case be attached to the case materials. He said that he had Katelevsky’s WhatsApp correspondence with Dmitry Filimonov, through whom, according to investigators, Inspector Gorokhov transferred money to bloggers so that they would stop publishing videos about him.

The investigator said that in this correspondence Katelevsky warns about his plans to leave for the United States. "What, *** ?" - the blogger exclaimed when he heard about the existence of such correspondence. The defense opposed the inclusion of these documents, and the judge supported the blogger’s lawyers.

After today's court hearing, Katelevsky was detained to face charges in the case of extortion. As it turned out, he had been a suspect in this case since August 7.

Updated at 1:45 p.m. Added information about new charges being filed.