Police in Russia’s Penza region have identified the woman who posted a video in which she spoke about taking along a child with a disability in order to refuel a car at a gas station without waiting in line. TASS reported this, citing the press service of the regional Interior Ministry directorate.
In the recording, the woman says she took a friend’s child with a disability so she could use the right to priority service. The footage shows the woman, the child in the back seat, and a sheet of paper in a transparent folder that the author of the video describes as a certificate. She then shows that the gas station did in fact serve her out of turn.
The video spread widely through major Telegram channels on July 11. Among those who reacted to it were Ekaterina Mizulina, head of the Safe Internet League, and State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov. Milonov said he was not sure the woman had violated any specific law apart from, as he put it, a “moral” one.
The right to priority service for people accompanying children with disabilities is indeed provided for by a 1992 presidential decree.
The Telegram channel Varlamov News said the video was filmed on the way to a gas station on 65th Anniversary of Victory Street in Penza and published a comment from the child’s mother. According to her, the woman in the video is the boy’s godmother.
“The car they were riding in is included in the disability registry; otherwise the gas station would not have served them without documents. I am shocked by what is happening now. I did not know the video had been made and saw it only afterward. The author deleted it as soon as she could. It is an extremely unpleasant situation in which everyone saw what they wanted to see,” the boy’s mother said.
According to Varlamov News, the author of the video later wrote on social media that she had made such content because “people like trashy stuff.” She maintained that the child in the video was theirs, the car was registered in the disability registry, and that no one had “rented” the child: they had “just been driving around and happened to stop for gas.”