Mathematician and blogger Mikhail Verbitsky was detained at Zvartnots airport in Yerevan and is currently being held in a detention cell. This was reported by TV Rain.
As literary scholar Roman Leibov wrote, Verbitsky was detained at Russia’s request, and the mathematician’s lawyer asked for this information to be made public.
The Yerevan office of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor said the detention is linked to a criminal case against Verbitsky in Russia. If Moscow submits an extradition request, he could be arrested for 40 days. If no such request is filed, he must be released within 72 hours.
“The lawyer told us to file an application for political asylum in Armenia. This story will take a long time <...>, but it seems to have every chance of ending well,” his wife said on social media.
In January 2025, Verbitsky was added to the list of “terrorists and extremists.” An asterisk appears next to his name in the register, indicating that a case has been opened against him under a terrorism-related article. RIA Novosti had previously reported that Verbitsky had become a defendant in a case over calls for terrorism.
🔵 Mikhail Verbitsky is a former lecturer at Moscow’s Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, the Higher School of Economics, the University of Glasgow, and the Free University of Brussels. In 2015, he left Russia for Brazil, where he began working at the National Institute of Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro. Verbitsky is also the creator of the online platform “Tifaretnika”.