Employees of the online publication Orlets were detained on charges of extortion

The administrator of the website of the Orlets publication, Artem Prokhorov, and the journalist of this publication, Vladimir Panfilov, were detained on charges of extortion. This was written about in the project’s telegram channel.

The journalists were detained while receiving money from businessman Vladimir Tilman, Orlovskiye Novosti claims , citing sources in law enforcement agencies, adding that Tilman had previously been a victim in another extortion case.

Orlets writes about events in the Oryol region and often criticizes local officials. In March, the group on VKontakte and the publication’s website were blocked due to unreliable, in the opinion of the Prosecutor General’s Office, information about the war in Ukraine. "Orlets" continued to work on the site with a new domain name.

• Russian authorities periodically use the article on extortion (Article 163 of the Criminal Code) to put pressure on political activists and journalists. On August 2, the court sentenced the founder of the Police Ombudsman project, Vladimir Vorontsov, who exposed violations in law enforcement agencies, to five years in prison. Among the charges against Vorontsov is an article on extortion. In the Moscow region, Rosderzhava journalists Yan Katelevsky and Alexander Dorogov are under arrest under this article. Also arrested in the case of extortion were employees of the Kemerovo human rights project “Siberia Legal” Dmitry Kamynin and Vladimir Taranenko. The editor of the Kaliningrad publication “New Wheels”, Igor Rudnikov, was prosecuted for a similar article. The court reclassified the charges as attempted arbitrariness (Part 1 of Article 330 using Part 3 of Article 30 of the Criminal Code) and failure to report the presence of a residence permit in the United States (Article 330.2 of the Criminal Code) and assigned Rudnikov 550 hours of compulsory work.