Administrator of the Moscow Calling telegram channel Andrey Kurshin has had his house arrest extended for six months in the case of military “fakes”

Judge Veretennikov of the Cheremushkinsky District Court extended until December 3 the house arrest of the administrator of the Moscow Calling telegram channel Andrey Kurshin in the case of “fake news” about the army (clause “e” of Part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom.

Prosecutor Shindyakina applied for an extension of the preventive measure. Kurshin told reporters before the meeting that he expected to be released from house arrest. He and his lawyer Sergei Balashov asked to change the preventive measure to a ban on certain actions.

Kurshin asked the court to “meet his law-abiding behavior.” He said that no new case materials will appear, all the evidence has been collected, which means there is no reason to keep him under house arrest. Kurshin also said that the technical means of his control “break down once every week or two,” and FSIN employees are forced to regularly come to his home to solve this problem. Kurshin asked the court to release him under a ban on certain actions with a ban on accessing the Internet so that he would not be able to carry out criminal activities, “if such a desire arises, although it will not arise.”

Lawyer Balashov separately noted that one of the prosecution witnesses gave a positive description of Kurshin’s personality, and the four others live outside of Moscow, and if certain actions are prohibited, Kurshin will not be able to put pressure on them. He also drew the court’s attention to the fact that on the day the preventive measure was chosen, the case file did not yet contain a reference from Kurshin’s place of work at the Rif defense enterprise, according to which, after he was placed under house arrest, work at one of the sites was forced to be suspended.

The court will begin considering the case on the merits on July 11.

Kurshin’s arrest became known on August 31. The SHOT Telegram channel published a video in which people in civilian clothes approach Kurshin at the station and take him away somewhere. Later it became known that he signed a confession.

On September 1, Kurshin was placed under house arrest. The reason for the criminal prosecution was two publications in the telegram channel dated September 14 and November 23, 2022.

The first post talks about the attack on Krivoy Rog, as a result of which the local population had problems with water supply. “This strike, without a doubt, is a war crime of the Russian Armed Forces,” the publication says. The second post reports an attack on the maternity ward of the Central Regional Clinical Hospital of the Volnyansky district of the Zaporozhye region.

At the time of Kurshin’s arrest, more than 87 thousand people were subscribed to the Moscow calling telegram channel, now there are about 56 thousand.

Since 2014, 35-year-old Kurshin fought for several years on the side of the self-proclaimed DPR and led a platoon in a motorized rifle regiment, because of this he ended up in the “Peacemaker” base. Soon Kurshin began to write more moderate posts, and also began to ridicule individual Russian radical supporters of the war and major ones .