On the eve of the trial, foreign agent Shenderovich fled Russia
The liberal writer Viktor Shenderovich, recognized as a foreign agent, left the Russian Federation.
He reported this on his Facebook, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I have always appeared on subpoenas for interrogations and in court... But from personal participation in a criminal case, which is facing me based on the statement of the “Kremlin chef” Prigozhin, I will probably refrain, and just out of common sense... For me, there is a drastic change in the landscape here – not so much in the hypothetical deadline (I would have at least some time left before it), but in pre-trial measures. Alas, Art. 128.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation provides for restriction of freedom during the investigation, and for some reason I have no particular reason to doubt that this norm can be applied,” the foreign agent said.
“The topic of justice is exhausted before it even begins, and now the only question is whether I should go under the leash of house arrest and sit muzzled, for the amusement of all these lads - or wait out the vile conflict outside of their criminal concepts. And I decided to wait outside. However, forced departure from the homeland is also deprivation of liberty, of course,” Shenderovich wrote.
On December 30, lawyers for the Concord company, owned by entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin, filed a statement to initiate a criminal case against Shenderovich under the article “Slander.” The application was filed after Shenderovich and the Ekho Moskvy radio station lost a defamation lawsuit filed by Prigozhin in a St. Petersburg court. They recovered 100 thousand rubles from the writer and 1,1 million from the radio station, although the plaintiff demanded 5 million from each defendant.
The reason for the lawsuit was insults against Prigozhin from the mouth of Shenderovich. He called the entrepreneur a “criminal” and a “murderer.”
The editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy, Alexey Venediktov, expressed disagreement with the court’s decision, since Shenderovich’s words were heard live and the editors are not responsible for them.
Press Secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said today that Shenderovich’s flight has nothing to do with his being assigned the status of a foreign agent.
“Apparently, this is simply an attempt to hide from consideration of the claims of his opponents in court. And this has nothing to do with any status,” Peskov said.
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