Early this morning, Yekaterinburg police arrived at the house of Alexey Mosin, the leader of the local branch of Memorial, detained him, and took him to the police station where he was charged with “discreditation of military” twice, Memorial reports.
“Mosin was put in a police car and taken to the warehouse of the Yeltsin Center, where the papers of Memorial are now stored, in order to pick up the constituent documents of Memorial’s legal entities,” the historian’s colleagues said.
After that, Mosin was taken to the police department. The reason behind the “discrediting of military” charges was the documents published on the website of the Ural Memorial. It is noted that more than 100 scans are attached to the case files.
“In particular, the publications in question are the statement of the Yekaterinburg Memorial and the statement of the board of the liquidated International Memorial on 24 February 2023, on the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the statement on the anniversary of Boris Nemtsov’s death, and many others,” Memorial says.
It has to be noted that Mosin does not run the website and has no access to it.
Russian Human Rights Centre Memorial is a non-governmental organisation created to study political repressions. In Russia, Memorial was recognised as a “foreign agent”, and the organisation itself was then liquidated by a court decision.
In 2022, the Russian Memorial received the joint Nobel Peace Prize alongside Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski and the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties. Memorial was represented by Yan Rachinsky in Oslo.
The Memorial Human Rights Centre was finally liquidated on 5 April 2022, and the organisation’s old website stopped posting updates. After that, the Memorial Human Rights Center was created, and news about the work of human rights activists was completely transferred to social media.
