The St. Petersburg City Court upheld the decision to arrest Ivan Punegov, a defendant in the “palace case.” Lawyer Sergei Podolsky told OVD-Info about this.

Now Punegov is in pre-trial detention center-1 “Kresty” in St. Petersburg, where he was transferred after two months in pre-trial detention center-6 “Gorelovo”.

A case was opened against Punegov for using violence against a government official (Part 1 of Article 318 of the Criminal Code) during protests on April 21 in support of Alexei Navalny. The investigation believes that at the protest the man “grabbed and squeezed the neck” of a policeman with both hands. Friends of the person involved in the case claim that Ivan tried to free the girl who was captured by the security forces.

Ivan Punegov is a native of the Komi Republic, and has worked as a truck driver in St. Petersburg for the last five years. The fact that he was taken into custody became known in early May.
After the arrest of politician Alexei Navalny, a series of protests took place throughout Russia; mass rallies took place on Saturday, January 23, Sunday, January 31, and February 2 (the day Navalny’s suspended sentence was replaced with a real one). The security forces reacted harshly to the protests: on January 23, more than 4,000 people were detained, on January 31, more than 5,500 , and on February 2 , more than 1,400 people .
In connection with the protests, more than a hundred criminal cases were opened throughout the country. The totality of these cases is called the “palace case,” since one of the catalysts for the protests was the FBK investigative film “ Palace for Putin. The story of the biggest bribe ."

A court in St. Petersburg upheld the arrest of Ivan Punegov, a defendant in the “palace case”