Press Release, 29.09.2019

The Yabloko party supported the rally for the release of political prisoners, which was held in Sakharov Prospect in Moscow today. Grigory Yavlinsky took part in the action, and Maxim Kruglov, head of the Yabloko faction in the Moscow City Duma, addressed the rally from the stage.

Grigory Yavlinsky, Chairman of the Yabloko Federal Political Committee, said that this action is part of an “absolutely fair” campaign against years of election fraud in Russia. According to Yavlinsky, people who participated in the protests this summer were absolutely right. “In the course of these protests, a lot of people were arrested, they were charged with criminal offenses, which actually had not taken place, and many got imprisonment sentences. This is absolute arbitrariness. This is also arbitrary because these people are right – they stand for the Constitution and lawfulness, so that there would be no fraud in the elections,” Yavlinsky said.

Valery Kostenok, member of the Yabloko party and one of the defendants in the “Moscow riots” case who had been finally released, and Maxim Kruglov, head of the party’s faction in the Moscow City Duma, spoke at the rally.

Kruglov said that “the release of political prisoners is now the first and main goal for the Yabloko faction in the Moscow City Duma”.

Maxim Kruglov in his speech said that Yabloko will seek to ensure that Moscow “becomes a city of freedom and creativity, rather than police batons, because none of the Moscow Mayer’s ‘prettifications’ can replace the main thing for us, which Moscow still lacks, and that is why we have gathered here, but it will certainly emerge – the freedom,” Maxim Kruglov said.

Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko’s deputy of the Moscow City Duma, also added that society “must do everything in its power to end this monstrous tradition, when elections results not only in the emergence of new deputies, but also of political prisoners”.