Local thugs hired by Moscow, accompanied by police and several LifeNews cameras, approach the opposition campaign headquarters, start causing a scene, and throw eggs. When a camera is shoved into one opposition activist’s face, another shields him with his hand.
It sounds like a completely routine episode, but the Kremlin has to fabricate criminal cases out of something, doesn’t it? It was literally from exactly what is described in the first paragraph that the “microphone case” against Leonid Volkov was born.
Early this morning, he was convicted. A fine—which, in today’s Russia, is rightly interpreted as an acquittal.
That means the whole thing completely fell apart. The false complaints by the LifeNews “journalists” that their microphone had been broken (and later they even produced a fake medical note saying there was “a bruise on the hand”) were exposed by a basic forensic examination. There were plenty of witnesses, and video of the incident exists from three different angles.
How can this possibly count as “obstructing a journalist’s work,” especially compared with actual cases of that kind?
Actually acquitting him by saying “not guilty” is impossible, because then they would have to clear his name, reimburse his expenses, apologize, and punish the investigator/prosecutor. And that would also mean openly going against Moscow, which ordered the case to be opened.
So today everyone is congratulating Volkov (here is his post about the verdict). On Facebook, with this Putin-style acquittal. I wrote “congratulations” to him too. But we need to remember the real price Leonid and his family paid for this entirely fabricated case:
- a year under travel restrictions. He could not work normally, live normally, or visit his two children, who live in another city;
- he was not even allowed to go to Yekaterinburg for his own mother’s anniversary celebration;
- over the course of a year, Volkov had to fly from Moscow to Novosibirsk 27 (!!) times and spend more than 1 million rubles on flights and accommodation. Don’t want to fly? You can live in pretrial detention (SIZO) almost for free;
- Volkov had to run around like a madman looking for extra work just to cover all these unexpected expenses—flights, accommodation, and a lawyer;
- the fabricated case made it impossible for him to take part in the election. And he had planned to run in Yekaterinburg, where he was born, raised, and elected to the city council;
- and so on and so forth. I’m not even talking about the stress and the time lost.
And all of this was done not just to a completely innocent person, but to someone whose innocence was obvious to everyone around him—which is very important.
That is the price of victory in a Russian “court” in the 21st century.
Our entire “law enforcement” and “judicial” system is not just rotten, but criminal. It cannot be cured. Random passersby pulled in off the street would make better judges and prosecutors than these people.