Press Release, 8.08.2025

Photo: Lev Shlosberg in court / Photo by the regional branch of the party

On 7 August, the 38th magistrate’s court in Pskov held another, already eighth hearing on the criminal case against Yabloko Deputy Chairman Lev Shlosberg for allegedly evading “fulfilment of foreign agent obligations”. The investigation believes that the politician posted several videos on his VKontakte page, which he administers, without the so-called “foreign agent” label.

At the previous hearing, specialist from the Main Internal Affairs Directorate of Russia for Pskov Region, computer technology expert Alexei Maksimov could not answer most of the defence’s questions, and called to “trust the investigation”, as well as redirected the defence’s questions to “comrades from VKontakte”.

Lev Shlosberg’s defender Vitaly Isakov stated in court that specialist Maksimov showed himself to be incompetent, therefore the defence prepared a motion to send a judicial request to VKontakte’s administration.

Vitaly Isakov also examined the URL links mentioned both in the case materials and in the indictment, and discovered that the links allegedly from Lev Shlosberg’s page open links to pages of another user who is not mentioned in the case, whilst publications in the Grazhdanin TV community (where Lev Shlosberg spoke and held interviews with different speakers) are located at different links from those indicated in the case materials. Furthermore, links in screenshots in the investigator’s inspection protocols are absent in principle. Thus, there is not a single reliable link in the case materials.

Vitaly Isakov asked the court to conduct an investigative experiment by opening all five links on the Grazhdanin TV channel and five links on Lev Shlosberg’s page that had been repeatedly mentioned in the case. The lawyer stated that it was wrong to consider a case concerning actions in the Internet by flipping through paper sheets, and called on the court to use the Internet on court equipment. The prosecutor objected to conducting the investigative experiment, as she believed there were “no grounds to distrust the investigation” and “no need” to double-check the case materials.

The Judge refused to conduct the investigative experiment because, in her words, “much time had passed since the investigative actions”, “access by third parties to video recordings” could not be ruled out, therefore the result “could be unreliable”.

Lawyer Vladimir Danilov provided the court with a response he received from the VKontakte company which refuted one of specialist Alexei Maksimov’s key arguments, on which the entire accusation was essentially built.

Lev Shlosberg’s defender Vitaly Isakov filed a motion for the court to send an additional request to VKontakte and proposed six questions that need to be answered for the court to make a lawful and well-founded decision.

The prosecutor initially objected to granting the motion, but then asked the court for a recess to formulate her own versions of questions – in case the court granted the defender’s motion. The court granted the prosecutor an hour’s recess, after which she read out three questions, two of which repeated questions proposed by Vitaly Isakov. After debate by the parties, the court granted the defender’s motion, and removed one question whose answer from VKontakte had already been received, and added the prosecutor’s questions.

Lev Shlosberg will give his testimony after all evidence is presented. The hearing is postponed until 17 September.

It should be noted that on 1 October 2024, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Lev Shlosberg under the article about allegedly evading fulfilment of “foreign agent” obligations (Article 330.1, Part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Lev Shlosberg does not admit his guilt.

Since 11 June, the politician has been under house arrest on another criminal case – for repeated “discrediting of the army” due to publication on the Odnoklassniki social media of a recording of his debates with historian Yury Pivovarov, in which Lev Shlosberg defended the position of the need of an immediate ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. On 6 August, the court extended the politician’s house arrest until 8 October. Investigative actions on this case continue.