A resident of Perm was sentenced to 11 years in prison for arson of a military enlistment office

In Yekaterinburg, a military court sentenced Perm resident Mikhail Sokolov to 11 years in prison in connection with the arson of the military enlistment office, Mediazona reports with a link to the website Properm.ru and a card on the court’s website.

According to the investigative documents, Sokolov was charged with a terrorist attack, participation in a terrorist community and treason, while his case was considered in court in one day. According to Properm.ru, this is due to the fact that the defendant fully admitted his guilt, and at the stage of the investigation he cooperated with law enforcement agencies.

It became known about the detention of Mikhail Sokolov last December. His acquaintance Aleksey Hashev was detained together with him. The FSB then reported that the men “at the behest of the SBU carried out preparations for terrorist attacks and sabotage” in Perm, and also helped the Ukrainian special services with “destabilization of the socio-political situation in the region.” Later, the detainees were blamed for the arson of the military enlistment office in the Kirovsky district of Perm, which occurred on June 24, 2022. Then unknown persons threw several bottles with incendiary mixture into one of the windows of the building. In the end, the building did not catch fire, and none of the employees of the military enlistment office was also injured.

The court will consider the case against Hashev separately.

• After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and especially after the announcement by Vladimir Putin of the so-called “partial mobilization”, opponents of the war throughout Russia began to set fire to military enlistment offices, police departments and city administration buildings. Currently, almost a hundred such cases are known. At the same time, no one was injured as a result of the arson.
• At first, criminal cases of arson were considered under the articles of damage to someone else’s property or hooliganism. Later, the General Staff of Russia announced that such cases would be considered acts of terrorism and would be punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The first sentence, in which the arson of the military enlistment office was qualified as a terrorist act, was handed down at the end of January 2023.