I honestly waited the five days required by law, and even longer. The verdict still hasn’t appeared. I can’t say my situation is entirely unique: I’m simply being kept under arrest without any paperwork at all, not even the operative part of the verdict, while my brother Oleg is actually sitting in a cell. Under normal circumstances, no pre-trial detention center (SIZO, Russia’s remand prison system) would accept a person without a copy of the verdict in hand—that is out of the question.
As you may recall, the reading of the verdict was unlawfully moved from January 15 to December 30 on the pretext that “the verdict was already ready.” In other words, the 139 volumes of the criminal case and the testimony of dozens of witnesses were supposedly carefully reviewed by Judge Korobchenko in 6 days.
Even so, on the 30th the verdict was read out for exactly 7 minutes: “find them guilty and give them so many years and such-and-such a fine,” without even handing over the part that had just been announced, saying it was “not ready yet.”
So there is nothing to say about the full text.
Everyone keeps asking me: have you filed an appeal yet? When is the appeal? There is no appeal yet, and there cannot be one—the text of the verdict does not exist, so there is nothing to appeal. That’s the kind of brilliant move you get from Putin’s “justice.”
It’s silly to boast about this, but I am the only person in the history of Russian courts to remain under house arrest after a verdict has been issued. Article 107 of the Criminal Procedure Code clearly states that this preventive measure applies only to suspects and defendants.
Article 311 of the Criminal Procedure Code clearly states that a defendant must be released immediately in the courtroom in the event of “a guilty verdict imposing a punishment not involving imprisonment, or a suspended prison sentence.” And my house arrest is a form of deprivation of liberty.
In fact, the Zamoskvoretsky District Court itself acknowledged that house arrest after a verdict is impossible, when it returned the Federal Penitentiary Service’s complaint against me.
The police who stop me on the street or stand outside my door do not really understand what they are doing either. They draw up no detention reports, and no search/seizure reports either (when they try to take my phone). All I hear is the same thing: Alexei Anatolyevich, you understand everything.
Yes, I understand everything, and now that the deadline for receiving the text of the verdict has expired, I will act strictly in accordance with the law, in keeping with my highly developed legal consciousness.
I refuse to comply with the terms of my unlawful house arrest.
I am not planning to go anywhere; my travel needs are limited to trips from home to the office and back, and spending my free time with my family.
I am fully aware (*Alexei Anatolyevich, you understand everything*) that for the Kremlin riffraff, cooking up a new charge against me (organizing snow traffic jams in Moscow, for example) and slapping me with a new house arrest order in a new case would be effortless—an investigator could come galloping over within the hour—but we’ll deal with problems as they arise.