In Krasnodar, this morning, lawyer and Golos coordinator David Kankiya was detained. This evening, David was supposed to give a lecture on election monitoring at our Krasnodar headquarters.
In the morning, police officers grabbed him right outside his apartment building and demanded that he go with them to the police station. Once there, they drew up a report under Article 19.3, allegedly for “disobeying police officers,” and arrested him; he will now be put on trial.
Why is this happening, and why specifically in Krasnodar? The answer is simple: Krasnodar Krai is the third-largest federal subject of Russia by number of voters, and the worst for falsifying turnout.
That’s right: in percentage terms, the numbers are inflated even more in Mordovia and Chechnya, but those regions are relatively small in population and do not make much difference overall. And when the goal is to artificially boost voter turnout specifically, it cannot be done without populous Krasnodar Krai—this is where millions of supposedly participating voters can be added at once.
All of this is well known to experienced members of the election-monitoring community—and to us as well. That is why we plan to pay special attention to organizing turnout monitoring in Krasnodar Krai, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, and the Kemerovo and Saratov regions. In each of these places, we have very strong headquarters, and lectures for observers are held almost every day.
That is why the cops were ordered to detain David Kankiya and lock him up under any pretext.
Headquarters will provide David with all necessary legal support, and the election-monitoring lectures will definitely go ahead as scheduled. Sign up and help catch the crooks—the good thing is, they are not even hiding their intentions.
Update.
David Kankiya was given 5 days of administrative arrest.