On March 13, the magistrate court in Rostov-on-Don dropped the criminal case against Kirill Skripin, accused of vandalism due to the graffiti “Putin is a thief.” The judge dismissed the case due to the expiration of the statute of limitations - March 12 marked two years since Skripin’s arrest.
In March 2021, five young activists were detained in Rostov-on-Don: Kirill Skripin, Mikhail Selitsky, Denis Fatkullin, Veronika Goretskaya and Alexey Ivanov.
The next day, the FSB released a video in which three people with hidden faces say that they entered into a chat on Telegram, which was “moderated from Poland,” and were preparing to carry out “direct action against the authorities.” The FSB press release explained that the detainees intended to write offensive graffiti on the walls and throw homemade incendiary devices at government buildings.
Later, the chat participants said that they did not intend to go beyond graffiti, but their group was joined by adults, apparently provocateurs from the security forces, who offered to deal with much more serious offenses.
Human rights activists feared that the FSB was preparing a high-profile case of extremism, but in the end only the charge of vandalism committed by a group of people motivated by political hatred (Part 2 of Article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) survived to trial. Its defendants were Kirill Skripin, Mikhail Selitsky and Alexey Ivanov.
Only Skripin was sent to jail, despite the fact that he had serious illnesses: tuberculosis, heart disease and others. The lawyer is sure that such severity towards her client is explained by the fact that he alone refused to read on camera the text proposed by the FSB officers confessing to the crimes.
Skripin spent almost six months in a pre-trial detention center. Human Rights Center Memorial called his persecution politically motivated and illegal.
In February 2022, Kirill Skripin appealed his detention to the ECHR. In March 2022, the prosecution of Alexey Ivanov was stopped - at the time of the crime he was a minor. Mikhail Selitsky was sentenced in October 2022 to one and a half years of restriction of freedom and compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital.
And finally, after two years of investigation, the case against the last accused was dropped. At the same time, the management company, recognized as the injured party (it was on its house that the graffiti offensive to Putin was painted), long ago abandoned its claims and proposed to the court to conclude a settlement agreement with the defendant. And according to defense attorney Kirill Skripin, he did not pick up a can of spray paint at all, although he witnessed “political vandalism.”