The court extended the arrest of Ivan Safronov for the sixth time

The Moscow City Court extended the arrest of Ivan Safronov for the sixth time - the former journalist of Kommersant and Vedomosti will be in jail until January 7, 2022. By that time, he will be in custody for a year and a half.

The court session was traditionally held behind closed doors - the judge, at the request of the prosecution, closed the session due to the presence of state secrets in the case.

The guarantees did not affect the change in the preventive measure either. More than 300 people vouched for Safronov. Among the signatories are journalists from Vedomosti, Kommersant, RBC, Dozhd (the media is included in the register of foreign agents), and Novaya Gazeta. Guarantees were also signed by more than ten employees of The Bell, including the editor-in-chief of the publication Irina Malkova. Public figures also vouched for Safronov, for example, Chulpan Khamatova, founder of the Podari Zhizn charity foundation.

• Ivan Safronov has been in jail for over a year: he was detained on July 7, 2020 on charges of treason. Neither the public, nor Safronov's defense, nor the defendant himself has received almost any information about the charge he is charged with. The only thing that the security forces reported was that Safronov was allegedly recruited by NATO services in 2012, and in 2017 he completed the task of collecting and transmitting information about Russia's military-technical cooperation with African countries and the activities of the Russian military in the Middle East. Safronov's contact was allegedly a representative of the Czech special services, then the information got to the United States.

• During the entire time that Safronov was in the pre-trial detention center, the investigation repeatedly put pressure on the journalist. For example, in June it became known that the investigator offered ex-journalist Ivan Safronov accused of treason to make a deal in exchange for a call from his mother. In his column, Safronov himself stated that he would not make a deal with the investigation - this is his principled position.

• In the spring of 2021, the authorities detained one of Safronov’s lawyers, Ivan Pavlov, and they opened a case against him for disclosing preliminary investigation data (Article 310 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), and as a result, he was assigned a preventive measure in the form of a ban on certain actions. This autumn, Pavlov announced that he had left Russia.