Activist Taganov who was beaten up by police in front of his 7-year-old son handed 3-year suspended sentence

A court in Maykop in Russia’s Adygea has handed a 3-year suspended sentence and a 2-year probation to Roman Taganov over charges of violence towards security officers, Mediazona cites Taganov’s wife Yekaterina.

She says the prosecutor requested three years in a minimum-security prison camp for her husband. Taganov’s lawyer says the sentence will be appealed against.

“If it wasn’t a political case, we might have believed that this is the end of our travails. However, the current context means that this is just the beginning of pressure against me,” Taganov reckons.

He was beaten up on 7 March in Maykop, the capital city of Russia’s Republic of Adygea, by police officers in plain clothes while he was out for a walk with his 7-year-old son. He was then detained for 10 days for failing to obey a police order and fined 30,000 rubles (€470) for “discrediting the Russian army” by posting an anti-war statement on Instagram. Later, he was put under house arrest for attacking a security officer. Taganov has two children; his 7-year-old son has epilepsy and his wife is ill with cancer.

A video where Taganov gets beaten up by police officers was posted in June. It shows a man in plain clothes attempting to grab Taganov, who was trying to ride off on a scooter with his son. In response, the activist punched the attacker, after which another man in plain clothes came to his colleague’s aid. They knocked Taganov down to the ground and started beating him up, with one of the officers putting his knee on the activist’s neck. Meanwhile, Taganov’s son was crying and attempting to stand up for his father, but he was taken away by a third plainclothes officer.

“Turns out that it was a planned operation that even involved an FSB officer. He was recording everything from a nearby car. My husband was attacked by the officers of the Republic of Adygea Centre for Countering Extremism and Terrorism,” Yekaterina said. According to her, after what happened, her son’s epileptic seizures have become more frequent.