Biography
Bryukhanova was born on September 1, 1993. [4]
She studied at the Department of Industrial Economics of the Faculty of Engineering and Economics of the Moscow Aviation Institute, but left after the fourth year. [8]
In 2015, Bryukhanova took part in a political show on the TV channel Rain for young people who want to try themselves in politics - the project "President 2042" [9] [ importance? ].
She has run for elections at various levels three times: in 2016 she was elected as a municipal deputy of Shchukino; [10] in 2019, she was not allowed to participate in the elections to the Moscow City Duma; [11] and in 2021, she participated in the elections of deputies of the State Duma. [12]
Since 2020, she has released videos on political and other socially significant topics on her YouTube channel "Anastasia Bryukhanova". Since April 26, 2022, the channel has regularly published videos with analytics of events, mainly related to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, the channel was rebranded and renamed to Obyektiv. Anastasia Bryukhanova is a co-host of the channel, along with Ekaterina Voropay. [13]
Bryukhanova is an employee of the "City Projects" foundation and heads the development of a federal network of branches. As of 2021, the foundation, according to its own data, has more than 30,000 supporters in 162 cities. [14]
She adheres to opposition views and has spoken at opposition rallies. [15] [16]
After the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine, she left Russia for Georgia.
On April 12, 2023, it became known that a criminal case for "fakes" about the Russian army was initiated against Bryukhanova. [17] [18] The reason was a video in which the involvement of the Russian military in the deaths of civilians in Bucha was claimed. [17] [18] Due to the agreement on extradition between Russia and Georgia (the "Convention on Legal Assistance and Legal Relations in Civil, Family and Criminal Cases"), she moved to Germany. On June 15, 2023, she was put on the federal wanted list. [19] On July 21, 2023, the Khoroshevsky District Court of Moscow arrested Bryukhanova in absentia. [20]
On December 27, 2023, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation put Bryukhanova on the international wanted list. [21]
Political activity
From 2016 to 2021, Bryukhanova was a deputy of the Council of Deputies of the Shchukino Municipal District of Moscow, IV convocation (she was elected as a candidate from the Yabloko party) and headed the Council's Committee on Improvement and Housing and Communal Services. [2] [4]
In 2019, she participated in the elections for deputies of the Moscow City Duma of the VII convocation from the Yabloko party, but was denied registration because the election commission considered 21% of the signatures collected for the nomination invalid. [2] [22] [23] [24] Bryukhanova became one of the candidates who were not allowed to run in the elections, which sparked the 2019 protests in Moscow.
After being denied registration, Bryukhanova appealed the decision of the district election commission to higher election commissions, but on August 9, 2019, the CEC of Russia issued a final decision to refuse. The court refused to consider Bryukhanova's complaint, citing a missed 10-day appeal period. The courts counted this period from the decision of the district election commission, and not from the date of the final decision of the CEC. In September 2019, Bryukhanova appealed to the Constitutional Court of Russia against the principle of "either the CEC or the court." On March 24, 2020, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation sided with Bryukhanova and declared this rule unconstitutional, but separately noted that this decision does not affect the past elections to the Moscow City Duma. [25] [26]
In 2020, she was expelled from the Yabloko party as part of a group of supporters of Maxim Katz. [27] [28]
In May 2020, the director of the non-profit foundation "City Projects" Maxim Katz announced in his LiveJournal that Anastasia Bryukhanova would run for the State Duma elections in 2021 in the single-mandate constituency No. 198 (covering the districts of the Northern Administrative Okrug, except Voykovsky, Golovinsky, Levoberezhny, Molzhaninovsky and Khovrino). [1] [29] In April 2021, the City Projects Foundation appealed for public support for Bryukhanova's candidacy (in particular, to the Yabloko and PARNAS parties, the Smart Voting project of the Alexei Navalny team). [30] [31]
On May 8, 2021, the former Prime Minister of Russia, the leader of the PARNAS party Mikhail Kasyanov supported the nomination of Bryukhanova. [32] On September 15, "Smart Voting" also supported the candidacy. [33] [34] [35] The congress of the Yabloko party, on the contrary, did not support Bryukhanova and nominated Marina Litvinovich in the same constituency. [36] [37] By the end of the collection of signatures (August 1, 2021), her campaign headquarters had collected 17,919 signatures, which is more than 100% of the number of signatures required for nomination (as stated on Bryukhanova's website, additional signatures are collected in order to subsequently select the highest quality signatures that will be submitted to the election commission). [38] [39] On August 3, 2021, 15,941 signatures were submitted to the election commission. [40]
Maxim Katz stated that more than 20 million rubles were spent on collecting signatures, collected through fundraising. [41]
After checking the signatures, the district election commission registered Anastasia Bryukhanova as a candidate for deputy of the State Duma. [42] [43]
As a result of the active election campaign, as of September 13, 2021, Anastasia Bryukhanova was the most recognizable candidate for deputy in her constituency, according to the Russian Field sociological center. [44]
According to the official voting results, Anastasia Bryukhanova took second place, gaining 23.28% of the vote and losing to Galina Khovanskaya, who gained 28.78% of the vote. However, according to the results of traditional voting (paper ballots without electronic ones submitted using remote electronic voting), Bryukhanova was in the lead at the polling stations, gaining 27.14% of the vote against 25.55% for Khovanskaya. [7]
Anastasia Bryukhanova's headquarters announced falsifications during the electronic voting. In particular, a representative of Bryukhanova's headquarters reported the discovery of voting bots [45] and also described a scheme for stuffing ballots in electronic voting based on anomalies in the growth of support at certain intervals for candidates supported by Sergey Sobyanin. In particular, according to Bryukhanova's headquarters, stuffing took place with a break for lunch in the daytime on Sunday. [46] Also, experts from Bryukhanova's headquarters reported that with the help of the re-voting procedure in Moscow, opposition candidates lost about 250,000 votes. [47]
Bryukhanova filed a lawsuit challenging the election results at the electronic polling station, but it was dismissed. [48]
In December 2021, a group of members of the Yabloko party was expelled from it on the grounds that they supported Anastasia Bryukhanova in the elections to the State Duma instead of Marina Litvinovich, who was nominated by the party in this constituency and took fourth place according to the voting results. [49] The group expelled from the party called the situation a split and created the Yabloko public movement, which aims to revive the Yabloko party on the basis of its original democratic, liberal and human rights principles. Bryukhanova became one of the members of the movement. [50]
She participated in the Congress of Municipal Deputies held in Bonn on June 24-25, 2023 [51] [ importance? ].
