Press Release, 29.05.2020

Detention of Kirill Gontcharov. Photo by Novaya Gazeta

Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov sent an official appeal to the heads of the Moscow and the St. Petersburg departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs with a demand to release the detained participants of one-person picketing and stop the detentions.

“Exiting the isolation regime, accompanied by the resumption of construction projects and permission of walks, clearly indicates that a one-person picket does not threaten the health of citizens,” Rybakov noted in his statement.

The party Chairman also demands that police heads “ensure the constitutional right to freedom of expression”. According to the Supreme Court, a one-person picket does not represent a mass event that are prohibited during quarantine.

One-person pickets in support of the Novaya Gazeta journalist Ilya Azar, arrested for 15 days, continued in Moscow and St. Petersburg today.

Among those detained by the office of the Moscow Interior at Petrovka 38 in Moscow there are seven members of the Yabloko party: Sergei Mitrokhin, Moscow City Duma deputy, Andrei Morev, head of the Yakimanka municipal district and Deputy Chair of the Moscow branch of Yabloko, Kirill Goncharov, another Deputy Chair of the Moscow branch of Yabloko and Yabloko Bureau member, Yelena Rusakova, head of the Gagarinsky municipal district, Yelena Filina, municipal deputy of the district Vernadsky Prospekt, and activist Vladislav Neymark.

In St.Petersburg, police detained Dmitry Anisimov, Chairman of the Vasileostrovsky local branch of Yabloko, and Nikita Chirkov, an activist of Youth Yabloko, during an action near Gostiny Dvor.

At present (at 17.00 MSK), all the detainees, except for Sergei Mitrokhin, are in police stations. Sergei Mitrokhin was released from the Tverskoye police station. He has to stand before court for his one-person picket on June 15.