Situation:
a) you are a repeat offender with multiple prior convictions
b) you prepared a cut piece of metal pipe
c) you lay in wait for your victim late at night by their car
d) you came up from behind and started hitting the person on the head with that metal pipe
e) it was even caught on surveillance camera footage
f) you were caught
Question: what punishment awaits you?
The answer is obvious, even if you’re not a lawyer. Several years in prison. All the evidence is there. Intent. Preparation. Repeat offending. Violence dangerous to life and health, and so on.
There could not possibly be any other outcome.
Now change point “c”:
c) you lay in wait for your victim — the head of Navalny’s Moscow campaign office — late at night by his car
Everything magically changes, doesn’t it?
And today the thug who struck Kolya Lyaskin on the head with a metal pipe received a harsh sentence: 11 months of corrective labor.
Before that, he was under a travel restriction order. In other words, not a single day in custody. Now they’ll just issue him a note saying he was trimming bushes in Zaryadye Park — and that’ll be that.
But now we know exactly what this was:
The security services working against our campaign office hired a criminal to attack Lyaskin.
After the attack, a huge scandal erupts, and ordinary police officers—before they have time to receive additional instructions—quickly find the attacker. Knowing who he was working for, he carried out the crime quite carelessly.
With nowhere to turn, the security services start making up nonsense on the fly, claiming that Lyaskin ordered the attack on himself, simply to create information noise.
Since Lyaskin’s skull was cracked and there had to be at least some formal consequences, the thug was effectively let off the hook by the court’s verdict.
A kind of Russian Watergate.
Still, never mind. The case files, with the names of everyone involved, will survive into the Beautiful Russia of the Future (a slogan used by the Russian opposition). We will abolish the statute of limitations, and it will make for a fine open criminal trial. Everyone will go to prison: from this “judge” to the attacker and the organizers.
That will be very good.