On the night of April 13, police conducted a search in the office of “The Other Russia E.V. Limonov» in a case not related to the National Bolsheviks. Lawyer Alexey Kalugin spoke about this.
After a search at the headquarters of the National Bolsheviks on Litovskaya Street, a search was also carried out in the apartment of activist Andrei Pesotsky, who was then interrogated as a witness at police department No. 78.
According to the search warrant, it was justified by a criminal case of “damage to an object of cultural heritage” (Part 1 of Article 243 of the Criminal Code). It was initiated at the end of 2023 due to the fact that in the Lesnikovs’ house at the intersection of the Griboedov Canal embankment with Nevsky Prospekt, a window was converted into a door.
Kalugin noted that the security forces did not obtain permission to search in court and indicated in his order for an urgent search, a non-existent address. They did not provide any evidence of a connection between the National Bolsheviks and the Lesnikovs’ house.
The day before the search, on April 11, activists of the “Other Russia” held pickets “against the importation of masses of migrants from Central Asia into the Russian Federation and Transcaucasia» near the building of the Migration Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs on Kirochnaya Street. They stood with a photo of the accused in the attack on Crocus and shouted into a megaphone: “Illegal migration kills, death to Ukrainian terrorists.”
On that day, two of them, Ilya Stepanov and Artem Moroz, were detained. Stepanov was arrested for seven days under the article on holding an action without approval (Part 2 of Article 20.2 of the Administrative Code). Moroz was released on the evening of April 12. He then said that the police threatened to rape them and “put them in a cell with migrants,” and also “waved a rubber penis” in their faces.