On 27 July 2019, the people of Moscow participated in a peaceful demonstration to express their disagreement with banning the independent candidates from the elections to the Moscow City Duma. This triggered a new round of political repressions and initiated a court case of "mass riots" currently involving 13 people.
Journalists, witnesses and participants state that the demonstration was performed in an exclusively peaceful way: no property was damaged and no violence was carried out by the demonstrators. But this didn't stop prosecutors from bringing charges, and judges, who rejected all of the applications by the defense, from convicting defendants - all in an incredibly short span of time. As of this moment, three people have already been found guilty: Konstantin Kotov (4 years in prison), Ivan Podkopaev (3 years in prison), Pavel Ustinov (3.5 years in prison).
On September 17 and 18, priests and teachers, indignant by the absurdity of this case, issued public letters to express their opinion: the case must be stopped and the innocents must be released. We, IT-specialists, feel a demand for all professional communities to express their position on this matter, and we also cannot remain silent.
One of the defendants in the “Moscow case” is our colleague, Aidar Gubaidulin. Aidar graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and works at Sberbank-Technology. Another colleague of ours, programmer Konstantin Kotov, has already been convicted: he was sentenced to 4 years in prison for the mere participation in four demonstrations, because, according to the prosecution, he had "a goal of creating a real threat to the human and civil rights protected by the Constitution".
This once again shows the diversity of people affected by political repressions: in Russia of 2019, anyone can turn into a defendant in a political case. You can learn more about the defendants in this case on the dedicated website.
Our only demand is to stop the political persecution of civilians, stop the fabricated criminal cases and release all those persecuted for the “mass riots“:
- Eugene Kovalenko
- Konstantin Kotov
- Alexey Menyailo
- Ivan Podkopaev
- Samariddin Rajabov
- Danil Beglets
- Aidar Gubaidulin
- Kirill Jukov
- Pavel Ustinov
- Nikita Chirtsov
- Eduard Malyshevskiy
- Yegor Zhukov
- Sergey Fomin
We encourage our colleagues not to stand aside and to support this letter.
You can sign this letter by creating a file with a random name (an easy way to create a unique filename is to use GUID generator) in the signed folder. Put the following lines in the file (each line represents a single person):
Name Surname | Position, company