Judge Yelena Samsonova of St. Petersburg’s Leninsky District Court has fined former activist Fyodor Gorozhanko 30,000 rubles in absentia under Part 1 of Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Code on “discrediting” the army. Mediazona reported this.
The administrative case was based on a post published on March 17, 2022 in Gorozhanko’s Telegram channel. It featured a video address by Arnold Schwarzenegger to Russians. The post said the actor had expressed his love for the people of Russia, urged them not to believe propaganda, and stated that “there is no denazification of Ukraine, only a senseless war unleashed by Putin.”
Lawyer Sergey Podolsky asked the court to question not only the security officers who, he said, had confused the name of Gorozhanko’s Telegram channel, but also Schwarzenegger himself, since he appears in the video. The defense also argued that the statute of limitations for administrative liability had already expired because more than four years had passed since the post was published.
On June 17, the same Leninsky District Court had already imposed another 30,000-ruble fine on Gorozhanko under a similar protocol. Then, on June 22, Judge Samsonova returned without consideration two protocols accusing the activist of displaying “extremist” symbols.
Fyodor Gorozhanko is a St. Petersburg activist and former employee of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In May 2021, the foundation accused him of stealing a database of email addresses belonging to Alexei Navalny’s supporters, after which people began receiving threatening messages. Gorozhanko denied those allegations.
In February 2022, he was included among prosecution witnesses in the case against Alexei Navalny, which Moscow’s Lefortovo District Court heard during off-site sessions at Penal Colony No. 2 in Pokrov. On the day of his testimony, Gorozhanko changed the statements he had given during the investigation and called the accusations against Navalny absurd. He left Russia immediately afterward; Ivan Zhdanov later wrote that the Anti-Corruption Foundation was “in touch” with him. It later emerged that Gorozhanko had managed to record a conversation with an investigator, and that recording was published by the Popular Politics channel.
On the same day, Judge Samsonova also fined Ilarion Makarenko, a door installation technician living in the United States, 30,000 rubles in absentia under the same article. That case stemmed from a post on VKontakte: on January 16 this year, he wrote that “Russia is a country of slaves, sending bombs and killing civilians.”