A resident of the Oryol region was sent to compulsory treatment for arson

Mikhail Davydov, a resident of the Oryol Region, arrested for attempting to set fire to an administrative building, was sent to a psychiatric clinic for compulsory treatment, the OVD-Info human rights project reports.

The incident, in connection with which Davydov was arrested, occurred in August 2022. A man riding a bicycle past the government building of the Oryol Region threw two bottles of incendiary mixture at him. The fire was quickly extinguished.

Davydov was detained a week later. First, he was charged with attempted murder committed in a dangerous manner. Later, the charge was changed to an article about a terrorist attack. Davydov was placed in a pre-trial detention center, and from there, having declared him insane, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital.

• 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 in many regions of Russia began to set fire to military enlistment offices, police departments and city administration buildings. At the moment, several hundred such incidents 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. Now dozens of citizens have been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.