In the center of St. Petersburg, a request was made to set fire to the military enlistment office

In the center of St. Petersburg on Monday evening, a local resident tried to set fire to the military enlistment office. The administration of the Central district confirmed that the intruder, whose name has not been released, set fire to the door of the building on Tchaikovsky Street, and after that asked to ram the entrance gate with his car. He was detained, the fire on the square of one square meter was extinguished.

The scene of the incident is cordoned off, the police are working there.

The publication “Fontanka” reports that the detainee is a man born in 1969. According to “Fontanka”, about two weeks ago, the suspect allegedly received calls on his mobile phone, as well as on WhatsApp, from a person who introduced himself as “FSB employee Kolesnikov”. He proposed to arrange a provocation – pour gasoline on the door of the military enlistment office and set it on fire. The subscriber allegedly needed to receive some documents from the military enlistment office related to Ukraine.

• 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, more than a 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.