The Primorsky District Court of St Petersburg has ordered the arrest in absentia of Russian journalist Alexander Nevzorov. He is accused of ‘financing extremism’ and of failing to fulfil the obligations imposed on a ‘foreign agent’, according to Daria Lebedeva, head of the joint press service for the courts of St Petersburg.
Under the court’s ruling, Nevzorov will remain in custody for two months — a period that will begin from the moment of his possible extradition to Russia or his arrest within the country.
Earlier, the Oktyabrsky District Court of St Petersburg had recognised Alexander Nevzorov and his wife Lydia as an extremist organisation and banned their activities in Russia. Furthermore, the court ruled that the couple’s assets should be forfeited to the state, TASS reported on 2 July.
This decision was handed down following a claim brought by the city prosecutor. Lawyer Alexei Pryanishnikov spoke about the lawsuit itself at the end of May. According to him, the prosecutor’s office demanded that all the family’s immovable property be seized in favour of the state — the Nevzorovs, as the lawyer claimed, own three plots of land. Pryanishnikov also wrote that the prosecution service had insisted on the confiscation of the house belonging to Lydia’s mother. “The mother-in-law (Nevzorova), admittedly, is not a member of an extremist organisation. But this inconsistency does not bother the prosecution service,” he wrote.
The lawyer added that the prosecution service had been trying unsuccessfully for a year to have the Nevzorovs’ land seized through civil claims. He described the department’s latest move as an attempt to test a “universal scheme for seizing property from dissidents”. “The Nevzorovs are likely just the first in a long line. The mechanism will be fine-tuned using them and then rolled out on a larger scale,” noted Pryanishnikov.
‘Fontanka’ reports that the prosecutor’s office had previously filed claims against the journalist with the Primorsky District Court. The authority sought the confiscation of Nevzorov’s plots of land in the village of Lisy Nos, claiming that the transactions for their purchase had been carried out in breach of the law. According to the publication, these cases had long been unable to progress beyond the preliminary hearing stage, and at the last hearing, a representative of the prosecutor’s office requested that the proceedings be discontinued, as the office had filed another claim in a different court. As ‘Fontanka’ reports, along with the new application, the prosecutor’s office submitted a request for the proceedings to be held in camera.
Nevzorov himself stated that he has no interest in the property remaining in Russia and wants nothing to do with the country. At the same time, he emphasised that the ‘legal mechanism’ proposed by the prosecution service could be applied to anyone. ‘Everyone was wondering exactly how the regime … would take revenge on those who speak out about the war and Russia’s decline. It turned out to be as simple as can be. The prosecution lacks imagination. You just have to label them and, on the basis of that label, take their property away. This will apply to all dissidents, free-thinkers and enemies of Putin’s moronic regime,” the journalist wrote on his Telegram channel.
In March 2022, a criminal case was brought against Alexander Nevzorov for spreading ‘fake news’ about the Russian army. The Russian Investigative Committee claimed that the journalist had posted “pre-fabricated false information” on social media about the Russian military shelling a maternity hospital in Mariupol and the killings of civilians in Bucha. Following this, his website was blocked in Russia, and Nevzorov himself was added to the register of “foreign agents”. In May, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and in February 2023, a Moscow court sentenced the journalist in absentia to eight years’ imprisonment in the ‘fake news’ case.
Shortly after the war began, the Nevzorovs left Russia. In June 2022, it emerged that they had been granted Ukrainian citizenship. According to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs, Nevzorov and his wife were granted citizenship “for outstanding service to the country”.