While looking for an original Telegram post (cited and translated, below) by Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora group of human rights lawyers, I found these more recent entries. The latest (at the bottom of the screenshot, above) informed Chikov’s readers that Agora attorney Leonid Solovyov was on his way to the apartment of activist, artist and Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov, which was being searched by police and security forces for the sixth (!) time in recent weeks. Meanwhile, according to the entry above it, Agora lawyers would be representing three people at three different court hearings today: reporter Mikhail Benyash, convicted and fined for, allegedly, “assaulting a police officer” (Benyash is appealing his conviction); Lyubov Kudryashova, a 55-year-old environmentalist indicted on charges of “inciting terrorism”; and Azat Miftakhov, a young mathematician charged with breaking the window at a United Russia party office in Moscow. It’s all in a day’s work.
Andrey Loshak
Facebook
July 7, 2020
Firs they grabbed the activists, now they’re jailing the journalists. When they come for you, there won’t be anyone to defend you.
Pavel Chikov wrote this on Telegram:
Attacks on the media in the summer of 2020 (disturbing)
1. Pyotr Verzilov, publisher of Mediazona, has home raided by police, is jailed for an administrative offense, and charged with a crime.
2. Svetlahna Prokopyeva, a journalist with Echo of Moscow in Pskov, is convicted of “condoning terrorism.”
3. Ivan Safronov, a former reporter for Kommersant and Vedomosti, is detained on charges of “treason.”
4. Police search the home of Taisiya Bekbulatova, editor-in-chief of Kholod Media.
5. Ilya Azar, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta, is jailed for an administrative offense.
6. Journalists (including Tatyana Felgengauer, Alexander Plyushchev, Sergei Smirnov, Anna Zibrova, Alexander Chernykh, Olga Churakova, Elena Chernenko, Kira Dyuryagina, and Nikita Gorin) detained for holding solo pickets in solidarity with Azar.
7. Management at the [liberal business] newspaper Vedomosti is reshuffled.
8. Policemen assault David Frenkel, a correspondent for Mediazona.
Thanks to Anna Tereshkina for the link. Translated by the Russian Reader
The Russian Reader 