Karelia: 19-year-old Civic Alliance of Russia member detained, he is accused of railway ‘sabotage’ 

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) employees have detained a 19-year-old vice-chair of the national council of Civic Alliance of Russia, Nikita Klyunya, in the Karelian town of Sortavala, the alliance reports.

In the early hours of 8 March the head of the alliance, Oleg Filatchev, received a call from someone who introduced themselves as an employee of the FSB and was told that Klyunya was being charged with being involved in a terrorist group due to a “railway sabotage”. The teenager is currently being held in a temporary detention facility of the Interior Ministry in the city of Petrozavodsk, Karelia’s capital.

“Nikita is 19, he’s a very responsible, smart parishioner of the local protestant church. When he first joined our team, he immediately wanted to take part in the elections for the head of his rural settlement. Considering all of these things, to imagine him as a ‘saboteur’… One would need to be a person lacking the ability to think and use logic and reason,” Filatchev writes. 

As per its website, Civic Alliance of Russia is a team of like-minded individuals uniting “young people who are not indifferent to the situation our country is currently facing”.