The Ministry of Internal Affairs has put former Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Denis Butsayev on the wanted list. Mediazona found information about this in the department’s database. The wanted card does not specify under which particular article of the Criminal Code a case was opened against the former official. At the end of April it became known that Butsayev “promptly” left Russia. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed the order to dismiss the official on April 22.

The Presnensky District Court of Moscow sentenced Vladimir Smerkis, the former director of the Binance crypto exchange in the CIS, to five years in prison. The capital's prosecutor's office reported this. Smerkis was accused of fraud on an especially large scale (part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code). According to investigators, in the summer of 2024, a blogger approached him with a request to provide advertising services.

A man and a woman were killed when the Russian Shahed drone hit a residential building in Krivoy Rog. This was announced by the head of the Dnepropetrovsk region Alexander Ganzha. Four more people were injured . The head of the Krivoy Rog Defense Council, Alexander Vilkul, clarified that among the wounded was a nine-month-old girl whose leg was torn off. Ganzha also reported four dead and three injured as a result of an airstrike on the Dubovikovskaya community of the Sinelnikovsky district.

The court district of Magistrate No. 374 in Moscow registered three protocols against LGBT activist Sasha Kazantseva, Mediazona noted . The protocols were drawn up under the article on the propaganda of “non-traditional sexual relations” on the Internet among minors (Part 4 of Article 6.21 of the Administrative Code). What exactly was the reason for this is unknown. Sasha Kazantseva is a sex educator, writer, blogger, editor of the international sex research project OMGYES (Kinsey Institute).

The Southern District Military Court is considering the case against Igor Herter, a former firefighter from the city of Langepas in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, accused of intending to surrender to Ukraine after being recruited to the front. Memorial writes about the criminal prosecution of the man.

The Vasileostrovsky District Court of St. Petersburg dismissed the criminal case of the former head of the Vasileostrovsky district, Eduard Ilyin, who went to war in Ukraine. This was reported by the press service of the city courts. The petition was filed by Ilyin’s military unit, citing the fact that he received a state award in the war in Ukraine.

During the war in Ukraine, Maxim Ovchinnikov died, along with his comrade Sergei Yulin, convicted of the murder of Novosibirsk student Kristina Prikhodko. According to Mediazona, the 33-year-old man died in July 2024, but was declared dead in March 2025. Judging by database leaks, two months before his death, Ovchinnikov received a new driver’s license in his native Orenburg.

The independent bookstore “Own Room” in Ulan-Ude announced the closure of the project after five years of work. A post about this was published in the telegram channel “Own Rooms”, “7x7” drew attention to it. The bookstore will officially close at the end of May. As the owner of the project, Elena Kalashnikova, said, there are several reasons for this decision - from material and organizational difficulties to problems associated with tightening legislation and growing censorship in Russia.

Judge Yulia Koval of the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow rejected the claim of journalist Antonina Favorskaya, who complained about the conditions of detention in convoy premises. This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom. “Thank you very much for legalizing torture conditions,” Favorskaya responded.

23-year-old technical school student from Buryatia Valery Averin died in the war in Ukraine three months after being recruited into unmanned troops. His adoptive mother Oksana Afanasyeva told the BBC Russian service about this. Averin, who was in his final year at the Buryat College of Construction and Industrial Technologies in the city of Kyakhta, signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense on January 3.

In the city of Gulkevichi, Krasnodar Territory, a ninth-grader carried a pneumatic weapon into school No. 1 and wounded two students. The governor and the regional prosecutor's office reported this. According to Baza, two of the victims were 15-year-old classmates of the shooter; they were wounded in the temple and stomach.

Two police officers threatened a young man with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and tried to kick him out of a restaurant. This was reported by the boy’s mother, head of the resource center for the development of inclusive education, Tatyana Khizhnyakova.

The Nikulinsky Court of Moscow imposed a fine of 70 thousand rubles on the rapper Ganvest (Ruslan Gominov) under the article on drug propaganda, a Mediazona correspondent reports from the courtroom. The reason for the protocol was the songs “Nicotine” in 2018 and “Mess” in 2021. The first composition contains the verse: You are the queen under the snow And I am a prince without wheels. You're the first one since the summer, And I’m with you from the first doses.

Rosmolodezh announced a tender to create a single resource for communicating with young people and supporting them in solving “life situations”, as well as the “comprehensive moral and spiritual development” of adolescents. Vedomosti reported this with reference to government procurement. The department plans to spend 95.6 million rubles on creating the service.

A 17-year-old teenager from Vladivostok was detained in Kemerovo on charges of preparing to set fire to a diesel locomotive. This was reported by the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Kuzbass department of the FSB. Security forces call the teenager a victim of the actions of scammers.