(Moscow-on-Thames) The cells in Russia’s jails reserved for political prisoners, like nature, apparently abhor a vacuum.
No sooner had Russia’s prisons and labor colonies begun to discharge the last of the ‘Bolotnoe’ prisoners — jailed in the aftermath of the May 6, 2012, protests — than they began to fill up again with the participants in the March 26 and June 12, 2017, rallies.
Just today, a court in Moscow sentenced Rasim Iskakov to 2.5 years in a prison camp for throwing a petard at a police officer on June 12, a crime to which he admitted. His was the first jail sentence handed down for that rally (following a handful of fines, community service obligations and suspended sentences around the country), but it will likely not be the last. And that’s on top of the sentences issued for the March 26 protest: 4 years for Andrey Kosykh; 2.5 years for Stanislav Zimovets; 8 months for Yury Kuliy; 1.5 years for Aleksandr Shpakov; and numerous other defendants still awaiting trial or under investigation. […]
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