Nikita Klyunya, a 19-year-old vice-chair of the national council of Civic Alliance of Russia, has been added to the list of extremists and terrorists compiled by Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service, as per the website of the service.
Klyunya is accused of railway “sabotage”. He was charged with organising a terrorist attack.
He was detained in the Karelian town of Sortavala in the early hours of 8 March. On 10 March, the court arrested the teenager and sent him to a pre-trial detention centre for two months.
Head of the alliance Oleg Filatchev previously said, citing lawyer Konstantin Koscheev, that the criminal case against Klyunya was initiated based on someone DMing Klyunya instructions on how to make an explosive device, as well as testimony of two unnamed witnesses. It is claimed that the witnesses struck a deal with the investigators and called Klyunya the “organiser” of the sabotage.
“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 election 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 previously wrote.
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”.
