Journalist Yulia Vishnevetskaya, detained after protests against mobilization in Makhachkala, arrested for five days

The Soviet District Court of Makhachkala sentenced journalist Yulia Vishnevetskaya to five days of administrative arrest for violating the rules for participating in a rally. She was detained after protests against mobilization that took place in the center of Makhachkala on September 26.

According to her husband, journalist Shura Burtin, and the editor-in-chief of Russian Reporter, Vitaly Leybin, Vishnevetskaya was in Dagestan on assignment for the publications Reporter and Radio Liberty and was reporting on a rural school and a cable car in the mountain village of Sogratl, Leybin said. Returning to Makhachkala, she saw protests in the city center and came to them with the intention of filming a report. However, the rally was already coming to an end, so she went to a cafe, where she was then detained.

The journalist spent the night in the police station with those detained during the riots, after which she was arrested, although other journalists detained at the protest were released. Vishnevetskaya was taken to the police station in the village of Karabudakhkent, an hour's drive from Makhachkala, but later the police said that she was not there and that she was sent back to Makhachkala. The lawyer and journalists were unable to contact Vishnevetskaya for 24 hours.

As the publication Chernovik writes , in reality she was in the temporary detention facility of the Karabudakhkent OVD the whole time. The police said that she was not in the OVD in order to prevent her defense from being allowed to see her, journalists explain. "She is fine, they are feeding her, she will stay here until October 1," members of the Public Monitoring Commission of Dagestan told Chernovik.

• Protests against the mobilization took place in Makhachkala on September 25 and 26. About 120 people were detained. Most of them were issued reports on participation in an unauthorized rally. Eight criminal cases were also opened under the article on attacks on police officers and two cases under the article on calls for extremism. The head of Dagestan, Sergei Melikov, said on September 26 that "the actions were prepared and were controlled, including from abroad."