The activist was awarded compensation for his arrest after meeting Alexei Navalny at Vnukovo airport

The Tverskoy District Court of Moscow awarded civil activist Konstantin Kotov 20 thousand rubles as compensation for moral damages for detention and administrative arrest after the meeting of politician Alexei Navalny at Vnukovo airport in January 2021. Kotov told OVD-Info about this.

On January 17, 2021, Kotov was detained in Vnukovo, where the plane on which Alexey Navalny was returning to Russia from Germany was supposed to land.

The activist was taken to the police department in the Dorogomilovo district, from where he was later released with an obligation to appear at the airport line department to draw up reports of disobedience to the legal demands of police officers (Part 1 of Article 19.3 of the Administrative Code). The protocol against Kotov was drawn up on January 22 in his absence. On January 27, he was detained again and the next day taken to the Solntsevsky District Court of Moscow, where he was sentenced to five days of administrative arrest.

On October 13, 2021, the Moscow City Court overturned the ruling of the court of first instance and dismissed the case against Kotov due to the expiration of the time limit for bringing to justice.

• Konstantin Kotov is a civil activist, a regular participant in peaceful protests. In 2019, he was sentenced to four years in prison under the “Dada” article on repeated violations at public events (Article 212.1 of the Criminal Code), later the sentence was reduced to one and a half years.
• On January 11, 2021, the Federal Penitentiary Service demanded that Navalny’s suspended sentence assigned in the Yves Rocher case be replaced with a real one. The next day, the politician announced that on January 17 he would return to Russia from Germany, where he was undergoing a long course of treatment and rehabilitation after alleged poisoning with a substance from the Novichok group. About two thousand people came to meet him at Vnukovo airport. That day, 63 people, as well as the politician himself, were detained in Vnukovo and Sheremetyevo, where Navalny’s flight was eventually redirected. The very next day the court sent the oppositionist into custody.