Press Release, 1.03.2022

Over the past three days, police have detained at least 19 Yabloko members in Moscow, the Chelyabinsk, the Sverdlovsk, the Saratov and the Samara regions and the Republic of Bashkortostan for their anti-war stance, including Chairpersons of the Bashkirian and Samara regional branches of Yabloko Kristina Abramicheva and Anton Rubin, and Yabloko Press Secretary Igor Yakovlev with his wife.

Photo: Igor Yakovlev, Yabloko Press Secretary, with other detainees in the police wagon. / Photo from social networks

On 27 February, Yabloko activists from Ufa, Samara and Moscow were detained and taken to police stations to give explanations.

Kristina Abramicheva, Chairperson of the Bashkirian regional branch of the Yabloko party, said that she and five Yabloko members had been detained during their single pickets (such pickets do not require any permission from the authorities) in Ufa. Police took the protesters to police stations, took explanations from them and issued them official warnings of liability.

In Samara, Anton Rubin, Chairman of the regional branch of Yabloko, worked as a media representative at a March in Memory of Boris Nemtsov and against the war with Ukraine on 27 February. Rubin was broadcasting live on the YouTube channel of the Ekho Moskvi in Samara radio station, and was wearing a yellow vest with the inscription “Press” and had an editorial task in hand as required by the law.

The police snatched the phone out of Rubin’s hands and ripped off his press card. The journalist was pushed into the police wagon. The law enforcement officers ignored Rubin’s demands to contact a lawyer and return his phone or draw up a formal protocol on the detention. Rubin left the police station an hour and a half after the arrest without getting an official protocol on detention or a formal warning.

On 28 February, Igor Yakovlev, Press Secretary of the Yabloko party and Grigory Yavlinsky, was detained along with his wife in the centre of Moscow. They were walking home from the Pushkin Theater after the performance and were detained by the police because of the anti-war badges on their coats. Six hours later, the detainees were released with a protocol of detention in their hands, according to which Yakovlev and his wife were in the crowd and chanted slogans instead of watching the performance which was on. They will appear in court in early March.

The police have been persecuting Yabloko members for anti-war actions across Russia. The following Yabloko members received administrative arrests for participation in anti-war actions: Kirill Goncharov (Moscow, ten days), Nikolai Kavkazsky (Moscow, six days), Yuri Bagrov (St. Petersburg, ten days) and Javid Agayev (Chelyabinsk, fifteen days).