Press Release, 12.08.2019

The Moscow Basmanny Court sent Valery Kostenok to a pre-trial detention centre for two months, despite the fact that the public prosecutor’s office requested that he is placed under home arrest. Yabloko activist became the 14th defendant in the “mass riots” case in Moscow on July 27.

Kostenok admitted that he picked up a plastic bottle and threw it at the policeman “without purpose to harm a government official”. Then he threw another plastic bottle at another policeman. One of them got into a policeman’s helmet.

“I think that the police could not experience pain from my actions. My actions were caused by emotional and unjustified behaviour on my part. What I repent of and apologise,” he said during interrogation.

Emilia Slabunova, Yabloko Chair, and Nikolai Rybakov, Deputy Chairman of the party, bailed out for Kostenok. In addition, Moscow municipal deputies Andrei Morev (Yakimanka district), Pavel Smirnov (Mozhaysky district), Vladimir Zalishchak (Donskoy distrcit) and Anna Desyatova (Danilovsky district) vouched for Kostenok. All of them, as well as several dozen Yabloko activists, came to court today.

20-year-old Valery Kostenok is a third-year student at Kosygin’s Russian State University, faculty of Standardization and Metrology. He has been Yabloko member since 2017. He was a volunteer at the election headquarters of Kirill Goncharov, unregistered Yabloko candidate for the Moscow City Duma elections.

Kostenok was detained during the action by the Moscow Mayor’s Office on 27 July; he spent two days at the police station. Yesterday, on 11 August, a search was carried out in Kostenok’s apartment. Officers of the Investigative Committee opened the door to his apartment, without waiting for the arrival of a lawyer. The activist spent the whole day at the interrogation in the Moscow department of the Investigative Committee, and in the late evening he was charged with “mass riots” under Article 212 Part 2 of the Criminal Code.

Yabloko does not doubt the political nature of the criminal prosecution of Valery Kostenok and other detainees in the mass “riots” case and their complete innocence. “There were no riots when weapons were used. Violence took place on the part of law enforcement. And this is very clearly seen in the video that the Investigative Committee distributed before the rally of 10 August, urging Muscovites not to go out into the streets. The video demonstrated shots from the previous actions. It is clear from the video that citizens were benevolent and were walking peacefully and calmly; whereas menacing law enforcement officers used force and committed acts that looked exactly like riots,” Emilia Slabunova said.

It is worth noting that Judge Yevgeniya Nikolayeva, who examined the case of Valery Kostenok, has a disciplinary sanction for cruelty to the defendants. In April this year, the Qualification Collegium of Judges of Moscow issued a warning to Nikolaeva, as she had ordered that seven defendants be placed in a double cell in the courtroom.