Translated material
The right to the truth. New accused under the article on "fakes"
35-year-old Vsevolod Korolev is one of the eight Petersburgers who are persecuted under the article on Fakes about the Russian army. In early July last year, a search was held at his house, and on July 13 the queen was placed in a pre -trial detention center. During the interrogation in court, one of the witnesses in his case changed the testimony, and the other two do not really remember anything about the events described in the case.
Vsevolod Korolev was accused of "fakes" about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. According to investigators, he published two posts on the VKontakte social network with supposedly inaccurate information about the actions of the Russian army in Buch, Borodyanka and Donetsk.
Subscribe to Instagram and telegram North. Real. There we publish content that is not on the site!Vsevolod graduated with honors from the Faculty of Philosophy (RHGA) of the Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy. He worked as a discourse magazine, wrote poetry, was a volunteer in one of the St. Petersburg psychoneurological boarding schools, and shortly before the arrest, Korolev began to engage in documentary and released films in support of Maria Ponomarenko and Sasha Skochilenko arrested for the "fakes".
Sasha Skochilenko is an artist, a musician and a former employee of the Petersburg publication "Paper". She is accused of "fakes" about the Russian army due to the fact that she replaced the price tags in the Perekrestok supermarket with leaflets describing the actions of the Russian military in Mariupol. Korolev shot the film "Sasha, you and I" on Somatic Fest "Love is stronger than war and death", which took place in support of Skochilenko.
While in the pre -trial detention center, Vsevolod Korolev told the North correspondent. Reali about why he could not be silent about the war and why it was so important for him to make a film about the pursued for "fakes".
- When I heard about a party in her (arrested Sasha Skochilenko. - SR) support, I immediately knew that I would go to her. Well, then why not shoot? These are films about what you just want to live, ”Korolev explains in a letter to the correspondent of the North. Realiy. - We volunteer, we go to the courts to friends, acquaintances, and sometimes strangers, who are accused of incomprehensible what. And sometimes we just dance so as not to go crazy with pain. It was important for me to show my world in the films, and I think I succeeded. At some point, part of my world became Sasha, with whom I personally do not know.
- Why did you talk about the war in social networks, despite the risks of criminal and administrative persecution?
- People have the right to know the truth. It’s more important for me not to speak out even, but it is important that they hear me. Information is what people make decisions on the basis of. The properties of the system, built by Putin, initially, were to cut off any information incompatible in relation to people with power. If, as an analogy, the state as an organism is considered, then criticism on the part of society plays the role of the immune system. A permanent violation of the principle of equality before the law (as in Orwell: everyone is equal, but some more equal to others) paralyzes the work of law enforcement agencies, redirecting their productive energy with monitoring compliance with the law to serve the interests of the ruling group. As a result of this, part of their real work was replaced by an imitation related to the persecution of those who continued to fulfill their civic duty. Replacing real signals with convenient signals led to the immersion of the system into the clouds of the imaginary: on the basis of all less relevant information, more and more global decisions were made, which led to the crisis. In particular, the invasion of Ukraine was planned on the basis of the information that arranged the Kremlin and was not a sharp contradiction with the reality of both Ukraine and Russia and the world. I return to the question: many of those who watch TV and trust what they say there, gathered for war. And I'm sure that they are mistaken on TV. Moreover, they do this aggressively, because another opinion in relation to what was happening has long been supplanted from the GOSTELEKANALS. The absence of a full -fledged other subject of dialogue deprives the possibility of adjusting judgments. Initially, "both the sea and Homer - everything moves love" (a line from the poem by Osip Mandelstam "Insomnia. Homer. Turn sails ..." - cf ) - but love, not in itself, turns into its opposite. This is the logic of aggression: anger comes from the fact that both the world and the object of love are not what should be. It is necessary to stop this wave of hatred - first of all in itself, because it leads to nowhere.
- You do not regret that you have not left Russia after the outbreak of war?
“I know for sure that if I left then, then Koril would have been unhappy from what I did not do everything that I could.” At the same time, I have no questions or insults to those who left - a person has the right to be happy. I'm just like that. Now I would think [about leaving], because in the bad minutes it seems that what I do is generally nobody. I have a favorite concert of Yegor Letov in Murmansk, where he quotes a Chinese proverb: "You can bring a horse to a watering, but you can not make it drink." But if you answer the question, then - no, I do not regret.
- You have been in the Kresta pre -trial detention center for several months. In your opinion, can an insulator or prison fix a person?
- A lot of young people who did not have happiness in their lives come here in the “Crosses”. Sometimes a prison could help them, but provided that it would really become a place of re -education. Instead, Wagner travels through prisons (the private military company Wagner, founded by businessman Evgeny Prigozhin, recruits prisoners from June 2022 to participate in the war in Ukraine, where they then die massively. - SR) and offers to escape from responsibility for war. I believe that it is mean and immoral.
- What do you personally lack in the pre -trial detention center?
- First of all, staff. Structurally there are absolutely the same problems as in boarding schools - no wonder Hoffman (the study of the sociologist Erwin Hoffman about how the identity of people who find themselves in closed institutions. - SR) wrote about total institutions. The “Crosses” at the moment is the largest prison in Europe, and this is at a time when it is absolutely clear that their disagreement is necessary for the normal functioning of the institution. And what to talk about, if there are five thousand people, and there are three dentists, and the corps (the position of employees of the FSIN in the isolator. - SR) on the floor is three times less than it should be - they simply do not physically have time. Therefore, purely humanly, I have no complaints about employees, but in fact everything happens very slowly. Difficulties at every step: to transfer the medicine, get to the doctor. Yes, even on an aluminum spoon, you need to write a statement! They didn’t give me anymore, but otherwise everything is fine.
- What is the worst thing you observe with the outbreak of war?
- Tolstoy has a very accurate observation of how people change in the “war and the world”. It’s scary to hear what people say to other people, how they are ready to do with them. This is an abyss from which it is very difficult to get out.
- What sentence do you expect?
- I hope that he will be legal and fair.
The Korolev case is already being considered essentially in the court of St. Petersburg. Indications against the accused gave three witnesses. One of them is Vasily Marchuk -an employee of the Center for the "E" of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg (management, which is responsible for the work on "extremist" articles.-SR ). It was Marchuk who discovered the queen of the post that formed the basis of the prosecution in VKontakte.
At the trial, Marchuk could not recall the questions that he posed before the expertise by experts, nor the content of Korolev’s posts, nor when he conducted the interrogation of two other witnesses in the case.
It turned out that in the protocols of the inspection of the page, Korolev Marchuk, in violation of the established order, did not record many of his actions committed during the inspection. The policeman could not explain why he did not make the relevant entries in the protocol. There are other inconsistencies: screenshots attached to the inspection act and allegedly made during the drawing up of the inspection act were made at another time, which was recorded on the screenshots themselves. According to data from the inspection act, it was carried out from a stationary computer, while screenshots were made from a mobile phone. The policeman could not give explanations to all these inconsistencies.
In addition to Marschuk, two more witnesses were interrogated in court: the inhabitants of St. Petersburg Mikhail Baranov and Vladimir Shatokhin , whose testimonies are almost word duplicated by each other.
- Earlier, the court's attention was drawn to the literal repetition of the testimony of witnesses of Shatokhin and Baranov, which is impossible, given that they are not familiar, have a significant difference in age, while the rams in court denied their testimony, given during the preliminary investigation. All this gives reason to believe that the testimony of the witness is unreliable, ”says Queen's lawyer Maria Zyryanova .
Initially, during interrogation, the investigator and sheep, and Shatokhin said that they themselves turned to the police because of the Korolev VKontakte posts. But at the trial, Baranov changed his testimony and stated that he did not go anywhere on his own. And the police demanded that Baranov to come to the police department. And before that, they came to the witness Baranov home-because of the baranov bay, which he left under one of the register of the queen.
- After putting on the Like on the VKontakte network, law enforcement agencies came to my house. They showed all these notes that my like is standing. They said that it was necessary to come to the investigator. This is the appeal. And so - go to the department to pass a person - I would not do this. That is, this was not the case, ”Baranov explained during one of the court hearings.
Shatokhin during the interrogation in court did not recall that it was he who asked to check the police in his statement, also did not name a single name or name of the employees who accepted the statement against Korolev. To the lawyer’s question, “whether the investigator helped him formulate the answers“ Shatokhin at first answered negatively, but after that he added that his usual speech was still translated into a “state-owned tongue”.
In the case there is no photocopy of Passport Shatokhin, as well as in the protocol of interrogation of the witness, another date of birth, which gives the lawyer Maria Zyryanova to believe that the full namesake of the real witness of the prosecution was present at the hearing.
- In the case file there are two different dates of the birth of Shatokhin, not one of them coincides with the one he called in court. There are other significant contradictions on the personality of the witness between the data from the case file and the fact that Shatokhin indicated in court. A copy of the passport is not applied to the interrogation protocol. Given the available inconsistencies, there is reason to believe that the person interrogated in court is the full namesake of the witness who was interrogated at the stage of the preliminary investigation. Between the testimonies in the case and the testimony that Shatokhin gave in court, there are also many inconsistencies (marital status, the name of the wife, the name of the VKontakte page, the chronology of events, and the events themselves). At the same time, the court did not announce the protocol of interrogation submitted by the charge as evidence of guilt, did not bring the protocol to Shatokhin to make sure that this was his signature, ”Zyryanova comments.
In March 2022, a few days after the start of Russia's military invasion of Ukraine, the State Duma adopted in a short time the bills on fakes on the army, according to which for the dissemination of inaccurate information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, can threaten up to 15 years in prison. Most of the criminal cases under this article were instituted due to records on social networks or messages in messengers.
With the adoption of the bill on fakes in Russia, 187 criminal cases were instituted, 149 people are held on them. There were several episodes against some Russians at once.
In July last year in Moscow, the court issued the first real term under the article on Fakes about the army. The municipal deputy Alexei Gorinov was given six years and 11 months of the colony for the performance at a meeting of the Council of Deputies. So far, the municipal deputy Ilya Yashin and the author of the telegram channel "Protest MSU" Dmitry Ivanov-they gave them eight and a half years of the colony received the largest time.