Police Warrant Officer Boyko, better known as the “pearl” warrant officer, was struck on the head by an unknown assailant. As AZhUR learned, information came in the day before that on the 15th, at around 11 p.m., an unknown attacker approached Vadim Boyko, a police officer from Battalion No. 2 of the Patrol and Guard Service regiment of the Main Internal Affairs Directorate, from behind near 8/1 Chudnovsky Street, placed a hand on his shoulder, and, saying, “Here you go, ‘pearl’ warrant officer,” hit him in the left side of the head with an unidentified object. Boyko was hospitalized in satisfactory condition with a traumatic brain injury and concussion. ////////// It certainly looks like a self-inflicted setup. And if it wasn’t, then the police and the prosecutor’s office are to blame. All the evidence is there; six witnesses were found through my LiveJournal alone. There is video footage. The elements of the crime are obvious. The case should have been sent to court long ago, but no—they’ll keep feeding the whole country nonsense until another vigilante appears. If the judicial and law enforcement system is not merely stalling but actively covering for a criminal, then this is exactly the kind of outcome to expect. An appeal to Petersburgers (residents of St. Petersburg): My friends, hold off for now. Don’t beat up the warrant officer; let’s try to hold him accountable through the proper legal process. That will only make things worse—people will start feeling sorry for him now. Update. Via a link from smolyak Well, well! Only now has it come to light that this very warrant officer detained my St. Petersburg friend Sergei Gulyaev and was even mentioned in Gulyaev’s memoirs. Read it—it’s interesting: “The second witness—Boyko, Vadim Vadimych—did not appear in court. He’s on vacation. In the Kingdom of Thailand. I told the judge, incidentally, that I was prepared to wait for his return in order to clarify all the details of my detention. The thing is, I wasn’t actually detained by Sharapov and Boyko at all; they were sitting in the bus. But the judge clearly had no need for another bogus witness whose testimony would not fit the logic of the verdict. Let Boyko go relax in the Canaries—but Gulyaev has been ordered off to prison. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Boyko’s trip was paid for by his superiors, just to keep him from showing up in court. The OMON (Russian riot police) warrant officer turned out to be far too talkative. When I was taken from the picket on February 2 (in defense of Russian officers who had fought in Chechnya, were later accused of murder, acquitted twice by a jury, and then sentenced by a third court to 15 and 17 years), Boyko, once he learned why we had been detained, opened up: ‘So what did you expect—that 30 people would be noticed and heard? Our state is a whore state, it sells everyone and everything, and it is served by nothing but whores. I’m the same kind of whore. We’re all whores.’” .... “All in all, Warrant Officer Boyko agreed that the country is a mess, that we have already lost Chechnya, that the blood of thousands of our soldiers and officers was spilled in vain—we established no constitutional order there, while all the bandits and killers of our soldiers became employees of Chechnya’s Interior Ministry, Kadyrov’s special forces, and instead of Russian Federation law, blood-feud rules, sharia, and inter-clan, inter-teip (Chechen clan) arrangements still hold sway there.” “And yet Boyko, together with Sharapov, filed false reports against all of us, dictated by someone else—with mistakes in every line. Andrei Dmitriev, the leader of St. Petersburg’s National Bolsheviks and co-chair of The Other Russia, and I were slapped with a charge under Article 19.3 of the Administrative Code—‘resisting the police’—which, in practice, carries up to 15 days in detention. And their hands didn’t tremble; they signed them all the same. One revealing typo in one of those reports read: held a banner saying ‘Russians don’t abandon their own. (They hand them over).’ They were in a hurry. All day on February 2, Warrant Officer Boyko kept lamenting that all his comrades were already drinking beer while he was stuck here writing a pile of reports: ‘How the hell did I, an idiot, end up on this bus?’” ///////////////