On Feb. 10, a Russian military court sentenced seven leftist activists allegedly involved in a terrorist organization called Set (Network) to prison terms ranging from six to 18 years. The defendants were accused in 2017 of planning multiple terrorist attacks, including bombings, with the aim of overthrowing the Russian government.
The Russian state news agency TASS said “the judge in the case sided with the prosecution, who argued that the group was a trans-regional terrorist organization with branches in Penza, Moscow and St. Petersburg.”
TASS reported that defense lawyers plan to appeal the verdict and quoted Igor Kabanov, who represents defendant Mikhail Kulkov, as saying: "We believe that the verdict on those charges was unlawful and unfounded and pronounced in violation of the ‘innocent-until-proven-guilty’ principle. Kulkov’s participation in a terrorist group was not proven in court.”
Nonetheless, TASS left out key information about the case, which has been roundly by human rights organizations inside and outside of Russia., among others, said the Network terrorist group is a fabrication and that the suspects .
Two days prior to the sentencing, the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in an article headlined: “’Coup d'etat with one Makarov pistol for seven’: Seven reasons why we don't believe the investigation into the case."
According to Novaya Gazeta, Yegor Zorin, a student in the town of Penza, was arrested by the FSB (the Federal Security Service, Russia’s main security agency and successor to the Soviet KGB). The newspaper reported that Zorin signed a confession in which he admitted to involvement in a terror group and implicated the seven defendants.
Another defendant, Vasily Kuksov, told Novaya Gazeta that Zorin said his interrogators had tortured him using electricity. The charges against Zorin were dropped in September 2018. The other defendants interviewed by Novaya Gazeta claimed the organization “Network” was fabricated by their FSB captors.
A third defendant, Dmitry Pchelintsev, told Novaya Gazeta that officials accused the suspects of “planning to plan to do something,” but that the officials had no idea what.
Pchelintsev said the FSB initially tried to coerce them to admit involvement in a right-wing group, but changed their approach when they discovered the suspects’ politics were left-leaning. They accused the defendants of being members of Islamic State, the YPG (leftist Kurdish self-defense units in Syria) and the FBK, Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
“Then they came up with ‘H-Hour’, which allegedly referred to the overthrow of Putin,” Pchelintsev told the newspaper. “They were unable to add any specifics to the case.”
Next, the Novaya Gazeta article pointed out that most of the subjects were not acquainted with each other and only met for the first time in court. Just two of them had a prior relationship, and they had not spoken to each other since 2015. The only thing the suspects shared was an interest in left-wing politics and airsoft (a sport similar to paintball using weapons that fire small plastic pellets). While airsoft is very popular in Russia, the FSB claimed the defendants’ involvement in it constituted paramilitary training to overthrow the state.
Although the defendants claimed their confessions were , the court refused to launch an investigation into their complaints. Prison authorities did not conduct medical examinations of the defendants to determine if they had been subjected to torture or mistreatment. The prison authorities dismissed marks on some of the defendants’ bodies allegedly caused by a stun gun as insect bites or bruises incurred during exercise.
While the defendants were accused of planning terrorist attacks, no information describing what sort of attacks were being planned – targets, time, place, etc. – was provided during the trial. The weapons and explosives allegedly found in the suspects’ possession did not have their fingerprints or other biological traces on them.
Novaya Gazeta reported that the FSB also presented as evidence of a terrorist conspiracy two document files allegedly found on the computers of two suspects. Ilya Shakursky, whose laptop was seized as evidence, was already in custody when the files were created on the laptop’s hard drive. A linguist told Novaya Gazeta the style of writing in the two files changes mid-document, creating suspicion that the files were altered.
In addition, many of the FSB’s witnesses were anonymous.