Lawyer defending Russian political prisoner faces criminal charges for ‘cooperating with a foreign state’

Maria Bontsler, a Russian defence lawyer who was detained in Kaliningrad on Wednesday, faces up to eight years in prison on charges of “cooperating with a foreign state on a confidential basis”, according to the regional Investigative Committee.

The investigation claims that Bontsler handed over “information about the region’s security forces” to the intelligence services “of an unfriendly state” at some point in 2024, offering no further details.

Bontsler has been sent to pretrial detention for two months, human rights NGO First Department reported.

On Wednesday, three Kaliningrad-based defence lawyers were subjected to searches. Security forces searched Bontsler, Roman Morozov, and a third lawyer, who has not yet been named.

Morozov, who was released after the search, had his home searched and his phone and hard drives seized due to his alleged ties to Bontsler, as the investigation described him as her “partner”, the regional liberal Yabloko party, which Morozov is a member of, wrote on Wednesday.

Bontsler and Morozov have a high public profile for defending activist and pensioner Igor Baryshnikov, who was convicted of spreading “false information” about the Russian military in June 2023.

Baryshnikov was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison, despite being in critically poor health. His 96-year-old mother, a Holocaust survivor whom Baryshnikov took care of, died within two months of his arrest. He was not given permission to attend her funeral.

Bontsler is one of the few lawyers in Kaliningrad willing to defend clients facing politically motivated prosecution. She was fined 60,000 rubles (€850) in June 2022, for spreading “false information” about the military army for two speeches she had made in court in March in which she defended people who had been detained at anti-war rallies and spoke out against Russia’s attack on Ukraine.