Press Release, May 28, 2013

Vladimir Kimayev

Police is searching the apartment and country cottage of Vladimir Kimayev, leader of the Sochi branch of YABLOKO. According to Kimayev, his son called him about an hour ago and said that police came to their apartment in the Maliy Akhun district, Sochi, and demanded to let them into the apartment for searching for “prohibited articles”.

At the same time another group of policemen arrived to Kimayev’s country cottage for a search.

Kimayev connected the searches with his political activity. He was one of the leaders of public protests against the construction of a thermal power plant in Kudepsta, Sochi. On May 26 the Russian Energy Ministry took a decision to exclude the thermal power plant in Kudepsta from the Olympic Facilities Construction Programme.

YABLOKO leader Sergei Mitrokhin also connected the searches with Kimayev’s victory in protection of Sochi residents from the construction of this environmentally unfriendly plant. “Most likely it was a revenge from the officials from Governor Tkachyov’s Administration and the businessmen who lobbied for this project. They have been trying to square accounts with him,” Sergei Mitrokhin said.

Mitrokhin also refuted all the accusations against Vladimir Kimayev and said they were farfetched and  fabricated.

“We know that there is no justice in the Krasnodar region. The story with Kimayev represents the same political reprisals as persecution of our activist Suren Gazaryan and human rights activist Mikhail Savva,” said the leader of YABLOKO.

We are going to protect our activist,” he added.

It is not for the first time when searches in YABLOKO activists’ apartments have taken place in the North Caucasus.

In April the Federal Security Service Department in the Stavropol Region searched the apartment of an elderly mother of YABLOKO’s municipal deputy Nikolaiy Kartsev. The deputy’s son was checked for possible complicity in a criminal group’s activity organizing a channel for illegal arms supplies to the Stavropol Territory from the Chechen Republic. YABLOKO connected the searches with the fact that it was Kartsev who had been seeking a dismissal of some representatives of the law enforcement agencies in the region and won.

In late April the North Caucasus Department of the Russian Ministry of Interior searched the apartment of Anatoly Sidakov, leader of YABLOKO’s branch in the North Ossetia. The police was looking for arms and ammunition in his apartment. The search took place three days after the court ruled out that the refusal of the South Ossetian Ministry of Justice to register the YABLOKO branch in the republic had been unlawful.