Yaroslav Belousov

Last updated April 07, 2019

Yaroslav Gennadievich Belousov (born July 30, 1991) is a Russian political-science student who was a participant in the May 6, 2012, Bolotnaya Square protest against President Vladimir Putin and who has been imprisoned since June 9, 2012, as a result of his participation in the protest.^[1]^[2]

Russia, officially the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is by far or by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with about 146.77 million people as of 2019, including Crimea. About 77% of the population live in the western, European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe; other major cities include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer serving as President of Russia since 2012, previously holding the position from 2000 until 2008. In between his presidential terms he was also the Prime Minister of Russia under his close associate Dmitry Medvedev.

Russia's Memorial Human Rights Center considers Belousov a political prisoner; Amnesty International has declared him a prisoner of conscience and has described his trial in 2013-14 as a farce. Human Rights Watch calls his conviction a “miscarriage of justice.” His continued imprisonment has been condemned by both the U.S. State Department and by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Memorial is a Russian historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-Soviet states. It focuses on recording and publicising the Soviet Union's totalitarian past, but also monitors human rights in Russia and other post-Soviet states.

Amnesty International is a London-based non-governmental organization focused on human rights. The organization says it has more than seven million members and supporters around the world.

Prisoner of conscience (POC) is a term coined by Peter Benenson in a 28 May 1961 article for the London Observer newspaper. Most often associated with the human rights organisation Amnesty International, the term can refer to anyone imprisoned because of their race, sexual orientation, religion, or political views. It also refers to those who have been imprisoned and/or persecuted for the non-violent expression of their conscientiously held beliefs.

Early life and education

Belousov was born on July 30, 1991.^[2] As of May 2012, he was a fourth-year student in the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University and a member of the Russian Citizens Union, a national democratic movement.^[2] A December 2012 profile of Belousov described him as having lived “a life full of promise” until his arrest.^[3]

Moscow State University is a coeducational and public research university located in Moscow, Russia. It was founded on 23 January [O.S. 12 January] 1755 by Mikhail Lomonosov. MSU was renamed after Lomonosov in 1940 and was then known as Lomonosov University. It also houses the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy. According to the 2018 QS World University Rankings, it is the highest-ranking Russian educational institution and is widely considered the most prestigious university in the former Soviet Union.

The Russian Citizens Union is an oppositional political party in Abkhazia.

Bolotnaya Square protest

A mass protest against Vladimir Putin took place on May 6, 2012, in Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. The participants in the demonstration were described in the New York Times as a representation of middle-class Russians opposed to Putin's presidency.^[1]

Bolotnaya Square is a square in the center of Moscow, in Yakimanka District, south of the Moscow Kremlin, between the Moskva River (north) and the Vodootvodny Canal (south). The square is bounded by Bolotnaya Embankment of the canal to the south, by Serafimovicha Street and the House on the Embankment to the west, and by Bolotnaya Street to the north and to the east. The square had the name of Repin Square, commemorating Russian artist Ilya Repin, between 1962 and 1994. The square is built as a pedestrian open space.

At the time of the protest, both Belousov and his wife were studying at Moscow State University. Both of them attended the protest on Bolotnaya Square. Belousov's wife, Tamara Belousova, later said that her husband had attended the protest in part because of his research into political organization methods.^[1] Belousov himself later stated he attended Bolotnaya Square for to collect data for his university thesis.^[4] According to his wife, Belousov had gradually become more active in promoting civic discussion.^[3]

According to authorities, 29 police officers and 55 protesters reported injuries, mostly minor, sustained in the violence that erupted during the Bolotnaya Square protest. Russian investigators claimed that the violence had been part of an orchestrated plan to destabilize the government.^[5] Belousov was among those arrested during the protests, and released the same day.^[6]^[3] He denied having taken part in clashes during the demonstration.^[1]

Second arrest and charges

On June 9, 2012, Belousov was taken into custody again, this time by authorities appearing at his apartment where he lived with his wife, child, and mother-in-law.^[7]^[3] Belousov was charged under paragraph 2 of Article 212 (“Participation in Mass Riots”) and paragraph 1 of Article 318 (“Use of Violence Not Endangering Life or Health against a Representative of the Authorities) of the Russian Federation’s Criminal Code.^[2]

Incarceration

Belousov was imprisoned pending trial by the Moscow Zamoskvoretsky Court.^[2] Between his arrest and December 2012, he was allowed to see his wife only twice, in the visitors’ room of the detention center.^[3] One observer of his pre-trial incarceration criticized the lengths the government took to imprison Belousov when he had a proven record of compliance.^[8]Gazeta reported on July 4, 2012, that the Basmanny court had extended the incarceration of Belousov and three other protesters, Maxim Lusyanin, Andrei Barabanov, and Fedor Backhov.^[9]

Support for Belousov

In June 2012, Russia's human-rights ombudsman stated the mass-rioting charges brought against Belousov and others were disproportionate. In December 2013, “an international panel of experts on freedom of assembly published a report that found that although there were individual violent episodes” that had taken place in Bolotnaya Square, they did not constitute a 'mass riot'. This panel, too, described the criminal charges brought against Belousov and others as unwarranted and concluded that the May 6 violence was a result of the government's response.^[5]

The conclusion of Human Rights Watch (HRW) was virtually the same, with HRW official Tanya Lokshina saying: “The facts on the ground simply did not justify mass rioting charges against the protesters, let alone conviction.” During Belousov's imprisonment, HRW called on Russia to release the demonstrators from custody and stated that authorities’ actions violated the European Convention of Human Rights, of which Russia is a signatory.^[5]

Amnesty International designated Belousov a prisoner of conscience. IFEX stated that there was “no video evidence” linking Belousov to any act of violence.^[5] The Committee of Concerned Scientists wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin in support of Belousov,^[6] and Russia's Memorial Human Rights Center recognized Belousov as a political prisoner.^[2]

Trial

The trial against Belousov and his fellow defendants began on June 6, 2013. The ages of Belousov and his fellow defendants in the case, all males, ranged from 19 to 51, according to the New York Times, though most were in their 20s. They were of a myriad of backgrounds, some being students, and journalists.^[1]

According to officials, Belousov had thrown “rocks and pieces of asphalt” and had broken through a cordon and attacked police officers. Video evidence, supported by the testimony of witnesses, indicated that Belousov had only thrown a piece of fruit.^[1] In one four-second video, according to Forbes Magazine, he was seen “bending down to pick up an object, which he then aimlessly tossed…in the direction of riot police. There are no videos or still images of the object striking anyone….Videos taken from another angle (and posted on the web) clearly show Belousov tossing the remains of the crushed tangerine or lemon he had bent down to retrieve.”^[10] While the defense said that the item in question was a lemon, and that the policeman who claimed to have been harmed by the projectile had departed from the scene before it was thrown, prosecutors argued that the object in question had been a billiard ball.^[7]

Belousov was represented by attorney Dmitry V. Agranovsky, who also represented another defendant in the same trial, Vladimir Akimenkov. On June 9, 2013, the New York Times cited Agranovsky's view that “the lengthy pretrial detention of most of the defendants was proof of the political nature of the charges,” and quoted him as stating that it was unusual the government detained the suspects were held for a year without bail, despite no previous arrest record for any of them.^[1]

Agranovsky further told the Times that the charges against Belousov were based entirely on one officer's testimony who claimed to be struck in the chest by a "yellow object". Agranovsky expressed doubt that the officer had been seriously hurt, noting “[a] riot police officer’s chest is protected by a serious guard, some sort of Kevlar vest, which can withstand at the very least knives, and maybe things stronger.” Agranovsky also expressed pessimism about the trial's likely outcome, stating the best likely outcome was a reduced sentence.^[1]

The Times also reported in its June 9 article that the case against Belousov and the other Bolotnaya Square protesters, as well as other cases against opposition leaders, had managed to suppress the anti-Putin protest movement through fear.^[1] Critics claimed that the government's clamp down on ordinary protestors, rather than opposition leaders, indicated their intent to intimidate.^[1] The case against Belousov and other protesters was set apart from other trials against opposition members, according to the Times, by the fact “that not one of the defendants was a high-profile opposition leader when arrested.”^[1]

In January 2014, Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky court rejected amnesty for both Belousov and Alexandra Dukhanina, another defendant in the Bolotnaya Square case. The prosecutor in the trial demanded a 5-year prison sentence for Belousov. In his closing statement, Belousov state: “I do not plead guilty because I was not involved in any wrongdoing.”^[4]

Verdict and sentencing

On February 21, 2014, Belousov and seven other defendants were found guilty of “application of force against representatives of authority.” The sentencing was characterized by a writer for Forbes as having been “conveniently delayed…until after the…closing ceremony” of the Sochi Olympics.^[10] On the day the verdict was handed down, Amnesty International issued a statement describing the trial of Belousov and his seven co-defendants as “clearly a show trial.” John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International said, “What happened on Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012 was not the quelling of a riot, but the crushing of a protest. The Bolotnaya trial has not exposed orchestrated violence, but rather a criminal justice system that is entirely malleable to the dictates of its political masters." Amnesty International called for the immediate release of the Bolotnaya protestors whom it described as prisoners of conscience.^[11] Human Rights Watch described the guilty verdicts against Belousov and the other seven defendants as “a miscarriage of justice.”^[5]

On February 24, 2014, Belousov was sentenced to 2 years and 6 months in prison. The judge stated he had received a reduced sentence due to his having never committed a crime previously. The judge maintained, however, that defense witnesses’ testimony had “not refuted the overflowing of the events into mass riots and have not refuted the proof of participation of the defendants in the riots.”^[12]

Outside the court, protesters held a banner reading: “You Can’t Jail Everybody.”^[12] As the judge read the sentences for Belousov and his fellow defendants, according to one source, "chants of ‘Shame!’" entered the court. Agranovsky told a reporter that the harsh punishment meted out to his client was, in his view, “in part a Kremlin reaction to the upheaval in neighbouring Ukraine.”^[7] At the sentencing, about 200 persons, among them two previously incarcerated members of the punk band Pussy Riot, were briefly detained by police outside the court.^[13]

In a February 25, 2014, statement, the U.S. Department of State condemned the sentencing of Belousov and the other protestors. The State Department claimed that they had been unlawfully detained for over a year on politically-motivated charges, calling it "another example of punishment of Russians for exercising their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and assembly."^[14]

On February 27, 2014, the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the House of Representatives of the United States, Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Frank Wolf (R-VA), expressed “grave concern over the mass detentions of peaceful protesters” who had taken to the streets “to protest the sentences handed down in the cases of eight participants of the Bolotnaya Square demonstrations,” including Belousov. The Lantos Commission described the trials as having been “marked by a lack of due process” and as “widely recognized as politically-motivated,” and urged the Russian government “to address these recent instances of blatant injustice.”^[15]

Personal life

Belousov and his wife, Tamara Belousova, were married in 2010.^[3] She was 21 years old in June 2013, and at that time was also a political science student. She and her husband are the parents of a son, Andrei, who was 4 years old as of June 2015.^[1] According to his wife, Belousov is “a scholarly man interested in political science” Describing him as “a man of books,” she told the New York Times in June 2013 that “this saves him now that he is in jail….I asked him how he celebrated the New Year; he answered that he finished reading five volumes of the history of the Middle Ages.”^[1]

Related Research Articles

Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is an exiled Russian businessman, philanthropist and former oligarch, now resident in Switzerland. In 2003, Khodorkovsky was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia and was ranked 16th on Forbes list of billionaires. He had worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s.

Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Egypt. The state carried out at least 44 executions in 2016, and at least 35 in 2017. On 8 September, 2018 a court in Egypt sentenced 75 people to death and 47 others to life imprisonment. They were charged with murder, membership in a terrorist group. The English newspaper Independent has reported that Najia Bounaim of Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa described the court’s sentence to “disgraceful" and "a mockery of justice.". The method of execution is hanging for civilian convictions, and by firing squad for convictions by commissioned military personnel at the time of duty.

Freedom of assembly in the Russian Federation is granted by Art. 31 of the Constitution adopted in 1993:

Citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to gather peacefully, without weapons, and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets.

Victor Anatolyevich Vassiliev or Vasilyev, is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He is best known for his discovery of the Vassiliev invariants in knot theory, which subsume many previously discovered polynomial knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. He also works on singularity theory, topology, computational complexity theory, integral geometry, symplectic geometry, partial differential equations, complex analysis, combinatorics, and Picard–Lefschetz theory.

Azimzhan Askarov is an ethnically Uzbek Kyrgyzstani political activist who founded the group Vozduh in 2002 to investigate police brutality. During the 2010 South Kyrgyzstan ethnic clashes, which primarily targeted people of the Uzbek nationality, Askarov worked to document the violence.

The 2011–2013 Russian protests began in 2011 and continued into 2012 and 2013. The protests were motivated by claims by Russian and foreign journalists, political activists and members of the public that the election process was flawed. The Central Election Commission of Russia stated that only 11.5% of official reports of fraud could be confirmed as true.

Sergei Stanislavovich Udaltsov is a Russian political activist. He is the unofficial leader of the Vanguard of Red Youth (AKM). In 2011 and 2012, he helped lead a series of protests against Vladimir Putin. In 2014 he has been sentenced to 4 1/2 years in a penal camp for organizing the May 2012 protest which ended in violence between the police and demonstrators.

Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest punk rock group based in Moscow. Founded in August 2011, it has had a variable membership of approximately 11 women ranging in age from about 20 to 33. The group staged unauthorized provocative guerrilla performances in public places, performances that were filmed as music videos and posted on the Internet. The collective's lyrical themes included feminism, LGBT rights, and opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom the group considered to be a dictator, and his policies. These themes also encompassed Putin's links to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Bahrain health worker trials were a series of legal cases in which forty-eight doctors, nurses, and dentists faced charges for their actions during the Bahraini uprising of 2011. In September 2011, twenty of the health workers were convicted by a military court of felonies including "stockpiling weapons" and "plotting to overthrow the government". The remaining twenty-eight were charged with misdemeanors and tried separately. The following month, the felony sentences were overturned, and it was announced that the defendants would be retried by a civilian court. Retrials began in March 2012, but were postponed until June 14. Convictions against nine of the defendants were quashed and reduced against another nine. The Court of Cassation upheld the sentences against the remaining nine on 1 October.

Nadezhda Andreyevna Tolokonnikova, nicknamed "Nadya Tolokno", is a Russian conceptual artist and political activist. She was a member of the Anarchist Feminist group Pussy Riot, and has a history of political activism with the controversial street art group Voina. On 17 August 2012, she was convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" after a performance in Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. On 23 December 2013, she was released early with another Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina under a newly passed amnesty bill dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Russian constitution.

The Bahrain Thirteen are thirteen Bahraini opposition leaders, rights activists, bloggers and Shia clerics arrested between 17 March and 9 April 2011 in connection with their role in the national uprising. In June 2011, they were tried by a special military court, the National Safety Court, and convicted of "setting up terror groups to topple the royal regime and change the constitution"; they received sentences ranging from two years to life in prison. A military appeal court upheld the sentences in September. The trial was "one of the most prominent" before the National Safety Court. A retrial in a civilian court was held in April 2012 but the accused were not released from prison. The sentences were upheld again on 4 September 2012. On 7 January 2013, the defendants lost their last chance of appeal when the Court of Cassation, Bahrain's top court upheld the sentences.

The Bolotnaya Square case is a criminal case by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation on account of alleged mass riots and alleged violence against police during the "March of the Millions" on May 6, 2012 on the Bolotnaya square in Moscow. The demonstration was one of the biggest protests in Russia since the 1990s.

Opposition to President Vladimir Putin in Russia can be divided between the parliamentary opposition parties in the State Duma and the various non-systemic opposition organizations. While the former are largely viewed as being more or less loyal to the government and Putin, the latter oppose the government and are mostly unrepresented in government bodies. Major political parties considered to be part of the non-systemic opposition include Yabloko and the People's Freedom Party, along with the unregistered Progress Party. Other notable opposition groups included the Russian Opposition Coordination Council (2012–13) and The Other Russia (2006–11), as well as various non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer is a 2013 Russian-British documentary film by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin. The film follows the court cases on the Russian feminist/anti-Putinist punk-rock protest group Pussy Riot. Directed by Lerner and Pozdorovkin, the film featured publicly available footage of the court proceedings and interviews with the families of the band members, but no interviews with the band members themselves.

Maria Nikolayevna Baronova is a Russian chemist who has worked as a sales manager of lab equipment, journalist, and political spokesperson. She is famous for being an activist of the opposition to President Vladimir Putin and, in particular, for having organized the Bolotnaya Square protests on May 6, 2012. In February 2019, she joined Russian government television network RT to work on a charity project.

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kosenko is a Russian activist who is a defendant in the Bolotnaya Square case. A participant in a protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin that took place in Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin's third-term inauguration, Kosenko was charged with participating in “mass riots” and with “threatening the life or health of a representative of authority.” Although Kosenko and his fellow defendants in the case, Artiom Saviolov and Vladimir Akimenkov, professed their innocence and were backed up by ample video evidence, they were found guilty, with Kosenko sentenced to forced psychiatric treatment.

Oleg Gennadyevich Sentsov is a Ukrainian filmmaker and writer, from Crimea, best known for his 2011 film Gamer. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea he was arrested in Crimea and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment by a Russian court on charges of plotting terrorism acts. The conviction was described as fabricated by Amnesty International and others.

Alexey Vladimirovich Gaskarov is a Russian social activist and economist who has been a major figure in the democratic, left-wing opposition to the regime of Vladimir Putin. He is the leader of Antifa, an antifascist group, and a member of the Coordinating Council of the anti-Putin opposition. He became famous as a prominent critic of the government's destruction of woodland.

Tatyana Mikhailovna Velikanova was a mathematician and Soviet dissident. A prominent member of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, she was for a long while an editor of A Chronicle of Current Events, its underground periodical.

The 2010 Manezhnaya Square riot trials resulted in verdicts against Igor Berezyuk, Kirill Unchuk and Ruslan Khubaev for violent clashes in Moscow. Each was a member of the Other Russia party, and found guilty on charges such as inciting hatred and organizing the December 11, 2010 Manezhnaya Square riots. Berezyuk was also charged with assaulting a police officer. Human rights groups have argued that the three are political prisoners, and that their imprisonment is chiefly the result of their involvement in the unregistered Russian opposition party, Other Russia.

References

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Hersenhorn, David M. ; Roth, Andrew (Jun 8, 2013). "Moscow Trial Sends Warning to Rank-and-File Putin Foes". New York Times.
1 2 3 4 5 6 "The List of Persons Recognized as Political Prisoners by Russia's Memorial Human Rights Center". Institute of Modern Russia.
1 2 3 4 5 6 "Yaroslav, young Russian protestor caught in Putin crackdown". Gale Global Issues.
1 2 "Verdict for Prisoners of the Bolotnaya Case Is a Verdict for Russian Society". Institute of Modern Russia. Feb 20, 2014.
1 2 3 4 5 "Eight Russian protesters found guilty in flawed case". ifex. Feb 22, 2014.
1 2 "CCS Urges Putin to Release Student Activist". Committee of Concerned Scientists. Jun 26, 2013.
1 2 3 Mills, Laura (Feb 24, 2014). "Moscow court sends 7 to prison for anti-Putin protest, suspends sentence for 8th defendant". 680 News.
↑ "One Day - One Name. Yaroslav Belousov". Navalny.
↑ "Boltnaya square case results in arrests". Gazeta.
1 2 Gregory, Paul Roderick (Feb 22, 2014). "Olympics Host Putin Protects Mother Russia From A Tangerine-Tossing Student (And A Teenage Girl Too)". Forbes.
↑ "Russia's Guilty Verdict of Bolotnaya Defendants is "Injustice at Its Most Obvious"". Amnesty International. Feb 21, 2014.
1 2 "Eight Sentenced in Bolotnaya Trial". The Interpreter Magazine. Feb 24, 2014.
↑ "Seven Putin protesters get up to 4-year terms". Boston Globe. Feb 25, 2014.
↑ Psaki, Jen (Feb 24, 2014). "State Dept. on Concern over Moscow Court Verdicts, Detentions". IIP Digital.
↑ "Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission Co-Chairmen Express Concern over Recent Mass Detentions in Moscow". Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Feb 27, 2014.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[nyt-1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Hersenhorn, David M. ; Roth, Andrew (Jun 8, 2013). "Moscow Trial Sends Warning to Rank-and-File Putin Foes". New York Times.

[imr-2] 1 2 3 4 5 6 "The List of Persons Recognized as Political Prisoners by Russia's Memorial Human Rights Center". Institute of Modern Russia.

[find-3] 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Yaroslav, young Russian protestor caught in Putin crackdown". Gale Global Issues.

[imr2-4] 1 2 "Verdict for Prisoners of the Bolotnaya Case Is a Verdict for Russian Society". Institute of Modern Russia. Feb 20, 2014.

[ifex-5] 1 2 3 4 5 "Eight Russian protesters found guilty in flawed case". ifex. Feb 22, 2014.

[conc-6] 1 2 "CCS Urges Putin to Release Student Activist". Committee of Concerned Scientists. Jun 26, 2013.

[680news-7] 1 2 3 Mills, Laura (Feb 24, 2014). "Moscow court sends 7 to prison for anti-Putin protest, suspends sentence for 8th defendant". 680 News.

[nav-8] "One Day - One Name. Yaroslav Belousov". Navalny.

[9] "Boltnaya square case results in arrests". Gazeta.

[forbes-10] 1 2 Gregory, Paul Roderick (Feb 22, 2014). "Olympics Host Putin Protects Mother Russia From A Tangerine-Tossing Student (And A Teenage Girl Too)". Forbes.

[11] "Russia's Guilty Verdict of Bolotnaya Defendants is "Injustice at Its Most Obvious"". Amnesty International. Feb 21, 2014.

[interp-12] 1 2 "Eight Sentenced in Bolotnaya Trial". The Interpreter Magazine. Feb 24, 2014.

[13] "Seven Putin protesters get up to 4-year terms". Boston Globe. Feb 25, 2014.

[14] Psaki, Jen (Feb 24, 2014). "State Dept. on Concern over Moscow Court Verdicts, Detentions". IIP Digital.

[15] "Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission Co-Chairmen Express Concern over Recent Mass Detentions in Moscow". Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Feb 27, 2014.