Activist Skoryakin, who was deported from Bishkek, was fined 500,000

The court in Moscow fined the Left Bloc activist Lev Skoryakin 500,000 rubles for the “Happy Chkist Day” rally at the FSB building, but exempted him from paying the fine because of the time he spent in a pre-trial detention center. The activist was released into the courtroom. At the same time, the state prosecution asked for five years of imprisonment for him, “OVD-Info” reports with reference to the lawyer Evgenia Grigorieva.

Lev Skoryakin fully agreed with the accusation and refused the right to have the last word. “I admit my guilt, I don’t see the point of testifying,” he said, Nastoyashe Vremya reports.

Skoryakin and his partner in the “Left Bloc” Ruslan Abasov held the “Happy ChKist Day” campaign in December 2021: the activists went to the FSB building in Moscow with a poster and flares. They were accused of hooliganism, and Abasov was also charged with vandalism.

Initially, the activists were placed in a pre-trial detention center, but later the measure of restraint was changed to a ban on certain actions. In July 2022, Skoryakin and Abasov left Russia. However, on the night of October 16 to 17, 2023, Skoryakin was detained in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, taken to Russia and placed in the Butyrka detention center-2 in Moscow.

Skoryakin later told the lawyer that he was detained in Bishkek by employees of the State Committee for National Security of Kyrgyzstan, who brought him to the airport, where two employees of the line department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Taganskaya metro station were located. [этот отдел разыскивал Скорякина] and three FSB employees. “He was brought to the airport in handcuffs, he didn’t want to go, he refused, but they took him through the terminals, and the handcuffs were removed only on the plane,” lawyer Evgenia Grigorieva relayed the story of the activist.

The activist was brought to Domodedovo airport on October 18. Skoryakin stated that there he was placed in a “room without windows and cameras”, where three FSB officers beat him with their fists. “They beat him so that there were no traces left. They even admitted him to the pre-trial detention center when they admitted him, they examined him, and he has no injuries. They beat him very professionally. They didn’t beat him badly,” she said. According to him, they demanded that he tell “why he ran away”, how he left and who helped him. The fact that he was beaten was confirmed by Skoryakin today after his release, in a video published by the publication “Sota”.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of Kyrgyzstan previously refused to extradite Skoryakin to Russia, as he requested asylum in the country. According to “Memorial”, the activist planned to leave Kyrgyzstan for Germany: he received a German humanitarian visa and a foreigner’s passport on October 16, but did not have time to fly. On the day of the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Kyrgyzstan, his internal Russian passport was confiscated, without which he could not leave the country.