The Samara District Court sent to pre-trial detention three participants in the fight in which State Duma deputy Mikhail Matveev was hit. This was reported by a correspondent for the Samara publication 63.ru.
The conflict occurred on the evening of July 18 in the private sector on the outskirts of the city, on 9th Clearing Street. According to Matveev, he was driving a car with his driver and saw “three young men with sticks beating men,” and before that “they beat 4-5 people.”
“They started beating people on the beach, attacked an elderly man there, and took away the ball. Then the minibus driver was hit and there was a riot in the store,” Matveev gave his version of events. The deputy's driver tried to separate them, but they «hit him on the shoulder and ran away.»
Then Matveyev caught up with the men again in his car and came out to them himself with a camera turned on and a deputy's ID. Two of them were holding sticks, and the third one was holding stones. Matveyev was immediately hit on the head. According to him, a stone was thrown at him.
The attackers were detained the same day. Two of them, Nekruz Bokhirov and Murod Musurov, are 19 years old, and the third, Artur Bagirov, is 16 years old. Bokhirov and Bagirov are Russian citizens, and the latter is a citizen of Uzbekistan.
Initially, the case due to the attack was opened under the article on “hooliganism” (Part 2 of Article 213 of the Criminal Code), but at the request of the Chairman of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, it was reclassified to a more serious article on attempted murder of several people (Part 3 of Article 30, paragraphs “a” , “b”, “g”, “i” of Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code).
Talking about the story in his telegram channel and on Samara television, Matveev repeatedly emphasized the ethnic group of his opponents. He called them an “international gang,” one of the attackers a “Russian with a non-Russian surname” and a “Russian,” and their girlfriends “pilaf lovers.”
The deputy also noted that three criminal cases had previously been opened against Bokhirov under articles on theft and robbery, but all of them were dropped due to reconciliation of the parties. Because of this, Matveyev presented him as a person with three convictions and a «seasoned supporter of the banned ideology of AUE.»
Mikhail Matveyev, who was previously a deputy of the Samara Regional Duma, entered the State Duma from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in 2021. He was one of the candidates supported by Alexei Navalny's «Smart Voting» strategy. The oppositionist proposed voting in the elections for candidates capable of competing with United Russia in order to thereby reduce the results of the ruling party.
Matveyev regularly takes anti-migrant positions. In 2024, he recorded a video apologizing to Ramzan Kadyrov and Muslims living in Russia. Before that, on the YouTube channel of blogger Pavel Ivanov, he called migrants «wild savages» who «aggressively impose» their values on the residents of Russia. The Russian government, the deputy said, «is bending to the Islamic factor.» In the same interview, he said that in the elections in Russia «everyone is drawing.»