A court in Chelyabinsk extended house arrest for anarchists accused of vandalism and hooliganism

The Central District Court of Chelyabinsk extended until November 14 the house arrest of spouses Dmitry Tsibukovsky and Anastasia Safonova, accused of hooliganism and vandalism due to actions dedicated to repressed anarchists and pension reform. Tsibukovsky’s mother Svetlana reported this to OVD-Info.

A case of hooliganism motivated by political hatred and enmity, committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy (Part 2 of Article 213 of the Criminal Code), was opened soon after, on the night of February 14-15, 2018, a banner reading “FSB” appeared on the fence near the Chelyabinsk FSB Directorate - the main terrorist." A few days after this, several anarchists, including Tsibukovsky and Safonova, were detained. Tsibukovsky said that under torture he confessed, after which the three detainees became suspects. Six months later, the criminal case was dropped “due to the lack of corpus delicti.”

The case was resumed on April 16, 2020; riot police officers burst into Tsibukovsky and Safonova’s Tula apartment and detained them. The anarchists were transported to Chelyabinsk, where they were charged. In April 2020, the court sent them to a pre-trial detention center. At the end of July, the preventive measure was changed to house arrest.

A case of vandalism (Part 2 of Article 214 of the Criminal Code) was opened against anarchists in November 2018 because of a drawing of a transformer booth and a cabin of a man in a crown and a pensioner with the inscriptions “Our poverty is their profit” and “Pension reform.” The police considered the drawing “the desecration of public buildings and structures.” By that time, the hooliganism case was dropped. As Andrei Lepekhin, a lawyer from Apology of Protest, told Mediazona, after this the decision to terminate the hooliganism case was canceled and combined with the vandalism case.