27 July 2019 people went out peacefully without weapons, just to express their disagreement with banning the independent candidates from the elections to the Moscow City Duma. That was used as an excuse for a new round of political repressions and to open a case of "mass riots", 13 people were involved in.
Journalists, witnesses and participants note that the action was performed exclusively peacefully: no property was damaged, no violence was used by the demonstrators. But this didn't stop prosecutors from bringing charges, and judges, rejecting all requests by the defense, to convict - in incredibly short time. Konstantin Kotov (4 years in prison), Ivan Podkopaev (3 years in prison), Pavel Ustinov (3.5 years in prison).
On September 17 and 18, 2019, priests and teachers were indignant by the absurdity of this and they issue public letters in which they expressed their opinion: the case must be stopped, and the innocents must be released. We, IT-specialists, see a request for all professional communities to express their position on this matter, and we also cannot remain silent.
One of the defendants in the “Moscow affair” is our colleague, Aidar Gubaidulin. Aidar graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and works at Sberbank-Technology. At the same time, our other colleague, programmer Konstantin Kotov, was convicted: he received 4 years in prison for participation in four actions, because, according to the prosecution, he had "a goal of creating a real threat to the human and civil rights protected under the Constitution" .
Those events once again show the diversity of people affected by the political repressions: in 2019 in Russia, anyone can become a defendant in political affairs for anything and for nothing. You can learn more about the participants in the case on the site dedicated to them.
Our only demand is to stop the political persecution of civilians, stop the fabricated criminal cases and release all those involved in the “mass riots“
- Eugene Kovalenko
- Konstantin Kotov
- Alexey Menyailo
- Ivan Podkopaev
- Samariddin Rajabov
- Danil Beglets
- Aidar Gubaidulin
- Kirill Jukov
- Pavel Ustinov
- Nikita Chirtsov
- Eduard Malyshevskiy
- Yegor Zhukov
- Sergey Fomin
We are calling up our colleagues not to stand aside and to support this letter.
You can do this by creating a file with a random name (preferably complex) in the signed folder. Put the following lines in the file (each line is a separate person):
Last Name First Name | Position, company