News digest for August 5

Real deadlines for the “palace affair”, closure of independent media and exclusion of opposition candidates from the elections. We talk about the main news for August 5th.

• A court in St. Petersburg sentenced Nicholas the Ninth, a participant in the January 23 protests, to four and a half years in prison. He was found guilty of using violence against a government official during a rally.
• Kazan resident Elnar Efimov was sentenced to one and a half years in prison. He was charged with calls for extremism and mass unrest due to messages in a telegram chat during the winter protests in support of Alexei Navalny.
• The prosecution requested two years of restriction of freedom for the defendant in the “sanitary case” Nikolai Lyaskin. The oppositionist is accused of inciting violations of sanitary and epidemiological standards due to the announcement of a rally on January 23.
• “ MBH Media ”, “ Human Rights Postcards ” and “ Open Media ” announced the cessation of work. The day before, their websites were blocked at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office. Roskomnadzor also blocked the website of the Profession Journalist award, established by businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
• Veteran of the Crimean Tatar movement Ilver Ametov was sentenced to eight months of restricted freedom. He was found guilty of illegal possession of weapons.
• The court in Yoshkar-Olaconfirmed the verdict of Jehovah's Witness Ekaterina Pegasheva. In June, she was given a suspended sentence of six and a half years under the article on participation in the activities of an extremist organization.
• Border guards in Crimea detained Yalta blogger Ludvika Papadopoulou. She is charged with libel because of a Facebook post made by another person.
• A psychological and linguistic examination carried out as part of the “Ingush case”did not find any signs of calls for violence in the words of the leaders of the protests in Magas. Previously, according to the lawyer of one of the defendants, the investigation deliberately did not include the examination in the case.
• The Electoral Commission refused to register Boris Vishnevsky, deputy chairman of Yabloko, for elections to the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg due to allegedly incorrectly executed documents. Independent candidate Sergei Tereshchenko, who was nominated for the Barabinsk City Council, will also not be able to be elected. Some of the signatures he collected were found to be unreliable. Three more opposition activists from the Novosibirsk region - Timofey Kazantsev, Irina Selishcheva and Ekaterina Alexandrova - were removed from the elections to the Berdsk city council. They were accused of involvement in an “extremist organization.”